


Ages

by deathtodickens



Series: Age Gap [2]
Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Age Difference, Coming of Age, F/F, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-02-16 09:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 29
Words: 537,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathtodickens/pseuds/deathtodickens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Myka tells Helena, "Sometimes the age difference between us seems like nothing at all," and she pauses and lifts her hand to palm the side of Helena's face just under her jaw, brushes her thumb across Helena's cheek to her ear then adds, "and other times, it's like a million years."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nine & Fourteen

Myka Bering is nine years old.  
  
Nine year old Myka is sinking into the couch where she sits beside a fourteen-year-old Helena Wells.  And Myka is fidgeting because she's nine and it's almost nine o'clock and she's exhausted and she can't stay still, despite her longer than average attention span for a nine year old.  
  
She's fidgeting because she's sinking into the couch, and these stupid old cushions have lost most of their shape, they don't hold, and the further she sinks into the couch, the closer she sinks into Helena Wells, against Helena Wells' body, touching Helena Wells' arm.  
  
Myka looks at the older girl from the corner of her eye.  Helena's attention is to her right.  Also to her right is Myka's seven year old abomination of a sister, Tracy.  Helena is reading a book to her and Myka is rolling her eyes because Tracy doesn't like books, she doesn't like reading books and she doesn't like books being read to her.  But when Helena is around, suddenly Tracy is aware of every single book in the apartment and wants to know the words within every single book in the apartment.  And Myka already knows these words so she's a bit selfish about Helena reading books to Tracy because of both Helena reading and the books being read.    
  
What Tracy actually likes is playing with dolls and listening to cassette tapes on her Walkman and dancing around in her room like a nut until the only contact she ever has with a book, outside of school, comes around five minutes before dinner, when Myka is hurling one, of lesser novelty, into her bedroom and at her head in order to get her attention.  
  
"Ow!"  She'll whine.  "Stop it, Myka!"  She'll throw the book back and Myka will dodge it like a pro because fencing has taught her a thing or two in the coordination department. Although, far less in the "walking down the street without tripping over your own big feet" department.  
  
"Dinner."  Myka will scold through gritted teeth, her voice cautious and low.  
  
"You made me miss my favorite part!" 

Tracy has no concept of caution.  Myka can't even be mad about that because it is not Tracy's fault.  Even at nine, Myka can clearly see that it is not Tracy's fault.  She was just born.. different.  More confident.  Less concerned?  So she'll insist on taking her time, listening to her favorite part of her favorite cassette from her favorite band.  Tracy will rewind the tape to the end of the previous song, fast forward too far after the beginning of the current song, rewind to just before the end of the last song, fast forward to the first note of the current song.    
  
It's good enough.    
  
"It's your butt, not mine."  
  
But it's never Tracy's butt because Myka's the oldest, Myka always knows better, Myka is supposed to set the example, and how can Myka ever expect to go anywhere in life if Myka can't even get her younger sister to obey her in the absence of their parents?  
  
"And that," her father had said once, and only once because Myka knows better than to make him repeat these lessons, "is exactly why I can't trust you with the responsibility of taking care of your sister."  
  
Because Tracy is the baby and Tracy is precious and Tracy needs care and attention and love, otherwise she acts out and it's not her fault.  She's just _young_.  
  
Myka had been full of so much hatred for her father then that she didn't think she could possibly hate him anymore than she did in that moment.  
  
But in the very next moment, a door was opening and they were stepping through the threshold of the very large Victorian inspired home of an old friend of Myka's fathers.  And there was Helena Wells all black hair and brown eyes and milky skin, lingering on the staircase and smiling down over Myka.  Waving a hand that seemed to actually tug at Myka's heart.    
  
And not even two minutes later, that hand was playfully combing fingers through Myka's curls.  The other annoyingly draped over Tracy's shoulder.  An accented "hello girls" causes Myka's flesh to ripple, and for the first time in her young life, her breath catches.  
  
"Looks as though the three of us will be spending the evening together."  Helena was looking at Tracy but then turned and smiled at Myka, gently tugging one of her curls.  "I'm Helena, but you can call me H.G."  
  
And Myka didn't think it would ever be possible to love her father any more than she did in that moment.  
  
  
Myka is suddenly opening her eyes from a dream she didn't even know she was having.  The room is dark, her knees are curled into her chest, her face is warm and wet with perspiration against soft skin.  An arm.    
  
The television is on and the sound playing low.  And when Myka looks up, because she doesn't dare move away, there is Helena Wells, with that smile and that accent and those words that do things to Myka's belly that she's not really sure of, that she cannot describe.  Because Myka is nine and she's never felt this way before.  
  
"Good morning Einstein."


	2. Eleven & Fifteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gradually moving through the timeline because there is history here folks! This chapter involves some minor growth, a diner, and a pool party.

When Myka is ten years old, still fourteen-year-old Helena has been babysitting her and Tracy off-and-on for two years.  Helena tells her, "You're definitely old enough to watch yourself, Einstein.  This has to be getting old for you."  
  
"I don't mind."  Myka responds almost too fast, looking up from the thin pink diary in her lap where she writes.  Helena smiles at her, reaching across the couch to tussle Myka's hair.  
  
"Of course you don't."  She winks and despite her cheeks, burning red and hot at the contact, Myka cannot help the frown that falls entirely over her face.  "I don't mind either.  You're good company in my efforts to rein in your sister."  Helena adds with a reassuring grin.  
  
Myka sighs and presses her lips together tight to hide the smile that threatens to reveal her thrill at the thought of Helena Wells enjoying her company.  
  
She puts pen to paper and writes. 

She wants to keep Helena company _all_ of the time.  
  
***  
  
On Myka's 11th birthday, fifteen-year-old Helena shows up at the bookstore on unofficial business and brings her a journal.  
  
"I haven't seen you writing in your journal lately." Helena tells her as Myka pulls wrapping paper away and tosses it into the trash bin beneath the bookstore counter.    
  
"I ran out of pages to write in."  Myka shrugs a single shoulder because Pete once told her that girls respond more to him when he responds less to them and Myka wasn't in a talking mood anyway.  
  
"Well, here are several hundred more pages."  Helena nods toward the book.  "As quiet as you are, I expect that thing to be full by the end of the school year."  
  
"It will probably be the most boring book in the world."  Myka says almost under her breath.  
  
"Einstein."  
  
Helena reaches across the bookstore counter, sets a packet of ink pens over the journal still in Myka's hands and smiles wide when their eyes meet.  
  
"Somehow I doubt that."  
  
***  
  
Myka is eleven and a half when an almost sixteen-year-old Helena Wells walks into the diner where she and a twelve-year-old Pete and the diner owner's nine-year-old daughter, Leena, are seated in a booth, drinking milkshakes.  There's water for Myka, because she doesn't eat sugar, but occasionally she takes a sip from Pete's milkshake and, after he complains for three straight minutes about it, she takes a sip from Leena's too.  
  
"You don't even eat sugar, you freak of nature."  Pete glares, pulling his milkshake into his chest and haphazardly mouthing the straw.  
  
"It's mostly milk anyway."  Myka argues with a roll of her eyes.  
  
Seconds later the diner door is opening, the bell attached to it signaling the arrival of new customers, and Myka has her back to the door but she can tell by the look on Pete's face that whoever just walked in probably has boobs.  
  
"Pete. You're _staring_."  
  
"And drooling."  Leena adds with a giggle.  
  
"Heck yeah I'm starin'."  Pete says with wide eyes.  "Adventures in Babysitting just walked through the door with a bunch of other super hot high school girls."  
  
"Don't be _gross_."  
  
"Gross?  Admiring a girl's body is _not_ gross.  It's educational!"  Pete thinks for a second and grins.  "I excel in the study of lady anatomy, like a professor."  
  
"You excel in the _oggling_ of lady anatomy, like a pervert."  
  
"I'm with Myka."  Leena says giggling more before slurping on her milkshake.  
  
"Yeah, well you would since you're practically her shadow."  Myka doesn't miss the huff of annoyance that Leena breathes out and turns to her just in time to catch the tail end of an eyeroll.  "You don't have to be mad about it, Mykes.  You can look, too.  I won't tell."  Pete teases with a wink.  
  
" _Super_ gross."  Myka says.  
  
"Whatever."  Pete shrugs.  "I'm just saying I wouldn't hate you for it.  If you decided you liked studying lady anatomy with me.  Actually, it would be super awesome and now I'm kind of hoping that you do."  
  
"Pete.  Shut _up_."  She's groaning but Myka's face is already red hot.  She reaches for Leena's milkshake again.  
  
"Hey!"  The smaller girl protests and Myka just smiles, taking another sip from her straw before returning the drink.  
  
"Alert, alert.  Hottie on the home front, approaching at your left flank.  Take cover."  Pete is suddenly straightening up.  "I'll provide cover fire."  
  
"What does that even _mean_?"  Myka asks before both she and Leena are laughing.  
  
And before Myka can turn to see who exactly is approaching, there are fingers in her curls and another body pushing against hers and pushing her further into the booth, and closer to Leena who squeals at the sight of their mystery guest, a mystery no longer.  
  
"Hello, my little ones!"  And she is extra cheery.  
  
"H.G."  Myka lights up at the sight of her.  Myka, for some reason, doesn't hide her smile today.  She's happy, she is in a good mood, she is with her friends, and Helena's hand is in her hair again, playfully scratching at her scalp and tugging a handful of locks before she finally removes it to wrap her arm around Myka's shoulders and squeezes her close.  
  
"We're not all little, you know."  Pete is talking suggestively, his brows wagging at Helena.  Myka rolls her eyes and she wants to cover her face with her palm but Helena Wells effortlessly diffuses the situation with a simple, "I don't _want_ to know."  
  
"How are you, Einstein?  It's been a few weeks since I've seen you."  
  
"Good."  
  
"I'm good, too."  Pete pipes up.  Helena gives him a sideways glance but smiles.  It's a flirtatious smile, Myka knows that much.   And Pete puffs up his chest like he's actually making some progress in his ongoing attempts to woo every cute high school girl that his older sister befriends.  
  
"I'm sure you are, Peter."  Helena winks.  Myka glares at Pete but it's a waste of a good glare because Pete has no intention of looking at Myka while Helena is present.  "Hello Leena." She greets the younger girl, too.  
  
"Hi Helena."  Leena grins.  "Do you want a milkshake?  Dad just got a new machine and he's giving away free test drinks."  
  
"Oh that does sound delightful."  Helena beams.  "In a bit."  
  
"You can have the rest of mine."  Pete offers, only now removing his hold on his milkshake and sliding it toward Helena.  Myka rolls her eyes and huffs out a laugh.  
  
"No, thank you, Peter.  I wouldn't want to deprive you of your sweets."  
  
"You're an idiot."  Myka says to Pete.  
  
"Jealous."  Myka jerks her leg forward until her foot collides with Pete's shin.  "Ow!  What was that for?"  
  
"Children _please_."  Helena scolds playfully then turns to Myka.  "Are you coming by for a swim this weekend?"  
  
"Huh?"  Myka's brows fly when she turns back to a grinning Helena.  "I uh... I don't..."  
  
Helena squints momentarily watching Myka squirm and then turns to Pete who is sinking into his booth.  "Peter didn't tell you did he?"  
  
"Tell me what?"  Myka glares at Pete.  
  
"I forgot!"  
  
"You did not."  Myka kicks again.  
  
"Ow!  Goddamnit!"  
  
"That mouth, Peter. What would your mother say."  Helena smirks, setting her elbow atop the table and leaning her chin into her palm.  
  
Pete groans.  "She wouldn't say anything because she'd be too busy whooping my ass."  
  
"Shut _up_ , Pete, your mother wouldn't lay a malicious hand on her precious baby boy."  Myka spits out, glaring.  "She might _try_ washing your mouth out with soap, but you'd probably enjoy eating it."  
  
"Someone is extra feisty today."  Pete teases.  
  
Helena sits up and is smiling at Myka now.  "Break it up you two, you each have your own sisters to fight with."  
  
"She started it."  Pete pouts.  Kick.  "Ow-wah!"  
  
"I'm having an end-of-summer pool party at my house this weekend." Helena says interrupting, ignoring Pete, and turning to Myka.  "Pete was supposed to tell you that he's being dragged along by his sister and he is more than welcome to drag you along, too."  
  
"What about Leena?"  Myka asks.  
  
"My dad is catering."  Leena grins.  "But I thought you knew about it already.  _Everybody_ is going."  
  
"Not _everybody_."  Helena rolls her eyes up.  "Don't sensationalize it, Leena."  
  
"Sorry.  Everybody but Myka because Pete never told her."  She giggles.  
  
Pete groans again.  "I _forgot_."  
  
"You did _not_."  And the way Helena scolds him this time is almost _real_.  "Will you come, Einstein?"  
  
"I'll ask my dad."  
  
Helena frowns then and narrows her eyes and twists her lips in momentary thought. "Okay."  She eventually smiles and releases her hold on Myka but tugs on another curl before standing to her feet at the edge of the booth.  "I'm sure he'll say yes."  
  
Myka isn't so sure about that but she shrugs and forces an agreeable smile.  "We'll see."  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't know why but her father says yes.    
  
And at Helena's she's in the pool with Pete and Tracy and Leena who is Tracy's age but doesn't really like Tracy as much as she likes Myka, and all of the older kids, the teenagers, are sun bathing or playing volleyball in the sand toward the back of Helena's large yard, or doing absolutely anything but swimming in the pool with a bunch of elementary and middle school kids.  
  
Helena is hardly anywhere at all because she's everywhere, inside helping to direct the caterers, out front greeting people, in the pool house where Myka suspects the punch is a little stronger than the cup she was served upon her arrival.  
  
Then there's water on her face.  
  
"Pete!"  She shrieks and he and Tracy are both laughing maniacally because they've both teamed up on her and begin splashing more water.  When they finally relent, Myka looks to Leena who also has a face full of fresh water drops, and they grin and almost on instinct, they return fire.  And Myka thinks to herself, that this is exactly why the teenagers stay out of the pool and she's okay with that.  
  
Then Helena's voice is loud and angry and somewhere nearby and all at once, they stop splashing in time to see Helena storming out of the house and toward the pool with her older brother hot on her tail.  
  
"Honestly, Hel, you can be such a bloody child at times."  She pulls off her shorts and tosses them into the grass.  Myka's heart skips a beat and her face is warm again.  
  
"Your punch, your party, Charles."  Helena is throwing up a hand, still walking away, not turning around.  "I'm not cleaning up after your friends."  Her brother follows her, bickering, all the way to the diving board where she steps up and walks to the edge and pulls off her shirt.

"Holy..." She can't see Pete's face but Myka is fairly certain they could be twins in this moment.  
  
Myka swims to the edge of the pool and grabs the side because she cannot possibly tread water and simultaneously watch the vision that is Helena Wells in a two-piece swimsuit.  Myka is certain she'd drown.  
  
"Helena!"  
  
"I'm going for a swim."  Helena dives into the pool, leaving her brother silenced at the edge, and he takes off before she resurfaces.  
  
When she does resurface, she's floating on her back and gliding through the water with her ears hidden well below the surface.  
  
"Dude.  That was hot."  Myka's fist instinctively finds Pete's arm but he laughs because, "You can't hit that hard in water."  
  
"She's upset."  Myka says.  
  
"Of course she's upset, she has a brother."  Pete beams.  "It's our job to upset our sisters."  
  
"I don't think that's a brother thing, Pete."  Myka says side-eyeing her sister, but Tracy and Leena are swimming and laughing on the other side of the pool with some other kids their age now, and Pete is soon to join them.  
  
"C'mon Mykes."  Pete calls and swims on.  
  
But Myka takes a pass and finds a step near the edge of the pool and sits there, laying her head back against the ledge, closing her eyes and allowing the warmth of the sun to drape across her face.  


" _Why_ , dear Myka," she startles at the sound of Helena's voice and sits straight only to come face to face with the remarkable beauty that has been plaguing her thoughts lately, "are you sitting over here by yourself while all of your friends are having fun over there?"  Helena gestures across the pool with a nod of her head.  
  
Myka's cheeks flush and she tries hard not to focus on the exposed skin of Helena's shoulders, the freckles that dot her chest.  But soon Helena lowers herself in the water to catch Myka's gaze and Myka doesn't think she tried very hard at all.  
  
"Well?"  
  
"Just... resting."    
  
Helena arches a brow and sits on the step beside Myka.  "Do me a favor, okay?"  Myka nods.  "You guys stay out of the pool house, all right?  And if one of my brother's friends tries to talk to you... ignore them."  
  
Now Myka is the one arching her brow at Helena.  
  
"If one of them says anything weird to you, come find me, okay?"  
  
Myka isn't quite sure what this means or why any of the older boys, who have been frequenting the pool house where Myka is now almost definitely sure the punch is stronger than hers was, would want to talk to her.  But she nods again.  
  
"I won't talk to them."  
  
"I know you won't talk to them.  I'm not worried about _you_ talking to _them_."  Helena smiles.  "You barely talk to me and I've known you since you were eight."  
  
Myka is red again and she slips off the seat to slip further into the water and hide her smile below the surface but then a question comes to her and she pulls herself back onto the seat.  
  
"Why would they talk to me?"  
  
"They're drinking and they're perverted."  Helena sighs with a shake of her head.  "You're not eight years old anymore, Myka."  
  
"I know how old I am."    
  
Helena laughs.  "Sorry, I know, you're very intelligent, Myka but... ah-"  
  
"But?"  
  
"You're lucky because you have Peter and he treats you like a brother and he knows how smart you are.  But not all boys pay attention to how smart a girl is.  And not all boys pay attention to how _old_ a girl is.  Mostly they pay attention to everything else, like how she _looks_."  
  
"Okay."  And Myka thinks that, for the first time ever, she is seeing Helena flush.  The redness in her cheeks travels to her chest, beneath freckles and pale skin.  "How do I look?"  And genuine curiosity is the driving force in this conversation, in Myka's ability to hold a conversation with Helena Wells.  
  
"You look older."  Helena twists her lips now, looks at Myka and doesn't quite frown, but her lips straighten.  "You know Myka, if you ever want to talk about things, like _girl_ things, I want you to know that you can talk to me."  
  
"I'm not much of a girl, H.G." Myka laughs softly.  
  
"But you are."  Helena nods.  "Biologically and... well, I'm sure your mother will talk to you about a lot of these things but some things can be really embarrassing to talk about with our parents.  It's nice to have other options.  Take it from the girl who grew up without a mother and had to have these talks with her father."  
  
"Where _is_ she... your mother, I mean?"  Helena shrugs.  
  
"Gone."  
  
"Did she die?"

Helena sighs.  
  
"Left after I was born."  Helena forces a small smile.  "I suppose she knew I'd be a handful and jumped ship early."  
  
"Oh."  Myka thinks a moment and says, "You're not a handful."  
  
"Thanks."  Helena winks and bumps her shoulder against Myka's shoulder.  "My brother and father likely think otherwise."  She rolls her eyes.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Myka sighs, lowering her head.  "About your mom."  
  
"Don't be sorry."  Helena sets a finger under Myka's chin to lift her head up again, and Helena is smiling a real smile now.  Attentive brown eyes lock with hers, and Helena's brows straighten and then fall into a look that Myka cannot place but it makes Myka's heart hurt all the same.  "Sometimes having an absentee parent is much better than having a neglectful one."    
  
And Helena stares at Myka just a bit longer.  Myka gulps, presses her lips together tightly.  Her stomach turns, not in the usual good way, in a very familiar, very bad way.  She swallows back bile that is suddenly rising in her esophagus and she's not sure she's ever felt this sick in Helena's presence.  And Helena seems to know.  
  
The older girl quickly drops her hand back into the water.  
   
"Would you do me another favor?"  Helena asks returning her gaze across the pool at where Pete is now picking Leena up and throwing her as far as he can across the water.  Myka forces a soft laugh at the scream the young girl lets out and sighs in the wake of Tracy's demands to go next.  
  
"Sure."  Myka turns back to Helena who gestures to the others.  
  
"Go have fun."


	3. Twelve & Sixteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myka takes a tumble. Tracy gets a fever. Helena should probably ask for a raise.

Myka is twelve and Myka is way too old to be chasing her little sister around their small apartment.  But Tracy is way too old to be stealing Myka's journal and running through the apartment reading random lines out loud.  
  
Especially when the main topic of that journal, a still sixteen-year-old Helena Wells, is just down the hall.  
  
" _With brown eyes, her gaze sweet like chocolate!_ "  Tracy laughs and runs.  "This is so sickening!  H.G.!  H.G., do you have brown eyes?!"  
  
"Tracy Emmanuelle Bering, I am going to _murder_ you!  Give it _back_!"  
  
"That's not my name!"  Tracy shrieks and runs faster.  
  
"Just because you say you're changing your name, doesn't mean your name has actually been changed, you dimwit!"  Myka narrowly misses the corner of a table as she rounds it, but her socks offer her nothing in the way of a grip and she slides across linoleum flooring, unable to stop herself, and into metal wire shelves at the opposite end of the kitchen.  
  
She sees Tracy stop dead in her tracks at the sound of the contact.  Myka braces herself as she falls back to the floor and barely registers the wire shelves as they begin to teeter over her precariously.  
  
"Please don't fall.  Please don't fall."  Her chant is an empty prayer.  She hazards a glance up in time to see the shelf is falling, cook books already sliding out of position, and it's the books, when they fall, that hurt the most.  Ever since her mother began to fancy herself a chef, that particular collection of books, many of them too large and thick for the shelf to have lasted even this long, had grown tremendously.  
  
The weight of the shelf itself is inconsequential, with nothing on it even Tracy could find the strength to pick it up.  An old ceramic cookie jar, a project from their mother's crafting days, is miraculously spared when it makes contact with Myka's head.  Steel mixing bowls clang against the tile of the kitchen floor after bouncing off of her side, two clay forms claiming to be pencil holders (from Myka and Tracy's preschool days) shatter across the ground.  Forgotten piles of mail, both important and junk, scatter everywhere around Myka and across the floor.  Pencils, pens, thumb tacks, chip clips, baby spoons, and every other miscellaneous item that had found its way onto the shelf rolled wherever the momentum allowed.  Seasonings topple to the ground, two of which break and turn Myka into the perfect human roast.    
  
Fitting because that's exactly what Myka thinks she'll be as soon as her dad catches wind of this.  And that's almost all that Myka can think about now, despite her aching side and her growing headache, but at least Tracy has been subdued.  
  
"Holy shit."  Tracy breathes out and Myka sighs her relief when she peeks out at her sister and sees her drop the journal.  
  
"Myka and Tracy Bering, what in God's name are you..." Helena appears in the doorway behind Tracy now but is immediately silenced when her eyes barely meet Myka's, still peeking through the arms that cradle her skull, and the mess of things she's buried under.  "Jesus Christ, you two, I leave to the toilet for one minute!"  
  
"I didn't do anything!"  Helena glares at Tracy and she immediately recoils.  Myka wants to smile triumphantly but soon that glare is fixed on her and Helena is stalking toward her and there is little to no sympathy in those brown eyes.    
  
Not like the time Myka smacked her head on the TV console, or the time Myka tripped at the bottom of their stairs leading into the bookstore and landed on a pile of unsorted books.  Or even the time she broke a plate at Helena's house only to be chastised by Helena's older brother, Charles, for her clumsiness. 

Helena is not sympathetic.  
  
Helena moves to return the shelf to its upright position and Myka simultaneously pushes the thing off of her.  Helena's hands are on Myka, checking for scrapes, bruises, bumps, cuts.  
  
"Are you hurt?"  She eventually asks and Myka shakes her head, ignoring the pain, and Helena turns back to Tracy.  "You need to help your sister pick up this mess."  
  
"I'm not the clumsy one who-"  
  
" _Tracy_."  Helena says through gritted teeth, cutting her off.  "Your parents will be home in one hour. Help Myka.  _Now_."  She turns back to Myka, removing several books from over her legs and setting them on the floor, and the annoyance that spreads across her face makes Myka's eyes tear up because Myka has never wanted to upset Helena.  Myka never wants to give Helena reasons to not like her because Myka knows that being Myka in the first place is already reason enough to not like her.  "I see now why you require a sitter."  
  
"H.G. I'm sor-"  Tears burn in Myka's eyes.  
  
"Not now, Myka."  Helena stands with a huff and leaves the kitchen.  
  
***  
  
Myka is buried under covers in her bedroom when her parents return that evening.  She hasn't spoken to Helena.  Helena has not spoken to her.  She simply announced that two girls their age should know how to put themselves to bed, and that is what they did.  
  
When Myka's parents come through the door, she hears Helena's explanation for the broken clay forms, the disorganized cook books, the now-empty cookie jar with a slight crack at the top of it, and the missing seasonings.  
  
Myka's mother thanks Helena just before she calls her father's name followed by a plea to calm down.  "Your _heart_." She cites.  
  
"Don't tell me to calm down, Jeannie."  Her father says with that voice that sounds calm but is way too calm to actually be calm.  "The girl is almost thirteen years old and has no concept of responsibility.  She is destructive, she is literally destroying our home."  
  
"She's fine, by the way."  Helena's voice says with a hint of what Myka thinks is annoyance and defiance.  "I checked her for scrapes, she hit her head but she's fine."  
  
Myka's father doesn't acknowledge Helena.  Surprisingly, Myka thinks, he doesn't slap her either.  
  
"Thank you again, Helena, I'll take you home now."  
  
"Thank you, Mrs. Bering."  Myka buries herself under covers as the sound of her father's footsteps, heavy against the hardwood, grow increasingly closer to her bedroom door, "Uh, Mr. Bering, she's aslee-"  
  
"Myka Ophelia Bering."  His voice isn't so calm anymore. Myka's door is opening, her bedroom light turning on.  "Out of bed _now_ and into the kitchen."  
  
By the time Myka's father has dragged her into the living room, her mother is ushering Helena toward the stairs.  Helena whose eyes are angry, whose mouth is gaping at the grip Myka's father has on her arm.  At the way Myka slips in her socks against hard wood, the way her father yanks her arm up and commands her to stand straight, to walk, to pay attention, to listen.  
  
Helena looks for all the world like she wants to say something but says nothing at all.  And when their eyes meet, Helena's face softens into something like sorrow.  Something that looks like hurt.  A pained expression that grips at Myka's too-young heart and, in some twisted sort of irony, makes Myka feel sorry for Helena.  
  
She doesn't know, that's what Myka tells herself.  She doesn't know that this is business as usual, that this is nothing out of the ordinary.  Myka is clumsy and gangly and she breaks things and she is always in the way and disturbing the peace and disrupting the calm, distracting her mother from her father, instigating fights with her perfect little sister.

This is nothing new.  
  
And Myka wants to run to Helena and hold her close.  Even now, as her father pushes her down into a chair in the dining room and demands her attention, she indulges in that familiar twist of her belly as she watches Helena's resolve disintegrate in the way her face falls further into that helpless gaze.  As Myka's mother gently coaxes her further down the stairs.  
  
Once more, Myka's father demands her attention.  Helena closes her eyes at the now-booming sound of his voice, unshed tears finally fall over red cheeks.  And when she opens them again, Myka smiles.  
  
 _Goodnight._   She mouths the words and barely waves with the few fingers that aren't gripping the back of the chair she sits awkwardly in.  
  
The sound that Myka's father's hand makes when it meets the flesh of Myka's cheek is almost drowned out by the sound of the apartment door closing home.  
  
Myka doesn't cry.  
  
***  
  
The first time Myka's flesh feels Helena's lips is the first time Myka has seen Helena since the last time she got into trouble.  It's innocent, this kiss, but Myka thinks she finally gets why some people say "I love you".  And Myka also gets why no one in her family ever does.  
  
***  
  
Tracy is feverish and it soars well over 103 degrees.    
  
"We have to take her to the hospital."  Myka's mother is in near tears because Tracy has been sleeping all day and getting chills and then burning up and she is listless and quiet and this is so far out of character for her that Myka's mother is _actually_ crying over her youngest daughter.  Her baby girl.  
  
Myka's father glares at her.  She's not sure why.  She hasn't done anything wrong today that she can recall.  She hasn't even tripped over her own two feet today.  She's reading a book.  She's minding her own business.  She's making herself small and quiet and unnoticeable, just like she has been doing for the past three weeks.  
  
"Get dressed."  He tells her.  She is on her feet before he can finish the sentence.  
  
Myka's parents bicker in the car.  It's difficult not to overhear when Myka is in the front seat, her dad in the driver's seat, her mother in the back seat cradling Tracy.  
  
"It's fine, Jeannie."  Her father groans.  
  
"It's late.  Myka can come to the hospital, too."  
  
"She'll just be in the way."  
  
"Give your daughter more credit than that."  Jeannie argues.  
  
Her father hits the steering wheel.  
  
"Don't you start with that sentimental _your daughter_ crap, Jeannie.  I'm already heading that direction.  The girl is already awake and waiting.  Just keep quiet and let me drive."  
  
The noise that escapes Myka's mother is nothing new.  Exasperation, she recalls.    
  
Her mother had once been on the phone with Myka's aunt and used that word to describe the end result of an attempted family vacation that involved all four of them trapped in a car for a week just to spend three horrible days in California.  
  
Her mother is exasperated.  Myka thinks she herself might be exasperated, too.  
  
***  
  
Helena is standing outside when they pull up to the large Victorian house.  Myka's stomach has been turning circles since her father turned into the neighborhood.  
  
"Don't forget your bag and your Teddy."  Jeannie calls after Myka as she climbs out of the car.  "We'll call when we know what's wrong."  
  
Myka is quiet but she nods, grabbing her overnight bag and the now traveling bear, closing the car door when she steadies herself on the sidewalk.  Her father rolls down the passenger-side window.  
  
"Do not act up."  Myka squints her eyes but her father has already turned away, is already rolling up the window, putting the car into drive, speeding away down the street.  
  
Myka lets her bag fall to the ground as the brake lights disappear around a corner, tires squealing through the dark.  Then silence.  She pulls her bear into her arms, hugs it tight and buries her nose into the top of its head.  
  
She closes her eyes.  
  
"I could set up a sleeping bag for you out here."  Helena's voice breaks through the quiet.  Myka turns her head to face the older girl and pulls her lower lip in between her teeth, bites down softly.  "But I don't think you'd be very comfortable on the walkway."  
  
"There's grass."  Myka says quietly.  Helena smiles, rolls her eyes, shakes her head.  
  
"Come inside, Einstein.  It's cold."  
  
***  
  
Helena sets a bowl of ice cream down in front of Myka who is seated at the large dining room table, then Helena sits across from her and Myka thinks it is entirely too far away but is also thankful for the distance.  
  
"Thank you, but I don't eat sugar."  Myka says softly, averting her eyes.    
  
"Oh, right."  Helena smiles and reaches across the table for the bowl of ice cream.  "Suit yourself then."  She spoons swirls of vanilla and strawberry into her mouth and raises her eyebrows.    
  
"I have school tomorrow."  
  
"So do I."  Helena is licking ice cream from her lips.  Myka's eyes don't look away.  "I have Charles' car, I can drop you off on my way.  And you can stay in the downstairs guest room if you'd like but I also have a trundle under my bed if you don't want to be by yourself."  
  
"I'm not afraid."  
  
"I didn't say you were afraid."  Helena rolls her eyes.  Myka thinks she rolls her eyes a lot but she also thinks it's cute, so she doesn't mind when Helena does it at her expense.  "But it's a big house.  A big empty house and you haven't stayed here overnight before, so if you want-"  
  
"The guest room... it's fine."  
  
"Okay."  Helena takes another spoonful of ice cream.  "You're sure you don't want any?"  Myka nods.  "You know, I spent my whole entire day with your best friend, Peter Lattimer."  
  
Myka arches a brow and she allows herself a crooked smile now.  "Really?"  
  
"Yes." Helena nods.  "Jeannie was forced to bring him shopping with us.  I didn't mind so much but he didn't close his mouth the whole time.  He was either talking or eating."  Myka laughs softly.  "Now I see why Jeannie is always turning her hearing aid off."  
  
"That's Pete."  Myka smiles and sighs.  "And Jeannie."  
  
"I just couldn't stop thinking about how very different you two are."  Helena smiles.  "Him, always eating and always talking.  You, rarely eating and rarely talking."  She arches a brow at Myka.  "But the few times I've seen you two together, you're both talking each other's faces off.  So, I asked him what I could do to get you to talk to me more."  
  
Now Myka is arching a brow at Helena.  
  
"Do you know what he told me?"  Myka shakes her head.  "Twizzlers."  And Helena slams a giant pack of Twizzlers on the table in front of Myka whose grin is suddenly relentless.  "So, I give you Twizzlers, you give me sentences.  Deal?"  
  
"I'm sorry." Myka says softly, letting her grin rest into a smile and lowering her head to where her hands busy themselves below the table.  
  
"Why are you sorry?"  Myka looks back up at Helena.  
  
"For the mess I made."    
  
Helena shakes her head and takes a deep breath.  "Do not apologize to me for that, Myka.  I need to apologize to _you_."  
  
"But I broke..."  
  
"Myka."  Myka lowers her head again and Helena sighs.  "I'm sorry I was short with you, I shouldn't have been."  Myka shakes her head and shrugs.  
  
"It's okay."  
  
"No."  Helena says.  "It's not okay.  I was agitated that day, I just had a lot going on and I took it out on you.  When I said that thing about you needing a sitter..." Helena sighs, twists her lips to the side in thought.  "It was disrespectful and rude.  You need to know that I didn't mean it, okay?  I have no goddamn clue why your parents think you need a babysitter.  I was your age when I started watching you."  
  
Myka sighs.  
  
"Myka, look at me."  Myka does.  Helena smirks and waves her over.  "Come here, please.  Bring your Twizzlers."  Myka does that, too, rounding the table and reaching for the large bag of Twizzlers, then coming to stand beside Helena who turns to her and takes the bag from her hands.  "You are getting so tall."  Helena barely glances up at Myka and then rips the bag open and takes out two Twizzlers, hands them to Myka who immediately shoves them into her mouth. "Also, you know these have sugar in them, right?"

Myka shrugs. "Exceptions can be made."

"I suppose, when it comes to candy, you and Peter are not all that different.." Helena trails off while giving the nutrition facts on the package a once-over.  
  
"These are fresh."  Myka says with a smile.  "Good job, H.G."  And Helena laughs, setting the remaining Twizzlers down on the table and reaching for Myka's arm again.  
  
"Thank Peter, he's worth his weight in sweets on occasion."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and laughs and only when Helena is quiet and her face sorts itself into a frown does she realize Helena's fingers have lifted her shirt sleeve and are grazing a faded bruise on her upper arm.  
  
"Myka."  Helena breathes in slowly but her exhale is jagged.  
  
Exasperated, Myka thinks.    
  
***  
  
Myka tries.  She really does try.  But the sounds in this house keep her awake.  And the lack of sounds outside keep her awake.  Because Helena lives in the suburbs and there is no traffic, no loud music being amplified from bars across the street, no sound of drunken pedestrians yelling and stumbling and hurling their way down sidewalks.  No honking horns, no car alarms, no police sirens pulling over drunk drivers.  Absolutely nothing but the sounds of what could either be the house settling or a serial killer who prays on little rich girls.  
  
How unjust, Myka thinks.  _I'm not rich, I'm just staying here because my brat of a little sister decided to play up her fever.  Why should I die because of her?_  
  
And Myka thinks of the _actual_ rich girl, the one sleeping a floor above her.  The girl who had tears in her eyes while repeating to Myka that it's "not okay" for her to have bruises and it's "not okay" that Helena caused them.   _But you didn't cause them._   Is what Myka wanted to tell her.  _My dad caused them._  

Myka strained for the words but she eventually found them while rolling down her sleeve and stepping away from Helena's prodding fingers, and Helena's silent cry, and Helena's falling tears.  Because maybe she was supposed to feel sad about this moment but it was hard to feel sad about a moment that involved Helena Wells touching you and crying for you.  
  
"It's not your fault, H.G." Myka had told her and she reached for the pack of Twizzlers, pulled out another one, broke it in half and gave one half to Helena before shoving the end of the second half into her mouth. "It would have happened anyway."  
  
Myka doesn't know why that didn't help.  Myka doesn't know why Helena's tears didn't stop falling or why the older girl had hugged her so tight and for so long before telling her to get ready for bed.  And honestly, Myka wasn't thinking about what had happened three weeks ago.  Myka had the ability to remember a lot of things for no reason at all but she had also learned how to make herself forget a lot of things she did not want to remember.   
  
Despite all those things Helena had said three weeks ago, about Myka being old enough to put herself to bed, Helena made sure Myka was settled in bed before she retreated to her own room upstairs.  
  
Now Myka is awake thinking of Helena's tears and Helena's sadness and Helena's hug and serial killers.  
  
Myka thinks she hears a scratch on the window but she doesn't bother looking.  She grabs her bear, jumps out of the too-large bed, bolts out of the room and into the hallway, turning on every light as she goes.  She climbs the stairs backwards, staring into the emptiness of the house below her as she ascends the steps.    
  
She stumbles backward at least three times, but once she reaches the top, she tucks her nose into the head of her bear and spins around toward the darkness of the awaiting hallway.  She rounds the banister and finds the light switch just before making her way to Helena's bedroom.  
  
Myka has been there before.  She remembers where it is.  Further down the hall because Helena and Charles had wanted their rooms on opposite ends of the second floor, separated by two bathrooms, a recreation room, and a study.  
  
Helena's door is open and Myka thinks that's weird because Helena has mentioned before, in passing, that she always keeps her door closed, and Myka remembers because Myka remembers just about everything she sees and hears.  And she remembers it extra well when Helena is saying it.  
  
Myka steps to her door slowly, palms the doorknob, pushes the door open a little further.  Another step elicits a squeak of a complaint from the floor, the next complaint comes from the door hinge.  
  
Then she hears Helena's voice, speaking softly but not to her.  
  
"I could not give two flying fucks what Jenn has to say about it."  And she says it in a way that only Helena Wells can say the words "flying fuck" and still sound incredibly charming.  She also says it in a way that sounds incredibly smitten.  "I don't care what _anyone_ has to say.  And you shouldn't either."  
  
Myka pushes the door open further.  "H.G.?"  
  
"Myka?"  And now Myka is pushing the door open all the way and Helena is sitting up in bed with a cordless phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder and turning to Myka with a knowing sort of smirk on her lips.  "I have to go, Elle.  I'll see you in the morning."  Helena rolls her eyes and a grin appears on her face.    
  
For the second time, Myka sees her blush, and then she whispers something into the phone that Myka cannot hear just before hanging up and setting the phone on its base atop her nightstand because of course Helena Wells has a phone line in her bedroom.  
  
"Hey Einstein, everything okay?"  Helena asks.  
  
Myka's eyes fall to her feet and she shrugs, squeezing her bear close to her.  
  
"I can't believe you still have that old thing."  Helena smiles.  
  
"Pete says it's the only boyfriend I'll ever have."  Myka says softly.  Helena rolls her eyes again and shakes her head.  
  
"Yeah, well what does Peter know?"  
  
"He might be right."  Myka looks up at Helena now and then immediately averts her eyes to somewhere else in the bedroom.  "I don't really know a lot of boys besides Pete."

"Peter could be your boyfriend someday." And Myka thinks she must have made the most disgusted look she has ever made just then because suddenly Helena is laughing and says, "Or not."

"Never in a million years would I kiss Pete again."

"Again?" Helena's eyes are wide and a small smile starts to pull at the corner of her lips.

"I don't want to talk about it." Myka says suddenly.

"You don't have to." Helena's smile is full now and Myka sighs. "Well, come here and let me see your bear."  Helena pats the other side of her bed and reaches to turn on the lamp as Myka almost doesn't run to seat herself on the bed beside Helena.  She hands over the bear and Helena smiles, inspecting it.  "Do you know where this bear came from?"  
  
"It was a gift. I've had it since birth."  Myka smiles with a hint of pride.    
  
"Yes, it was.  But do you know _where_ it came from?"    
  
"London.  Your dad, right?"  Helena nods, thumbing at the frayed tag protruding from the bears lower leg.  Myka's name is barely noticeable there.  
  
"And guess who picked it out."    
  
"I don't know."  Myka shrugs and falls back into Helena's pillows, a hint of exhaustion creeping up on her.    
  
"Guess." Helena is grinning now, gently elbowing Myka, and Myka arches a brow and shrugs.  "I was four and a half," Helena says softly, "and my father wanted to get a gift for his old friend back in the states who'd just been married and was expecting a baby soon."  
  
"You picked out my bear."  Myka's eyes are wide now and Helena nods.  
  
"I did."  She says.  "My father took us to this big toy store and Charles wanted to buy you some godawful action figure.  But I protested.  Quite gracefully, in fact."  
  
"You threw a tantrum."  Myka corrects.  Helena feigns insult.  
  
"Well I never!  I was a perfect angel as a child, you little brat!"  And Helena's hands are all over Myka, tickling her sides, under her arms, inducing a laugh that not even Myka has heard before.  
  
"Okay, okay!  I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"  Myka squirms and rolls and tries so very hard not to kick Helena, but she still rolls and eventually she's sliding off the bed.  Helena is stretched across the bed on her belly and catches Myka by her arms to pull her back onto the bed.  
  
"Okay then."  Helena is laughing.  "Back up here with you."  And she tugs until Myka steadies on her feet and plops herself back onto Helena's bed, rolls onto her back, closes her eyes.  "So, the guest room?"  
  
"I couldn't sleep."  Myka still laughs.  
  
"Uh huh."  Helena smiles.  "Well, you're welcome to stay here."  
  
"I can pull out the trundle."  
  
"Look, just don't kick me in your sleep and we'll be fine."  
  
Myka's eyes are wide open now and she gulps, all previous amusement slipping away from her right along with all the blood from her face.  "Oh... kay."  
  
"What time do you have to be at school?"  
  
"Seven thirty."  
  
"Jesus H Christ.  I don't have to be at school until nine."  
  
"I have fencing in the morning.."  
  
"Of course you do."  Helena pulls back the covers.  "In."  She says.  
  
Myka obeys, because she always does, and she lays back into the too many pillows that Helena has at the head of her bed.  Helena reaches for her lamp again, turns off the light and buries herself under covers beside Myka. Myka who has crept closer to the edge of the bed, away from Helena, and stilled herself.  
  
"Did you turn on all the lights in the house on your way up here?"  Helena asks, looking toward the light that shines through her doorway.  
  
"It was dark."  
  
"Einstein." She laughs softly.  
  
"Sorry."  Myka turns onto her side, facing further away from Helena.  
  
"Einstein."  
  
"I can turn them off."  
  
Helena is shuffling around and suddenly leaning over Myka and Helena is narrowing her eyes at Myka through the almost-dark with that serious look returning to her face, only it's hard to take seriously because she's practically upside down.  And it's also hard to focus because Myka's entire body is warm and her belly is twisting again and all she can think about is Helena's body leaning over her.  Helena's chest against her arm.  Helena's hair tickling the side of her face.  Helena's breath on her ear.  
  
"Stop apologizing."  It's almost a whisper in Myka's ear.  "Unless you actually did something wrong, you need to stop apologizing all of the time."  
  
"Sorry."  And that apology is purposeful, Myka grins and forces a laugh as Helena tickles her side, though not quite as relentless this time.   Just enough to make her giggle.  
  
Sometimes Myka can be witty.  Sometimes she can break through the cloud of whatever this feeling is that Helena induces in her and say something funny like she does with Pete because sometimes she pretends Helena isn't Helena at all and it helps.  Especially now, in the almost-dark.  
  
"You're a brat."  Helena smiles and Myka can feel her cheeks burning and she digs her teeth into her bottom lip to bite back her still growing smile.  "I'm going to go turn off all these lights."  Then Myka's bear is being pushed into her arms and Helena pulls the bed covers over both Myka and Myka's bear and pats the blanket into place.  "Teddy shall keep you safe in my absence."  
  
"I'm not afraid."  Myka says softly.  
  
"I didn't say you were, Myka."  
  
And Helena shuffles off of the bed, out the door.  Myka hears her soft steps against unsettled wooden stairs and she prays the little rich girl serial killer really was just a figment of her imagination but resolves that she would gladly fight one off to save Helena Wells.    
  
She breathes a sigh of relief when she doesn't have to.  
  
The hallway light eventually turns off and Helena is through the door seconds later.  Myka shuts her eyes as the older girl walks to the nightstand by her side of the bed and sets a glass down.  
  
"There's water here for when you get thirsty."  Because Helena knows Myka that well.  Helena has spent enough late nights with Myka to know she has a penchant for getting up to retrieve water.  And even if Helena knows that Myka is getting up to retrieve water for reasons other than thirst, she at least has the decency to pretend it's for thirst.  And not because Myka always had trouble sleeping knowing Helena was in the next room.    
  
Myka stays quiet and she shuts her eyes tighter.  
  
"I know you're not asleep."  Helena adds with another whisper.  
  
"Thank you."  Myka says almost too softly for Helena to hear.  
  
"You're welcome."    
  
And then it happens.  
  
But Myka's eyes are closed, so she doesn't know it's happening until it happens and Helena's hand is pulling Myka's hair from her face and Helena's lips are on her cheek.  Just beside her ear, just above her jaw.  And it's sentimental, sincere, loving even.  Probably the kind of kiss Myka's mom would give her just before bed if Myka's mom gave kisses just before bed.  But it's not Myka's mom and the placement is all wrong, Myka thinks, because the way she _feels_ about it makes her heart want to burst, sends shock waves through her body. 

It's Helena Wells.  Helena Wells is kissing her cheek.  
  
It lasts a second, the touch of Helena's lips against Myka's cheek.  Helena's hand in Myka's hair lingers two seconds longer than that.  But it's long enough for Myka, who is forgetting how to breathe, who thinks she's having a heart attack, who is minutes away from also being rushed to the hospital with a high grade fever.  
  
She still feels Helena's touch burning in her skin as though she never stopped touching her, even as the older girl is climbing into her side of her own bed.  And Myka can barely move but she buries her face further into one of Helena's numerous pillows and it smells like her and Myka inhales deeper and she squeezes her bear into her chest and she closes her eyes tighter, if it's even possible.  
  
"Goodnight, Brat."  Helena says softly, after settling in beside Myka.  
  
Myka smiles into the dark.  She smiles so wide because no one can see.  But Myka's voice, much like that incessant rapid beating of her barely-working twelve-year-old heart, is no longer hers.


	4. Twelve & Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When Myka is twelve and Helena is seventeen, they are an entire universe apart because Helena is almost an adult now and Myka is not even a teenager.

When Myka is twelve and Helena is seventeen, they are an entire universe apart because Helena is almost an adult now and Myka is not even a teenager.  
  
***  
  
Tracy had almost died last year but that's just the sort of theatrical life that Tracy liked to lead. Usually Myka would mind but in the weeks that Tracy had been in the hospital, her mother and father had been occupied with the precarious status of her health, so Myka had become what Myka is sure is a distant memory to them.  
  
A distant memory that they left in the care of one Helena G. Wells' father Charles and by proximity, Helena G. Wells herself.  And that was okay with Myka.  
  
Sometimes Myka felt as though she was meant to see Helena's father as an uncle. He would insist on her calling him that, Uncle Charles, the few times she did see him. But Myka could never picture Helena as a member of her family, for so many reasons. Not at all in the beginning and definitely not now that she knew how to interpret the way she felt about the older girl.  Knew what to do with those thoughts about her.  How to expand on the idea of her.  
  
Also, Myka hated Helena's brother Charles and for so many reasons, many more than she could list, she didn't want to picture him as family either.  
  
But Myka is still just twelve and she sees so little of both the older girl and her brother because after living with her for two weeks, Myka's parents decided to give Helena a break from babysitting duty as a sort of thanks. This only compounds the guilt that Myka already feels for taking up space in the older girl's house, in her room, and mostly in her bed, for the weeks that she did.    
  
Myka begins to think that maybe her perception of those weeks, spent listening to Helena go on about _girl things_ and music and colleges and how very on the verge of being an adult she was, is perhaps a bit skewed.  Because she had fun and she thought Helena had had fun, too, but now Helena is being particularly teenager-y and they haven't talked or even seen much of each other for half of a year.  
  
***  
  
"You're really bringing me down, Mykes." And Pete doesn't quite punch her shoulder, not in the way she punches his shoulder, because she's not as wide or bulky as he is.  She is all skin and bones, and if Pete punched her with the same force she attempted to punch him, she would fly across the park they are currently walking through on their way home from school. So Pete's punch is light, just enough to make her step to the side to catch her balance as they walk along.    
  
Myka doesn't correct her side-step, though, she allows her body to move in the direction that Pete has pushed her, away from the walkway, across the grass, past benches and further from the screams of the kids who are still young enough to play in the park without it effecting their _reputations_.  
  
Myka is not quite that young anymore but she's also not old enough to have acquired one of these well-coveted reputations.  She's not even sure she'll ever be that old or care that much.  
  
"Where are you going?"  Tracy is steps behind them with Leena by her side and Pete waves them on.  
  
"Go play for a little bit." Myka hears him say to the two ten-year-olds.  "We'll be back."  
  
"Are they gonna go make out?" Leena asks, "Because if so, that is very disgusting."  
  
The many reasons why this is Myka's breaking point cannot be counted on a single hand.  She finds a familiar spot behind the too-large trunk of a very big tree, drops her book bag to the ground and wedges herself into a seat of roots.  
  
Pete appears and stands in front of her just seconds later.  
  
"You know, this is probably why people think all we do is make out."  
  
Myka shrugs and lifts her glasses to wipe at tears that are falling down her face. "Let them think it."  
  
"Well, that's all good for you, Mykes, because we both know that I'm the most handsome guy you'll ever love." She can see him flexing out of the corner of her eye and she rolls her eyes as a smile tugs at the corner of her lips. "But it's also kind of a drag because all the ladies think I'm taken."  
  
"Being a drag is the one thing I do well."  Myka doesn't look up at him but pulls her knees close to her body and lowers her forehead against them.  
  
"Dude."  Pete finally takes a seat in the grass in front of Myka.  "That's not what I meant and you know that's not what I meant."  
  
"Sorry." Myka sighs.  
  
"No." And this makes Myka look up at Pete.  
  
"No?"  
  
" _No_." He repeats.  
  
"No _what_?"  
  
"I'm Pete and you're Myka and we are best friends which means you talk to me without being bribed with Twizzlers.  You're not going to get all Myka-with-everybody-else on me right now."  Pete says.  "And you're definitely not going to get all Myka-with-H.G. on me right now."  
  
"What is Myka-with-H.G.?" Myka is indignant but she would also really love to know.  One, because she's curious and two because any connection that any person can make between her and Helena Wells is obviously worth hearing out.  
  
She knows she can draw too much attention to anything that has to do with how she is to, with, and around Helena but she also knows that she had been doing a good job of not drawing attention to these things. She knows too that in the months that she hasn't seen much of Helena Wells, her ability to not draw attention to the fact that she misses the older girl, like a whole _lot_ , has failed almost miserably.  
  
And the way Pete immediately grabs her attention by even the slightest mention of H.G., Helena Wells, only further proves her failure.  
  
"Mykes, how long have we known each other?"  Pete asks picking at the grass beside him.  
  
"Forever."  She answers softly, lowering her chin back to her knees.  
  
"Forever and a day."  Pete corrects.  "And you're like the brother with boobs that I never had.  Well, let's say the brother who might one day have boobs that I never had."  
  
"I might one day have the boobs that you never had?" Myka knows what Pete means but she cannot resist the urge to point out the flaw in his statement.  She also throws a pebble at his feet for the boob comment.  
  
"You're losing focus and I don't blame you." Pete says. "I lose focus when the conversation turns to boobs, too."  And then he gives her a look and raises his brow, almost as if he is expecting the reaction that Myka instantly feels burning in her cheeks and her chest, that is now twisting into and around her belly.  
  
The level of "awkward" that consumes this moment is second only to the time that Pete and Myka decided to test the very popular theory that most of their friends and family held about them getting married some day.  It took four straight hours of Mario Kart followed by a marathon of Tetris for them to move past the kiss that made that day the most awkward of all the days they've known each other.  
  
And Myka thinks that's saying a lot for two kids whose mothers used to bathe them together.  
  
Now all that Myka can think to herself is how she very much does not want to lose her best friend to another awkward moment brought on by her very awkward inability to find her best guy friend, or any guy for that matter, attractive.  
  
"Mykes, I love you, you know that right?" Myka knows he means it like a brother and she nods but she cannot bring herself to say those words back to him because she has never said them before, not to anyone, and they feel foreign in her mouth, against her lips.  Like a lie or a farce of feelings that she doesn't want to pretend to know anything about.  That she honestly doesn't know _anything_ about.  
  
Pete pulls more grass from its roots, tosses the blades at Myka's sneakers, then adjusts his position so that he is sitting straight and takes in a deep breath.  
  
"So you know you can talk to me about whatever and I will always love you, right?" Myka narrows her eyes and Pete arches his brow again. "Even if you just want to talk about H.G. for hours and hours, I will still love you."  
  
Myka averts her eyes but the flush in her cheeks grows, she can feel that much, and the twist in her belly is stronger than it has been in weeks, in all of her thoughts of Helena Wells.  And she also feels what she's sure is panic because she is forcing herself not to get up and _run_. Her heart races, her hands sweat, she blinks several times as more tears fall.  
  
Then she hazards a glance at Pete and Pete is grinning at her hopefully, filled to the absolute brim with hope and happiness and anticipation.  Pete looks like he does when he tells a really cheesy joke and then waits and waits and waits for Myka to laugh at it.  Which Myka usually, eventually, does laugh at, not because the joke was funny but because _that face_ , and how could she not?  
  
The panic is gone faster than it set in and she can't help the smile that pulls at her lips.  She tries, she tries very hard to contain that smile, but Pete's grin and the mention of Helena and the fact that Myka thinks she might one day be able to say, out loud, that she loves someone, all these things _get_ to her right now.  
  
"She's beautiful."  Myka says finally, softly, and she doesn't expect the sudden feeling of lightness.  She doesn't expect to feel so light, so suddenly overwhelmed by relief.  She takes in a very deep breath and tears continue to fall down her cheeks but she smiles as Pete's grin grows.  "I like her.  A lot."  
  
"I don't blame you, Mykes.  She's _super_ hot." Pete nods and Myka is covering her laugh and wiping at tears and nodding her agreement.  
  
"She's _so_ hot."  And it feels _so_ good to say.  It feels _so_ right.  For the first time in her life, Myka feels honest and real and truthful. Like her life isn't an act, like she isn't the most deceitful person in the world. The big liar that her father always makes her out to be.  
  
She doesn't think either of them can possibly smile any harder than they already are, but they do and soon Pete is on his knees and lunging for her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling her into one of his really tight Pete hugs that are mostly reserved for his mom and Myka and even little Leena.  
  
Pete kisses her hair and she goes limp in his too-tight grip.  "You have made me the happiest Pete in all of the world today." He whispers into her ear and some new feeling in her brings her to pull her arms around Pete and squeeze back.  "You really are the brother I never had."  Her grip is not even close to being as tight as Pete's grip is, but the sentiment is there and it's the most sentimental she's ever been in her life, so Pete, she's sure, gets the point. "My little lesbian brother."  
  
"I'm not a lesbian, Pete."  He just squeezes her tighter.  "It's just her."  
  
"Fine, H.G.-bian." He concedes and Myka is both laughing and crying into his shoulder.  
  
"They _are_ making out!"  Leena screeches suddenly and Pete and Myka are pulling away from each other with their too-big grins and red eyes to see Leena standing beside them with her hands over her face.  Tracy is by her side in seconds.  
  
"Gross guys!"  Tracy fakes a gag.  
  
"Trust me little ladies." Pete says standing to his feet, helping Myka to her feet and throwing his arm around her shoulders when she's steady.  "I am _so_ not her type."  
  
***  
  
Some weeks later, it's a week before Myka's thirteenth birthday and Pete's present to her is a front row seat at his older sister Jeannie's sleepover party.  
  
He doesn't tell Myka that Helena was invited and he also doesn't tell Myka, until she already knows, that Helena has a girlfriend and Claire, another of his sister's friends, has dated girls before, too.  So Myka doesn't know, until the next morning at breakfast, that Pete decided to tell the entire world she likes girls because, apparently, all the girls in her world also like girls.  And it was okay and Myka should know that.  
  
But that's just how Pete is, forgetful and disorganized and not thorough, and anyway Helena, who she hasn't seen since before Christmas break, before Thanksgiving even and it's now already Spring break, promised her a date in nine years and Myka has been, quite appropriately, on cloud nine ever since.  
  
It almost makes Myka forget about what her father would do to her if he ever found out.  
  
Almost.  
  
***  
  
"Meat! I need more meat!" Pete is making monster noises and Claudia, Claire's baby sister who is barely three years old, is in a fit of giggles in her booster chair between Pete and Myka.  
  
Pete grabs three slices of bacon and shoves the ends into his mouth, turns to the toddler and starts growling like a... like a...  
  
"What exactly are you supposed to be?" Helena asks with a brow raised from across the table.  Myka tries not to smile, she's also trying very hard not to watch Helena, but she fails very horribly at both of these tasks.

"A loon." Claire says without ever looking up from her plate. "As usual."  
  
"A walrus baconppotamus!" Pete declares.  
  
"Silly wa'rus Pete." Claudia giggles and Myka doesn't miss the playful face that Helena makes at the toddler.  
  
" _Mom_." Jeannie groans and her mother waves absentmindedly over her shoulder from where she stands by the stove.  "I'm sorry guys."  
  
Helena grins, shakes her head and signs while she says, "It's okay, Jeannie, we are used to it by now."    
  
Myka's worlds are colliding because she hasn't actually seen Helena when hanging out with Jeannie before but she's beginning to see why Helena has become so expressive with her hands in recent years.  She is simultaneously proud of herself for noticing.  
  
"You know how to sign?" Myka asks after swallowing a forkful of eggs and concluding that talking would probably be better than the wide-eyed oggling she'd previously been doing.  
  
"Only a little." Helena winks at her. Myka almost chokes on air.  Pete is instantly on his feet and patting her back, albeit with a playful force, and Helena reaches across the table to refill her orange juice and tells her to wash it down.  "Don't die on me just yet, Einstein. I'm kinda looking forward to that date you promised me."  
  
"Date?" Pete's suggestive brows materialize as he returns to his seat.  "You're going on a date with Myka?  Hot damn, Mykes, you work quick!"  
  
"Language, Peter Lattimer." Ms. Jane only now turns around to glare at her son and Jeannie takes advantage of the opportunity to sign rather ferociously at her mother.  Myka's ASL isn't that great but she picks up that it's about Pete and his immaturity and also his general presence and maybe something about his birth as a whole.  
  
"I don't want to hear it, Jean." Ms. Jane scolds, shaping her lips to perfection so that Jeannie has no problem reading them.  
  
" _Mom_." Pete groans now.  
  
"Or see it." She adds turning back to the stove with a huff.  
  
"You're _welcome_ , Sis." Pete signs and says to Jeannie and she rolls her eyes and goes back to eating her breakfast.  "So, what's this about a date?"  
  
Myka sinks into her chair.  
  
"Myka and I made a deal.  Didn't we, Einstein?"  
  
Myka thinks she will probably have the strongest cheek muscles in the world with all the smiling she is attempting not to do, but she nods anyway and avoids looking at Pete who is very obviously and expectantly staring her down.  She also avoids looking at Helena because looking at Helena, especially Helena now that she is seventeen years old, requires more resolve than what Myka has.  
  
"If we're both single by the time Myka is twenty-one, she's going to take me out." Helena smiles and winks again. This time, thankfully, Myka has too little oxygen to choke on because she's barely breathing as it is.  
  
" _Twenty-one_?" Pete questions leaning forward to catch Myka's attention.  "You realize she'll be like _thirty_ by then, right?" And he makes a face as if to imply that thirty is _old_.  Myka finally turns to Pete and shoots him the most annoyed glance she can possibly muster.  
  
"I'll only be twenty-five."  Helena rolls her eyes and Myka is thankful she's seated, otherwise she'd be swooning because Helena and those eye rolls.  "It'll be a proper relationship by then, don't you think, Myka?"  
  
Myka opens her mouth but no words come out.  Pete is shaking his head and wagging his eyebrows at her again.  
  
"What will Giselle say?" Claire adds.

"Giselle will have forgotten about me by then." And Helena rolls her eyes again, but this time it isn't the same as the other times. This time she shakes her head and shrugs and Myka can see that there is more disappointment there than anything else.  
  
"Don't make me turn my ears on so early in the morning." Jeannie pipes up and Pete signs the gist of the conversation to her before she cracks a smile at Myka and turns to Helena with a shake of her head. "Myka and Pete will be married by then."  
  
Both Myka and Pete gag and the table, everyone except the two of them, erupts into laughter.  
  
"More egg p'ease." A tiny Claudia asks banging her spoon against her plate.  Myka serves the toddler more eggs. "S'ankooouu."  
  
"You're welcome."  Myka gently pokes Claudia's cheek but she is having none of it and bats the finger away, favoring eggs over the attention.  
  
"So, Myka, where are you taking Helena on this date?" And it's Ms. Jane who is at the table now, spooning more eggs into the now empty bowl and grinning down at Myka. Myka feels all the blood leave her face and her mouth falls open but no words come out as the reality of who Ms. Jane is and how close Ms. Jane is to her mother, like "I named my first born child after you" close, begins to set in.  
  
"We're going to see a movie." Helena smiles and it's her turn to spoon more eggs onto Myka's plate.  
  
"I'm... not hungry." Myka shakes her head.

"She's never hungry." Pete says holding out his plate. "Just give them to me."  
  
"No." Helena waves the wooden spoon at Pete's plate to usher it away, then narrows her eyes on Myka. "Eat." She commands.  Ms. Jane has gone and returned with more biscuits now and Helena swoops one up before Pete can lay claim to the last of them. She sets it on Myka's plate, too.  "You're going to need more meat on those bones if you're expecting a cuddle."  And Helena winks again.  
  
Myka dies. Or she thinks she dies. Or she's dead. Or maybe this is what it _feels_ like to be dead.  She's not really sure what's going on because her breathing may have stopped, and her heart may have stopped, too.  Her face is warm, she knows that much, and maybe time is passing but she doesn't know exactly how much time is passing because all she can see is Helena's smile and all she can hear is Helena's laugh. And this is ridiculous, she thinks, because Helena is not at all phased by what Myka's saying or by Myka's presence or by Myka's eyes on her, but when Helena is speaking and present and watching _her_ , Myka feels very much on the verge of death or plummeting to her death, like she always does.  
  
"No offense, H.G.," Pete starts and Myka holds her breath because Pete has a reputation for saying really stupid stuff, "but if you really want Myka to live long enough to make that date, you're going to need to tone down the hot."  
  
This time what he says is not so stupid.  Helena blushes and Myka doesn't miss how the redness creeps from her cheeks, down her neck and disappears beneath her pajama top.  
  
And Jeannie must have turned on her hearing aid after being brought up to speed because she's groaning at her mother again and Pete indulges in this attention by clearing out the room with one of his world-class farts.  
  
***  
  
"Hey."  
  
Myka is sitting on Pete's bed reading one of his numerous comic books while he plays video games when Helena appears beside her and gently pulls the comic from her hands.  
  
"Hey, I was reading tha-" And Myka stops when she realizes it's Helena who is now tossing the comic book onto the bed and picking up Myka's teddy and gesturing toward the door with a nod of her head.  
  
"Grab your stuff."  
  
"My stuff?" Myka asks.  
  
"Yes, Einstein, I'm taking you home."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"So get your things and meet me up front."  
  
"Okay."  
  
Helena leaves Pete's room with Myka's teddy in hand.  Myka turns to Pete, whose game is already paused and whose brow is already arched in Myka's direction.    
  
"Dude." Pete says shaking his head. "I have a very strong feeling that you are going to die at a _very_ young age."  
  
***  
  
"This isn't Charles' car."  Myka says buckling her seat belt.  
  
"No." Helena grins. "It's mine."  
  
"You got a car?"  Helena just nods, lowering the volume on the radio before putting the car into drive and taking off.  They're quiet for a long while and the drive to Myka's place downtown from Pete's house in the neighboring district isn't long.  She could have walked it if not for the sudden downpour of rain.  
  
She could have walked it even in the rain.  
  
"I talked to Ms. Jane." Helena says suddenly breaking through the silence.  She turns momentarily to Myka and smiles softly at her.  "About keeping your secret a secret.  She won't tell your parents."  
  
Myka sighs her relief because one secret kept is better than none as she seems to have accumulated quite a bit of them in recent weeks.  
  
"Thank you." And she's quiet again.  
  
"You had so much to say last night." Helena glances back at Myka again.  "What happened?"  
  
"Pete told me the cake was sugar free."    
  
Helena's smile grows.  "And the fact that he ate half of it didn't give that lie away?  Also the fact that it was good?"  
  
Myka shrugs.  
  
"So are you telling me that when you eat sugar, you become hyperactive and that's why the Twizzler's help you talk to me more?"  
  
Myka shrugs again. "I guess." She nods.

Helena's grin grows even more and she nods, too.  "Okay."  
  
They're turning onto Myka's street now and it's quiet, empty save for a few cars here and there.    
  
"Are you just..." Myka starts but her voice wavers and trails off.  Helena pulls in front of the bookstore and puts the car in park.  
  
"Am I just what?" Helena asks as Myka gathers her things and reaches for the door handle.  
  
"Are you just teasing me?  About... about the date?"  And Myka doesn't look at her when she asks it, she looks at the drawstring on her overnight bag, and her loose shoelace, and a speck of dirt beneath her fingernail, and the numbers that now turn to 1:34 PM on Helena's car clock.  
  
"No." Helena says simply and she's reaching to Myka and tugs on her arm before running her fingers up along skin and pushing her sleeve up.  And Myka is too numb by the touch at first to realize what is happening but Helena motions for her to twist around and Helena does the same with Myka's other arm.  
  
"I haven't gotten in trouble since then." Myka finally breathes out in a whisper.  But Helena checks her neck anyway and stops only when Myka shivers beneath the contact.  
  
Helena sits back in her seat and grips the steering wheel now, lowering her head and taking in a deep breath.    
  
"I wouldn't tease you like that, Einstein." She says quietly. "You just..." And Helena looks up at her and smiles. "Sometimes I think you need someone looking out for you and I'm sorry we haven't seen much of each other lately."

"Pete looks out for me." 

"I know." Helena nods. "And he does a great job, but someone older to..." Helena waves the topic away with her hand and sighs before gripping the steering wheel again.  
  
Myka is quiet but tries to conjure up something to say to make Helena feel better because she can see Helena slipping into that mood she was in the last time she tried checking Myka for marks.  And it's hard because Myka is more nervous to say something stupid than she is willing to say anything at all.  Sometimes she wishes she could not filter herself like Pete does, turn off her brain or at least lower the volume on her thoughts and her fears and her feelings and everything else that makes her.. her.  
  
"Maybe..." Myka pauses, thinks, takes in a deep breath, fiddles with the door handle, "maybe, you can come over for my birthday. Saturday, we... Pete and I, our families take us to dinner on our birthdays. You could come." And Myka is shaking and she pulls the handle on the door and pushes it open, grips her bag, still doesn't make eye contact.  "If you want."  
  
"That's very sweet of you, Myka, but Giselle is..." Myka's brow furrows at the name and Helena stops, smiles. "I have plans, I'm sorry. I should have remembered."  
  
"Okay."  
  
Myka thinks you could drop a ton of books on her right now, the entire bookstore full of books, and she would not be any more hurt than she is in this moment.  
  
"I'll make it up to you, though." Helena adds reaching over to grip Myka's wrist.  And something akin to happiness creeps its way back into Myka's bones at the touch.  And when Helena smiles, that gorgeous smile that Myka has tried so hard to describe to Pete but he just doesn't _get it_ , Myka is fully recovered from the previous let down.  
  
Helena squeezes Myka's wrist then and let's go, too soon Myka thinks.  
  
"Okay." Myka manages a smile. "You don't have to..."  
  
"Myka, I will."  Helena repeats. "You think you're not worth these things but you are. You should know that. You're my friend and you're also worth something. Okay?"  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"Now please, go inside."  
  
Myka thinks she sees tears in Helena's eyes but Myka is obedient and grabs the last of her things, her teddy, and removes herself from Helena's car.  
  
"Thank you for the ride." Because Myka might be extremely shy but she doesn't lack manners.  
  
Helena nods. "You're welcome, Einstein."  And Myka shuts the door, runs to the awning over the front of the bookstore and rummages around for her key.  And not until she finds it and is unlocking the door and closing it behind her does Helena wave and put her car into drive.  
  
And Myka does see it this time, the tears down Helena's cheeks, the way she wipes them away as she drives off down the street.  
  
Myka doesn't know what that means or who they are for but Myka spends the rest of her week dreaming of kissing those tears away.


	5. Thirteen & Seventeen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myka turns thirteen. Myka gets attitude. Myka better check herself.

 Helena takes Myka to lunch on her thirteenth birthday.  
  
They go early enough so as to not spoil Myka's dinner and they walk from the bookstore to Leena's family's diner because it's just around the corner and up another block.  And Myka's first gift from Helena, she thinks, is that Helena walks with her arm around Myka's shoulders the entire way there.  
  
Helena's second gift to Myka is the way she drags her fingers through tight curls when they part to sit down.  It is the one thing, besides the older girl herself, that Myka had missed the most about Helena in her absence.  
  
They sit across from one another in the same booth Pete and Myka and Leena always take up space in and as soon as they are settled, Leena's father brings Myka a slice of pound cake with a lit candle sticking out of it, a milkshake, two forks, and a birthday card from Leena who has been out of town for Spring break.  
  
That is gift number three, judging by Helena's grin, or maybe two and a half since Leena had left the hand drawn card for Myka with her dad before heading out of town, so the gift was partially from her, too.  
  
Myka decides to round up.  
  
Gift number four is that Helena doesn't sing happy birthday to her because Myka has heard Helena sing karaoke before and Myka might really like Helena, like a _lot_ , but she cannot say the same for Helena's singing voice.  Instead, Myka receives gift number five when Helena reaches across the table and holds Myka's wrist for what Myka thinks is the absolute longest time.  Gift number six is the smile she gives Myka shortly after she tells her "happy birthday" and gift number seven is Helena Wells' flushed cheeks when Myka squints her eyes and asks half-joking and managing to pull off Pete's trademark eyebrow-wag, "Is this a date?"  
  
"No, Einstein." And Helena isn't quite laughing but she has a big smile on her face and she looks away for a second before looking back at Myka and pressing her lips together tightly.  "This is me treating my friend to lunch on her birthday.  Now don't forget to make your wish."  Then Helena squeezes her wrist in that way she always does and the contact is gone.  
  
Myka blows out the candle after Helena also tells her to make it a _good_ wish and winks at her for probably the five-hundredth time in her young life.  And that wink is gift number eight, so Myka thinks for a second that she should wish for Helena to never stop winking at her, and to never stop holding onto her wrist like she does or sliding her fingers through her curls.  But Myka also doesn't want to waste a wish on something Helena will probably never stop doing anyway.  
  
Instead Myka wishes for the same thing she does every year, then she blows out her candle.  
  
Myka has half-devoured the milkshake before Helena reaches across the table for several sips of her own.  And if Helena had planned this, pumping Myka full of sugar when she couldn't possibly say no, Myka didn't know until she was an hour deep into conversation with Helena about her ongoing war with Tracy and how she and Pete had spent the rest of their Spring break riding their barely-used bikes to the lake just outside of town and that her mom had given her _roller blades_ for her birthday that morning but there was no way in hell (because Myka says "hell" now) that Myka was going to _roller blade_ to school.  And Helena is laughing along with her and commiserating over Tracy's unruly behavior with her and telling her the next time she wants to go to the lake, Helena will just drive them there, and also agreeing that Myka should probably not roller blade to school.  
  
Eventually the cake is gone and the shake has been annihilated along with half of another and mostly entirely by a now-fidgety Myka.  A now-fidgety Myka who is almost not quite sitting in her seat when Helena reaches across the table and grabs her wrist again.  But this time, Myka thinks, it isn't for no reason at all because Helena's expression has more than just a hint of seriousness in it.  It's also thoughtful and maybe just a little bit sad, too.  
  
"Myka." And she stops moving and talking and fidgeting instantly.  "I need to ask you something."  
  
Myka sinks into the booth, instantly sobering from the peak of a sugar rush as the warmth from the contact moves through her limbs and steadily toward her chest.  "Yeah?"  And she might have sounded a bit scared just then, her voice not as sugar confident as it was just minutes ago.  
  
Helena removes her grasp on Myka's wrist to put her hands in her lap and tilts her head slightly to the right.  Myka's eyes follow the flow of dark hair that also shifts to the side, cascading over her shoulder, before her eyes land on those lips that seem, in Myka's wild imagination, to be so fond of speaking her name.  
  
"How is everything?  With your dad?"  
  
"My dad?"  
  
Helena nods expectantly.  Myka shrugs a single shoulder.  
  
"I don't know, I don't really talk to my dad."  
  
"But I mean, he hasn't.."  Helena trails off.  
  
"I told you, I've been good, H.G. I haven't-"  
  
"It's not about you being good or being bad, Myka." Helena cuts her off and her voice rises ever so slightly and Myka doesn't miss the anger that is present in her tone. "Even if it were about that, you're good _all_ of the time. Like an annoyingly massive amount of the time.  I don't know another kid who is as good as you are. I certainly am not.  _Was_ not."  
  
Myka presses her lips together and lowers her head to stare at her hands, busy in her own lap.  
  
"I'm sorry, Myka, I just... worry."  Helena breathes out and she, too, slumps back into her booth.  "I'm sorry."  
  
"It's okay."  Myka shrugs a single shoulder and looks up at Helena.  "I'm used to it."  And Helena's expression falls into sadness as she brings her hands over her face and buries that expression behind her fingers for a long time.  Long enough for Myka to realize, eventually, that she is crying.  "H.G. I didn't mean it like... like my dad.  I just meant I'm used to you.  Worrying about me.  I didn't mean... I'm sorry, I didn't..."  
  
"No, it's okay." Helena finally lowers her hands, wiping away tears and taking a deep breath. "God, I'm so sorry.  You're fine, Myka.  I shouldn't be crying to a twelve year old." Helena rolls her eyes and smiles, shaking her head.  
  
"I'm thirteen now." Myka says then.  
  
"Yes," Helena nods, "you're officially a teenager, and what a happy birthday I've given you." She adds sarcastically and laughs softly.  
  
"One of the best I've ever had." Myka responds, not at all sarcastically, and she forces the next thing out of her mouth because it sounds about right, "So far."  
  
Helena rolls her eyes again and Myka manages a smirk only because she wants to smile at that eye roll but she's trying so very hard not to.  
  
"Someone is going to be very lucky to call you their girlfriend one day." Helena smiles with an arched brow.    
  
Myka isn't brave enough to say out loud that she wants Helena to be that someone and she hopes that the burning in her cheeks and the grin that she can now no longer hide do not give her away.  
  
"Well, I did actually get you something other than me being hormonal."  Myka thinks that's an okay gift, too, so she'll count it as gift number nine.  And Helena digs through her bag by her side and pulls out a book with a bow on it, slides it across the table to Myka, who wipes her hands off before taking it up and pulling the bow from its cover.  
  
"Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?"  She questions reading aloud the title.  
  
Helena shrugs.  "Some new book my father's publishing company is releasing this year back home.  That's one of the first printed copies, so you should probably hang on to it for a while. I mean, in case it's actually any good."  
  
"What is it about?"  
  
"Magic. Sorcery. Academics. Other weird things that you like." Helena smiles and Helena winks again. "Your _Uncle Charles_ wants to know what you think of it when you're done, also he says to tell you happy birthday."  
  
"Thank you." And Myka sets the book, her tenth gift from Helena today, on the booth beside her. "I'll start reading it after dinner."  
  
"And on that note, I should probably walk you home now."  
  
***  
  
Pete and Myka are playing tether ball during their physical education class at school when Myka, in her usual clumsy fashion, misses one of the rounds that the ball is making around the pole because she thinks she sees Helena's new car parked outside of the fence line of the middle school.  What she actually sees is a car of the same color that is not even the same make or model as Helena's car. Nor is it occupied by a hot older English girl but rather a slightly familiar dark-haired woman who probably has nothing else to do except wait out the next three hours for her kids to get out of school.    
  
She also then sees, relatively up close, maybe even too close, like Pete will later tell her she shouldn't take the saying "keep your eye on the ball" so literally, a giant yellow mass of plastic as it travels directly toward her face and straight into her right eye.  
  
Her glasses take a fanciful flying journey off of her face and the right lens pops out of the frame and skids across the black top while the frames land somewhere to Myka's left where they narrowly miss being crushed by a passing set of feet.    
  
The bruise doesn't appear until much later in the day.  
  
The pain isn't as excruciating as the nurse makes it out to be when she calls Myka's mother to tell her about the incident.  The lecture she gets from her father about taking care of her _things_ and how money doesn't grow on _trees_ and glasses are not _cheap_ so she's just going to have to be _blind_ in one eye until they can afford a new pair, is far more excruciating than the pain could ever be.

Also, Myka is no longer allowed to play tether ball.  
  
Sometimes she wishes he would stop lecturing beforehand and just get her punishment over with already.    
  
***  
  
Myka would rather be blind than wearing her now busted up pair of glasses where the right lens is haphazardly held into place with maybe a tad too much Scotch tape, but it's better than nothing when she's in a reading mood.  And she's been in a reading mood since Helena brought her a new book for her birthday.  A new book that she'd finished reading just the day after she had started it and then proceeded to spend a great deal of her week scanning through the shelves of the bookstore for anything else remotely like it.  
  
Myka isn't surprised to turn up nothing.  Her father has a hefty collection of books but he also has a very selective collection of books and, not surprisingly, so few of their shelves contain youth or young adult novels because Myka's father wants neither youths or young adults in his book store.  
  
By the end of the week, Myka is halfway through her third read of the book that Helena brought her for her birthday.  
  
***  
  
The bookstore bell chimes to signal a customer arriving, but Myka is so deep into the novel before her that she doesn't notice anyone is there until long after Helena makes her way behind the counter and behind Myka and is leaning over her shoulder and says, almost directly into her ear, "I'm guessing you like the book."  
  
Myka startles at the suddenness and the closeness of the voice behind her and clutches her chest for a beat before pushing her busted glasses back into place on her nose and turning on the stool she sits on.  She almost chokes on a gasp when she finds herself face to face with Helena who is grinning and laughing but then suddenly stops grinning and stops laughing to stare blankly at Myka and, more specifically, at the right side of Myka's face which Myka has, by now, forgotten all about.  
  
"H.G. what are you-" Myka starts but Helena is quick to cut her off.  
  
"What happened to your face?"  And she says it in such a way that makes Myka think, for a split second, that she's in trouble because Helena's brows are furrowed and her forehead is wrinkling and then her hand is cupping Myka's face just under her chin.    
  
With a gentle force, Helena turns Myka's head further left so that she can better glare at the darkened skin, shades of black and purple and yellow-green, that create a crescent shape around Myka's right eye.  
  
"Myka, did your dad..." It's a whisper that trails off Helena's tongue and falls into complete silence.  
  
"Tether ball."  Myka exhales.  "At school, I got distracted while playing tether ball with Pete and... he's really strong."  
  
"Tether ball?"  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"Myka Bering." Helena lowers her voice as she also lowers her hand to find Myka's wrist and squeezes gently.  "Myka, you know you can be honest with me, right?  You don't have to lie to me..."  
  
And Myka, who is thirteen now and less than a year away from high school where she will get to spend one whole entire school year with Helena Wells, thinks that now is as good a time as any to challenge her ability to function as a proper human being around Helena.  So Myka reaches with her free hand and she wraps shaky fingers around the also unsteady wrist of the older girl, and she returns that familiar gentle squeeze and forces a small smile at her.  
  
"I wouldn't lie to you, H.G." Is what she thinks to say and she stares for a moment, directly at Helena.  She sees the moisture suspended in her eyes, the tightness of her lips pressed together, the deep inhale that Helena takes just before she squeezes Myka's wrist once again, and the slight nod that Helena gives her just before she releases her grip and turns completely away from Myka.  
  
And now with her back to Myka, she wipes away tears, covers her face for a moment.  For one very long moment.  And Myka reaches out to touch her, to put her open palm against Helena's back, to do what Myka thinks might be soothing but Myka isn't exactly sure because Myka's never really done that before to anyone.  So Myka's palm touches Helena's back and the contact sends a strange thrill through her body that dizzies her for a second.  
  
It only lasts a second.  
  
The older girl finally turns around and Myka drops her hand back to her lap.  Helena forces a smile and Myka smiles back.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Myka lowers her eyes, turns back to her book.  
  
"Stop Myka.  You didn't _do_ anything wrong-"  
  
"I made you cry."  
  
"I made myself cry." Helena laughs softly. "You didn't make me cry.  I am..." Helena shakes her head. "I'm sure there's something off with me."  
  
She's joking, Myka knows, but the words trigger a thought, "You're perfect, H.G. There's nothing off about..." Myka hadn't expected to hear her own voice saying the words she had only thought to be thinking and she stills herself when the realization of what she's saying out loud sinks in.  She glances to Helena whose head is tilted still watching her and with something of an amused smile on her lips and Myka says again, out loud, because she wants to see that smile grow,  "You're perfect."  
  
She turns fully toward Helena now and she is rewarded with her smile.  Wide and unrelenting and Helena wipes at her eyes again before shaking her head and gesturing toward Myka's book that now sits neglected on the counter.  
  
"I'm surprised you're not done reading that by now."  And Helena stands straight, reaches for the book, slides it closer to her on the counter and skims over the current page. "Is it any good?"  
  
"I've finished it twice actually."  Myka says softly. Helena looks back up at her with brows raised.  
  
"Really?"  Myka nods.  Helena smiles, eyes still quietly examining the right side of Myka's face.  "How can you even see out of those things?"  
  
Myka instinctively adjusts her glasses on her nose and shrugs.  "It's not that bad."  
  
"You don't have another pair?"  
  
"I can't see at all with the other pair."  
  
"I don't think you can really see with these either, Myka." and Helena reaches up to Myka's glasses, "Do you mind?" Myka shakes her head as Helena gently pulls her glasses off.  "Have you ordered new ones."  
  
"No."    
  
"And why not?" Helena laughs softly. "You can't wear these to school and actually expect to..." Helena sighs.  "Kids will make fun."

"Dad said no."  
  
Helena sighs.  Rolls her eyes.  
  
" _Why_ did he say no?"  Like she doesn't want to ask because she already knows the answer or that the answer is going to be something not worth the time it takes for her to hear it.  That's how Helena asks that question.  
  
"Too expensive."  
  
"Your father has insurance."  Helena says.  
  
Myka arches a brow and then shrugs.  "He's trying to teach me a lesson, H.G."  
  
"And what lesson could you possibly learn from being hit in the face with a tethered ball and blinded indefinitely?"  
  
"Duck?"  
  
Helena tightens her lips, narrows her eyes, and stares at Myka for several seconds until a smile slowly surfaces and a laugh bursts through the serious expression she has failed to maintain.    
  
She rolls her eyes, it's the most exaggerated eye roll she has seen from Helena in a while, and Myka smiles.  
  
"Your eyes are going to get stuck like that." She tells Helena, who hands her back her glasses and closes Myka's book, and with a giant grin on her face.  "Hey!"  
  
"Don't be a brat."  
  
***  
  
By the end of the next school week, Helena is back in the bookstore and this time Myka sees her coming.  She might be just a blur of dark hair and white skin dressed in blue, but Myka knows it's her.  
  
Myka pretends to be busy looking through a catalog when Helena approaches the counter, giving her only half her attention.  It's mostly because Myka is trying hard not to care about Helena as much as she's learned that she very much does, trying not to want to _see_ Helena as much as she very much does.  It's also because Myka has been in a _mood_ since her dad woke her up at four in the morning to task her with cleaning the bathroom she shares with her sister.    
  
During which time he thought to ask her why: she was such a slob?  She expected new _things_ when she couldn't keep the current _things_ off of the counter top and in their place?  There was random bits of _hair_ clogging up the drains?  She thinks he cares after she points out the hair is mostly Tracy's and maybe she needs to see a doctor again?  
  
And he also told her: Tracy is fine. Take out this trash, it's disgusting. Grab the Ajax, and _scrub_ the ring out of the tub.  You're old enough that I shouldn't have to tell you these things.  You might as well stay up and get ready for school.  Come straight home after because you're working the counter this afternoon.  And do not let me catch you with your little friends behind the counter.

To which Myka thinks to herself: What friends? And concludes that he must be, once again, fusing her life with Tracy's life while attributing all the _bad_ things to her and all the _good_ things to Tracy.  
  
Myka almost cares enough to wonder why he's even awake.  Why he's still fully dressed. Why his words don't quite sound as sharp as they're supposed to sound.  Why he leans so far into the jamb of the bathroom doorway and then barely stands straight when he finally _finally_ walks away.  
  
But Myka doesn't quite care that much about what her dad does.  Myka only cares enough about what he _doesn't_ do and also how to keep his focus off of _her_.  And Myka has been learning that the less she sees her dad, the less he also sees her, the less she gets into trouble, the less Helena has to worry.  
  
Helena who is here again, Myka thinks, to worry some more.  
  
The older girl greets Myka with a smile too wide to be for nothing (and if Myka can see it in her state of blindness, it is definitely wide) and says, "I see your father still hasn't bought you new glasses."  
  
Myka smirks but doesn't look too far away from the catalog.  "Maybe I still haven't learned to duck." She responds.  It makes Helena laugh just a little bit and Myka smiles now for such tiny miracles. She finds that being blind, not being able to see Helena entirely, makes the conversation flow a lot more easily.  
  
"Maybe if you had a new pair of glasses, you would know _when_ to duck."  Helena grins.  Myka looks up now, arches a brow.  She can make out more of Helena's features as the older girl approaches the counter.  
  
"Maybe I already told you that not knowing when to duck is cheaper than knowing when to duck." And Myka turns back to her catalog, flips a few pages until Helena's hand is there, closing the thing in this new way that she does, and pulling the catalog toward her.  Myka looks back up at her but she can't read the expression on Helena's face.  She can barely _see_ the expression on Helena's face.    
  
It's almost angry, Myka thinks, but more thoughtful than anger would allow.  Maybe she's annoyed. Myka has probably annoyed her.  But something about that look, that Myka now thinks is a _smolder_ , something about it turns Myka's stomach in that _good_ sort of familiar way.  And Myka thinks, too, that she kind of likes messing with Helena like this.  Myka thinks she should always talk to Helena with her glasses off.  Because at this point, Helena might as well be Pete or Tracy or even her dad.  
  
Myka takes that last part back.  Never her dad.  
  
"Maybe," Helena starts, "a daughter's ability to see should take precedence over whatever it is her father is out spending his money on."  
  
Myka shrugs and she stares.  "Maybe it would," Myka thinks a beat, watches Helena's face twist into curiosity before she continues, "if her father acknowledged having that daughter to begin with."  
  
"Myka."  
  
"You shouldn't care so much."  
  
"But I do care, Myka.  I always _have_ cared. I thought you were used to me by now?"  Helena's grin falls into a playful and almost hopeful smirk.  
  
"Used to you worrying."  Myka corrects her.  "Not caring."  And the last part is said just under her breath, she doesn't think Helena really hears it because the older girl leans over the counter and now she's close enough to Myka that her face is no longer a blur.  
  
"What is the difference?"  
  
Myka swallows.  Helena raises her brows.  
  
"Well?"  
  
"One is more self-serving than the other."  Myka finally chokes out.  
  
"Self-serving." Helena echoes and tilts her head to the side, twists her lips to the side, too. "Did you have sugar today?"  And Myka shakes her head no.  "Yet you suddenly have so much to say."  
  
Myka shrugs and looks away, somewhere past Helena, far over her shoulder.  "Maybe I _am_ used to you by now."  
  
"Are you upset with me, Myka?" And Myka thinks that maybe she is.  Or maybe she should be.  Maybe Helena doesn't belong here, being Helena.  Perfect and beautiful, with all of her caring and worrying.  
  
"You shouldn't be nice to me just because you think I'll be bruised."  And Myka is almost regretting her words as she's saying them, but some new feeling in her keeps her from stopping the thought.  "You should be nice to me because you like me, and because you _want_ to be nice to me.  Not because it makes _you_ feel better."  
  
Helena stands straight at that.  Plants a hand firmly onto the counter.  Now Myka sees this new expression on her face and it is definitely more than just a _hint_ of anger.  
  
"Myka, what makes you think I don't like you?  What makes you think that I don't feel better simply _because_ I like you?  Why would you even say something like that to me?  Did your dad say something...?"  
  
"I k _now_ you don't like me, H.G."  Myka cuts her off, shakes her head.  "Because _nobody_ likes me.  Except Pete and maybe Leena.  How can _you_ possibly like _me_?  I'm just _me_.  And you're _you_.  You're rich and you're pretty and you have a girlfriend and a car and you're in high school and I'm just..."  
  
" _Myka Bering_." Helena says it through gritted teeth.  
  
"Exactly."  
  
"No, Myka.  I mean, you need to stop."  Helena says. "As in _stop talking_."  
  
"You shouldn't be here, anyway.  My dad will be back.  He'll be pissed off.  Then you really _will_ find those bruises you keep looking for."  
  
"Myka!"  Helena sounds exasperated and Helena's lips are parted in wordless gaping and she suddenly has tears slipping from her eyes. She wipes at them and shakes her head. "You finally say more than two sentences to me and this is the conversation you choose to have?"  
  
Myka sighs, she rolls her eyes, reaches for her catalog again and flips it back open.  
  
"I am a brat after all."  
  
"You're twisting my joke, but yes, Myka," Helena chokes out, "you're being a _major_ brat right now."  
  
"Great.  More reasons for you to hate me.  More reasons for you to leave me alone."  
  
She sees Helena straighten up out of the corner of her eye but she remains quiet.  Myka looks up at her with curiosity and the look on her face now is one she does know.  
  
Hurt.  Myka has actually hurt Helena's feelings.  And Myka surprises herself by feeling mostly accomplished.  She waits for Helena to leave.  Silently begs Helena to leave.  To walk away and alleviate all the confusion and the awkwardness and the twisting in her belly and the aching in her heart and also the endless questioning as to why she's even still here to begin with.  
  
Myka shapes her face for the words she can't say.  Tries desperately to convey those words in her expression.  Thinks them, _screams them_ , in her own mind.

 _Just. Go. Away!_  
  
"You're absolutely right, Myka Bering."  Helena says, gently setting an eyeglass case down on the counter in front of her.  "I must hate you _so very much_."  
  
Myka eyes the case, looks up at Helena with her red eyes and red cheeks, face covered in tears.  Myka reaches for the case and flips it open to reveal a brand new pair of glasses.  A very nice and probably very expensive brand new pair of glasses.  
  
The bell attached to the door chimes in unison with her voice when she says, "H.G."  
  
The older girl is already gone.  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't sleep that night.  She clutches that eyeglass case, still just holding onto the glasses that her guilt won't allow her to wear.    
  
Somewhere around 2:00 AM she resolves to apologize to Helena.  Somewhere around 3:00 AM she starts writing out that apology.  And somewhere around 4:00 AM, her pen runs out of ink.    
  
At 5:00 AM, Myka finally dozes off, only to be awaken at 6:00 AM by her dad who gives her a list of tasks to be completed in the store before she's to do anything else with her day.  
  
Myka folds up the letter, all seven pages of it, and shoves it into her pocket.    
  
By 3:00 PM, Myka is done with her list.  She grabs her bag.  She _tells_ her mother she has to run an errand.  Her mother gives her a _look_ and asks what kind of errands she could possibly have to run.  
  
And Myka is honest because Myka doesn't want to lie to her mother.  She almost can't lie to her mother because it would make her too much like her dad, she thinks.  
  
"I need to go apologize to Helena."  
  
"Apologize?  For what, exactly?"    
  
Myka already has her hand on the doorknob, her book bag on her shoulders, she shifts her weight from one foot to another, lowering her head under her mother's scrutiny. Although her mother is the least capable person on the planet when it comes to scrutinizing any person or situation.  Dealing with confrontation, in general, is not her greatest talent.

Myka supposes she is the perfect mix of her mother and dad in this regard.  
  
"For being a brat."  
  
Myka's mother arches a brow and nods.  
  
"Do you need a ride?"  
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Call if you won't make dinner."  
  
Myka nods and turns to leave.

"Myka."  Her mother calls after her as she is halfway through the door, and she looks over her shoulder. "If your dad asks, you were at Pete's house."

Myka furrows her brows but she doesn't ask questions.  Even if she asked, she is doubtful her mother could answer or would answer.  So she nods quietly and leaves.

  
***  
  
"What do you want?"  
  
It's Charles' typical way of answering the door, but Myka has no patience for him today because what she has to do is extremely important to her and will likely be extremely important to Helena, too.  
  
"I'm here to see H.G."  
  
"Her name is Helena."  Charles corrects her.  "If she ever wants to be taken seriously."  
  
Myka narrows her eyes at the blur of him and says again, "I'm here to see _H.G._ "  
  
And Charles stares back at her for a moment before stepping aside and letting Myka in through the front door.  "She's pissed at the world, I really don't think she wants to see anybody."  
  
Myka just turns to stare expectantly at the shape of him again.  She doesn't say anything.  
  
"Out back."  
  
***  
  
It's not hot outside and Helena is doing laps in the pool.  It isn't until Myka is right at the edge of the water that she feels the steam rising from the surface.  Helena does three laps, back and forth, before she finally stops below where Myka stands and acknowledges her presence.  
  
"Did you bring your swimsuit?"  Helena questions her.  
  
"It's fifty-three degrees."  Myka doesn't want it to sound challenging, so she says it as softly as she can because how could she have reasonably assumed that Helena's pool would be both heated and currently occupied by her?  
  
"That's not what I asked you."  
  
"No."  Myka lowers her head to the side, away from Helena.  
  
"Why aren't you wearing your glasses?"  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"That also doesn't answer my question."  Helena lowers herself into the water, Myka thinks to shield herself from the cold.  And despite Myka's blindness, she knows the look that Helena is giving her right now.  
  
Myka takes in a deep breath.  "I'm not wearing the glasses because I'm sorry I was mean to you and I don't feel right wearing them."  Myka reaches into her bag and pulls out the eyeglass case, holds it in front of her, toward Helena.  
  
"You honestly don't expect me to take those from you."  It's not even a question, Myka realizes.  And no, she doesn't suppose Helena could take them from her in the pool but it was more of a peace offering than anything else.  
  
Myka shrugs, lowers the eyeglass case to her side.  
  
"I wrote you a letter." Myka says quietly.  "I can leave it in the house.  With the glasses.  I'll go back home."  
  
"Your face is red."  
  
Myka doesn't know what to say to that.  
  
"How did you get here?"  
  
"Walked."  
  
Helena is quiet for just a moment before she takes off swimming back across the pool.  Myka watches her with a minor sense of defeat until the older girl exits the pool at the other side.  And now Myka is internally scolding herself for not wearing the glasses.  For not being able to see Helena in her two-piece again.  And by the time Helena makes it around the edge of the pool, back to where Myka stands, she has on an entire outer layer of warm-up clothing and a towel wrapped around her hair.  
  
She walks past Myka and toward the house, pausing only for a moment when she realizes that Myka is not following her.    
  
"Well?"  
  
Myka is not quite sure what to do.  
  
"It's cold, Myka."  Helena gestures toward the house with a nod of her head.  "Inside."  
  
***  
  
Myka is sitting on Helena's bed when the older girl comes back into her room, dressed now in shorts and a tank top, drying her hair with a fresh towel.  She walks past Myka to her night stand and checks her cordless phone for missed calls.  She walks back past Myka to her closet and pulls out a hooded sweatshirt with the high school mascot on it.  She pulls it on over her head.  
  
Finally, Helena comes to a stop in front of Myka.    
  
"So, you were saying."  
  
Myka raises her eyebrows.  "I..." Then nothing.  
  
"You don't know how to talk today?  Because you had so many lovely things to say yesterday."  Helena's narrowing her eyes at Myka now.  Her forehead wrinkling in a way Myka has only seen it do when Helena's brother Charles is being Helena's brother Charles.    
  
Myka immediately thinks she doesn't want to be like Charles and she doesn't want to make Helena feel like Charles makes her feel a lot of the time that they're together.  And these thoughts turn and twist in her stomach, they make her feel nauseous.  Filled with regret.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Myka lowers her head to stare at her lap where her hands are idly opening and closing the eyeglass case she's still holding onto.  "I'm sorry I said all those things to you, I just... sometimes it doesn't feel real.  This, you talking to me, it doesn't feel real.  Sometimes it feels like a really big joke."  
  
"Look at me, Myka."  And Myka does. "I learned something yesterday.  Something I thought you should know."  Helena moves beside Myka, sits next to her on the bed.  Myka thinks she sits really close to her but after a moment Helena adjusts her seating on the bed and then she's not sitting so close anymore.  "You really hurt my feelings."  
  
Myka looks up at Helena and she's close enough to see that Helena's feelings are still hurt.  She's close enough to see the anger melt into something sad and thoughtful.    
  
"What you should know is that I'm not the type of person whose feelings are hurt very easily."  Helena continues.  "Especially not by a kid."  
  
"H.G. I'm not..."  
  
"I'm not done, Myka."  
  
Myka swallows hard to tame her protest.  As if she hasn't said enough to make Helena realize she's not a child anymore.  She has said enough.  She's said more than enough.  Although, she's not so sure about the "make Helena realize she's not a child anymore" part.  
  
"What I'm saying is, you're my friend, Myka.  You're more friend to me than even I would have admitted before now.  You're so intelligent and, at times, so mature for your age that when I'm talking to you, and you actually talk back to me, when we're engaged in conversation, I forget exactly how young you are.  And the older you get, the more I grow to appreciate our friendship."  And then Helena shakes her head.  "Except yesterday.  Yesterday was not one of those days.  Yesterday, you were a child again."  
  
"I'm sorry, H.G."  Myka says again.  "I'm not a very good friend.  I'm not..."  Myka doesn't know what she wants to say.  She doesn't have the words entirely.  She spent up all of her thoughts writing the letter to Helena and had not expected Helena to even say this much to her.  So she's at a loss, as usual, for the words she needs to convey how very sorry she is.  How she never wants to hurt Helena.  How seeing Helena upset, having caused that upset, makes her upset, too.  How her apology is self-serving because she wants to feel better by making Helena feel better. And how it suddenly clicks, what Helena means by caring for and worrying about Myka.

How very _not_ selfish Helena has been.  
  
Helena's hand over Myka's pulls her from her thoughts and Helena is slowly pulling the eyeglass case from Myka's hands and opening it, pulling the glasses out.  
  
"I think you've been blind for long enough." And Helena unfolds the frames, lifting them to Myka's face and gently moves them into places, over her ears, against her nose.  Then Helena is brushing back Myka's hair and her smile, that beautiful smile that has been absent from Myka's life for too long, is so close and so clear and so in-focus that Myka cannot help but smile back.  "There you are."  
  
"I can't take these glasses from you, H.G." Myka is reaching to pull them off but Helena stops her with her hands over Myka's.  She pulls them down to her lap and holds them tight.  
  
"You will take them."  Helena states.  "Or I won't accept your apology.  Or your letter."  
  
Myka squints at Helena and that very serious face that Helena is making and the fact that Helena is still holding tight to her hands.  And then Myka smiles and she squeezes Helena's hands in hers just before shaking her head and turning away from the older girl with a roll of her eyes, " _Now_ who's being a brat?"

Helena playfully pinches Myka's arm then pulls her into a tight hug, squeezes her with all the strength she can muster. 

"H.G. that kind of hurts."

"I know."  Helena sighs and softens her hold again.  "Myka, promise me you won't ever talk to me like that ever again." And Myka is already nodding, wrapping her arms around Helena's back, resting her head on Helena's shoulder, returning what Myka thinks is the first real hug they have ever shared.  A touch that Myka will hold onto for maybe far too many nights after tonight.

"I promise, H.G."  And as Helena pulls away, she cups Myka's face in the palm of her hands, smiles her smile, pulls Myka in close and sets a gentle kiss on her nose, just below where her glasses rest.  And Myka is certain she's five shades of red as her nausea slips away, giving way to the _good_ feeling inside of her.  Inducing a smile so big that her cheeks hurt.  That she has to look away.  That is likely what moves Helena off the bed and onto her feet and toward her cordless phone.

"So, how does pizza sound?"  Helena asks wearing an accomplished smile.

Myka tames her own smile, turning back to Helena and nods.  "It sounds good."  Myka breathes out and she's sure she's looking at Helena like the whimsical creature that she is and not thinking about pizza at all because what is pizza when Helena's lips have kissed her twice in as many weeks?  So Myka just breathes and she just stares and she continues to tame her smile as she nods at the other girl, like the thought of _pizza_ is what has actually made her breathless.  "It sounds really _really_ good."


	6. Thirteen & Seventeen (And A Half)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helena & Myka at 13/17 felt a little unresolved, so I extended that chapter a bit into this mess of emotions. Just to help Myka grow a little bit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep in mind that this story is told from a very Myka-as-a-kid point of view, so Myka's view of Helena's actions are almost always a bit tilted to her favor. For example, at times it might seem like Helena is being overly-intimate, but it's mostly just how Myka perceives their interactions.

After Myka gives Helena her seven paged letter, Myka doesn't see Helena for going on three weeks.  Myka almost dials Helena's phone number on approximately twelve different occasions.  On two occasions, she _does_ dial and then immediately hangs up.  One day she debates walking to Helena's house.  Three or four, or maybe five or six other days, Myka casually mentions Helena in front of Pete just to see if he has anything to say about her.    
  
Pete has a lot to say about Helena, but almost all of it has to do with how she _looks_ and almost none of it has to do with where she's _been_.  
  
***  
  
Myka starts to feel _testy_ again and Myka has been having abdominal pains like nothing she has ever felt before.  The first couple of hours, she ignores it completely.  The next couple of hours Myka is trying very hard to assure herself that what she thinks is happening to her is not _actually_ happening to her because Myka thinks herself so abnormal, so far off the spectrum of an actual human being with an actual humane existence, that she doesn't think these things that happen to normal girls, these life altering events that make normal people _normal_ , will ever happen to her.  
  
Except they _are_ happening to her.  It _is_ happening to her.  
  
Myka gets her period.  
  
***  
  
" _Pete_!" She's _not_ panicked.  She's _not panicking_.  She's not currently hiding in Pete's bathroom, yelling out his name through a partially cracked door, and falling into complete and utter despair when Ms. Jane appears in the hallway before her instead.  
  
"Myka, what in the world is wrong with you?"  Myka knows she means it teasingly but Myka is _not panicking_ right now, so Myka continues to not panic by tightening her lips and shaking her head and sinking back into the bathroom.  But Ms. Jane puts her hand on the door and pushes it open just a little and arches a brow at Myka, who looks for all the world like the cat who has completely obliterated an entire pet shop full of canaries.   "Pete's taking the garbage out.  Are you okay?"  
  
Myka shakes her head, then lowers her head, and she's fiddling with her fingers and biting her lower lip and then she's looking back up at Ms. Jane and taking in a deep breath and says, "I..."  
  
"Mom!"  And Pete's voice is traveling down the hallway and Ms. Jane is stepping out of the bathroom but glancing back at Myka with a worried look on her face.   Then she's looking back out into the hallway for Pete who appears in the doorway beside her to voice his complaints about the amount of trash a house with only three people can possibly create.  Presumably, he's blaming the _women_ of the house because: cans of hairspray, last season's fashion flops, and (fittingly) feminine _"byproducts"_.  And he says the last part with the back of his hand next to his mouth, as if voicing such things aloud would actually summon something awful.  
  
 _Too late._ Is what Myka thinks in this moment.  
  
Pete immediately closes out his external monologue with, "I should start bench pressing our garbage bins."  Then he flexes his left arm as if to prove that he can just before Ms. Jane playfully slaps the back of his head.  
  
Ms. Jane says, stepping completely away from the bathroom door now, "Myka was looking for you."  Then she flashes a quick smile at Myka before disappearing down the hall.  
  
"What's up, Mykes?"  And when she doesn't answer, Pete steps further into the bathroom and slightly closes the door behind him, gives her those expectant eyes.  "Is this an H.G. freak out thing that's happening right now?"  
  
Myka covers her face and shakes her head.  
  
" _Okay_?"  Pete steps closer and Myka peeks at him through her fingers.  "Did you rip another one of my comic books?"  And if she hadn't been so preoccupied with all the _not_ panicking she'd been doing, she would have laughed at the seriousness in both his expression and his accusation.  
  
Instead Myka is shaking her head again and before Pete can even begin to suggest that she tore off another limb from one of his innumerable action figures, when she didn't even tear off the first limb of the one action figure to begin with (little Claudia had), she blurts out, "I'm _bleeding_."    
  
Pete furrows his eyebrows and gives her a quick once, twice, and thrice over, looking her up and down and then up and down and up again.  He's stepping toward her asking "Where, I don't see any blood?" when her eyes widen and he sees her eyes widen and then he let's out an "oh.." followed by a more pronounced, "OH!"  
  
The reaction that Myka is anticipating from Pete, disgust or mortification or running far away or even a tease or two, doesn't come.  
  
"Okay, dude." Is what Pete says instead and he levels his hands out in front of her as if he's about to talk her off a ledge and he adds, "No big deal, I've got a sister.  I've got you covered."    
  
He leaves the bathroom.  He's gone for less than a minute and when he comes back he is out of breath and he has a box of tampons in one hand and a box of pads in the other hand and he holds them out to Myka.  And Myka is either going to kiss him or punch him for this before she curls up into a ball and dies of embarrassment.  She's not exactly sure which she's going to do yet and by the time she is lunging toward Pete, Jeannie appears behind him and she's already yelling.  
  
Myka freezes again.  
  
"Peter, why were you in my bathroom!?  Why are you stealing my stuff!?" And maybe it's the look on Pete's face as he backs up against the wall that makes Jeannie stop and look to Myka and then back to Pete and then to what Pete has in his hands.  Myka isn't sure but she's sure she loves Jeannie forever after she snatches both boxes from Pete's hands, palms the back of his head, and pushes him out of the door with a, "Thank you, I will handle this."  
  
And blessedly, Myka thinks with something close enough to a sigh of relief to actually alleviate some of her embarrassment, Jeannie shuts the door behind him.  
  
"You're welcome!" Pete yells from the hallway.  
  
***  
  
Somehow Myka is not surprised when she sees Helena the very next day.  
  
Helena comes into the bookstore during Myka's usual after-school pre-dinner hours and she's carrying a large brown paper bag.  Also, she has the biggest grin that Myka has ever seen gracing that gorgeous face and she wonders where Helena has been hiding this particular smile all these years.  
  
"Einstein!" Helena is _beaming_.  And even the word beaming cannot properly describe what Helena is _truly_ doing right now.  Myka's sure that if her smile were made of helium, Helena would be a thousand feet in the air by now.  
  
Every bit of anxiety that Myka has been feeling in relation to Helena and the letter instantly melts away into that one part of Myka's mind where she's learned how to actively forget, or more like not dwell on, the things she doesn't want to remember.  
  
"Hi."  It's a quiet almost squeak of a hello as Helena sets the paper bag down on the counter and tilts her head to the side.  
  
"Hmm."  Helena hums with what Myka thinks is almost too much delight.  "I love your glasses."  Myka squints at her now.  "Where did you get them from?"  
  
"Um... a friend?"  Myka decides she'll play along with whatever is happening.  
  
"Must be _some_ friend." Helena's smile is softer now and Myka gives her an awkward sort-of-smile in return.  The crooked one that she thinks Helena seems to like so much and apparently she really does because now Helena is shaking her head and says, "You.  Are adorable."  
  
Myka blushes, smiles, turns away then and then pretends to be distracted by curiosity over whatever might be in the bag that Helena has brought.  Helena moves her hand to obstruct Myka's view.  Now Myka's curiosity over what might be in the bag is no longer pretend.  
  
"What's that?"  
  
"It's for you."  
  
Myka attempts another peek but Helena uses both hands to clap the bag shut.  
  
"You can look after you take it upstairs."  
  
"Why not now?"  
  
"Because I _know_ you, that's why."  
  
Myka doesn't know what that means and thinks the older Helena gets, the more confusing she becomes.  Or maybe it's just that the older Myka gets, the more confused by Helena _she_ becomes.  
  
"Is this another one of your _hormonal_ things?" Myka asks as a tease.  "Like with the crying only now you're smiling?"  
  
Helena narrows her eyes at Myka, let's her mouth fall open and then huffs out a sigh as though she is actually offended.  
  
"Have you learned to _duck_ yet?"  Helena asks allowing her right brow to arch significantly. "Because very soon I'm going to be throwing one of these books at your adorable little head."  And it's almost as if the comment triggers a memory in her mind because now Helena is reaching her left hand to the right side of Myka's face, setting soft fingertips to skin, and running her thumb over Myka's eyebrow.  
  
And Myka can't help that she closes her eyes at the contact, that her body shivers under Helena's touch, or the extremely disappointed sigh that escapes her when the bell attached to the door jingles and the warmth of Helena's hand against her face is gone far too fast.  
  
But then Helena's hand is gripping her wrist and squeezing tightly.  And not the type of reassuring squeezes that Helena usually gives but the type of squeeze that immediately prompts Myka to open her eyes.  
  
"Myka."  
  
She can't read the tone in her dad's voice when her eyes land on his before instinctively averting her gaze to absolutely anywhere else in the room.  She looks at Helena instead and Helena is staring at her dad with a look that Myka cannot really decipher because she's not sure she's seen this face before either.  
  
Helena's forehead is wrinkled and her brows furrowed.  Her eyes are just a little wider than they naturally tend to be and Myka thinks Helena's nostrils actually flare.  Then Helena's lips part and her breathing changes, somehow.  
  
"Yes?  Dad."  Myka says it without ever breaking her gaze from Helena's profile and she feels Helena's hand further tightening around her wrist.  It doesn't even come close to hurting but Myka still slightly tugs against her grasp and Helena's grip loosens.  But Helena does not let go.  
  
"What have I told you about having company in the store?"    
  
Now Myka looks at her dad because she knows her dad well enough to know that if she answers his question without acknowledging his presence, where he stands in the room and how he scrutinizes her, it will just make for an unnecessarily long night of remedial task after remedial task after remedial task.    
  
"H.G. was just.. just..." Myka's suddenly unsure of what she wants to say.  Mostly because she doesn't really know what Helena was here to _just_ do.  
  
"Just leaving."  Helena interrupts.  And the look that Myka's father gives Helena just then is nothing short of menacing.  Myka looks back at Helena, whose lips are pressed together now, whose breathing has hastened, whose grip tightens on Myka's wrist once again.  
  
It's too long, Myka thinks.  It has been entirely to long.  Too many seconds have passed for this to not be weird or awkward or _unnerving_.  Unnerving is the word that Myka finds, that fits this moment perfectly.    
  
The way her dad is staring at Helena and the way Helena is glaring back at him, it completely unnerves Myka.  And Myka is almost sure this moment would go on forever and ever if not for that bell on that door that rings once again when her mother comes into the store hauling a bag full of groceries.  
  
"Helena."  Myka's mother sounds a mixture of shocked and not quite pleased.  "It's been a while, how are you?"  And the silence lingers for a moment more.  Long enough for Myka's mother to catch her dad's stare and the look on Helena's face and the absolutely unnerved look that likely clouds Myka's expression.  
  
"I'm just leaving."  Helena finally says turning to Myka's mother.  She forces a small smile. "Mrs. Bering."  
  
"Dear, could you..."  Myka's mother hands the groceries off to her dad who finally stops staring at Helena, only to look down at the bag as if Myka's mother just handed the most foreign object in the entire universe to him. But he says nothing and Myka's mother says, "I'm going to see Helena off." And that seems to satisfy Myka's dad in some weird way that continues to make her feel unnerved.  
  
Now Myka's mother _stares_ at her dad until he finally breaks his posture and returns his gaze to Myka.    
  
"We'll talk later."  Is all he says before heading upstairs.    
  
Myka sighs and Helena's grip tightens on her wrist again and when the door upstairs opens and closes, Helena finally turns to Myka and the look that she gives her, Myka thinks, is also unnerved.  But also full of sorrow.  She's upset again.  She is on the verge of tears again.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Helena says softly to Myka.  
  
"What have you got there?"  Myka's mother asks, approaching them at the counter now.    
  
"Just some things I've out grown."  Helena smiles reluctantly at Myka before turning to her mother.  "That I thought Myka might like.  Before _she_ outgrows _me_."  
  
"That's very nice of you, Helena."  Myka's mother smiles softly and reaches for the bag.  Helena doesn't try to stop her and when she peeks inside, her brows go up and then something like a smirk appears on Myka's mother's lips.  She gently folds the bag up and pulls it into her arms.  "Thank you, Helena, I'm sure Myka will appreciate this very much."  
  
Helena just nods then and Myka's mother's eyes fall to her hand, still gripping Myka's wrist over the counter top.  She swallows.  It's pronounced enough that Myka notices but she doesn't know what it means.  She especially doesn't know what it means that her mother says nothing about it.  
  
She only sighs, Myka's mother.  She sighs softly, before she smiles again at Helena and pats the brown bag that is now in her arms.    
  
"I'll leave this on your bed, Myka."  Her mother says.  "So your father won't ask any questions."  She begins to turn toward the stairs then but stops, eyes the floor for a moment, then looks back at Myka and then Helena.  "I know you two are close, Helena."  She starts. "But it would probably be better if you didn't drop by the store anymore."  
  
Myka opens her mouth to speak but Helena says, before she can begin her protest, "I understand, Mrs. Bering."  
  
"Just until your fathers resolve their little... feud.  Maybe you can see Myka at Jane's?  After school?"  
  
"Right."  Helena nods.  
  
"Thank you again, Helena.  For this."  And Myka's mother pats the bag once more then leaves to head upstairs.  
  
Helena sighs and she lowers her head to stare at the floor and her grip over Myka's hand is starting to get sweaty, so Myka tugs at the contact again and this time her wrist slips easily away from Helena's grasp.  But when Helena doesn't move an inch or a muscle or say one thing or even look away from wherever her gaze lands on the floor, Myka challenges herself.  And it's mostly easy because Myka can see Helena falling to that place she goes when she's looking for bruises and asking Myka important questions about her week or her weekend or her family that basically lead to how her dad has been treating her.  
  
So Myka challenges herself to comfort Helena because the older she gets and the older Helena gets, the more she is starting to realize that _Helena_ needs the comfort.  And it's funny, Myka thinks, that Helena should need comforting when Myka is the one Helena is trying to...  
  
Myka doesn't really know the word.  Because Myka isn't really sure what Helena is trying to do.  Help her?  Protect her?  Just be sad for her?  Cry over her?    
  
Myka isn't at all sure what Helena is trying to do.  
  
But Myka knows what _Myka_ is trying to do and so she does, she sets her hand over Helena's hand, still on the counter, and she holds it, just barely at first but when she squeezes softly, Helena becomes suddenly aware.   The older girl gasps and she turns to face Myka directly and she slowly retracts her hand from Myka's grasp but smiles up at Myka, the kind of smile that's meant to be reassuring and has been reassuring in the past but has now, in this moment, officially stopped being reassuring to Myka.  
  
"H.G."  
  
"I have to go."  Helena says quietly.  "Don't forget the bag, okay Myka?"  And her voice is so soft that Myka can barely hear the tremble in it, but she does and her heart aches.  Her heart physically starts to ache at the sound of Helena's voice and the feeling is so familiar.  Too familiar.  She's felt this way before, seeing Helena hurt over Myka's hurt.  
  
Helena reaches out for Myka's wrist once more and gently squeezes it once more and smiles, that false reassuring smile once more.  
  
"Call me if you need to."  And she turns to leave, letting her hand slip slowly away from Myka's wrist.  
  
"H.G. wait."  
  
And Helena stops and turns back to Myka for a moment.  
  
"I don't want to not see you anymore.  I don't understand what's going on.  With our dads.  Why can't you visit me?"  
  
Now Helena smiles a real smile.  A very real and very reassuring smile. "You're not going to _not_ see me anymore, Einstein."  She says.  "And you'll understand when you're older.  Friends don't always stay friends.  Sometimes things happen.  _Sometimes_ they're unforgivable."  Helena shrugs then and shakes her head.  "I'll see you later, okay?"  
  
"You promise?"  Myka doesn't like sounding so desperate but Myka also hasn't seen Helena for three weeks and it's just about driven her crazy.  So Myka might be a little bit desperate and at first, she regrets it, but then Helena walks over to her quickly, around the counter, and pulls her into a huge hug and squeezes her so tight that she's sure she's going to burst.  But she hugs her back, holds her just as tight, pulls Helena further into her, inhales deeply.  
  
"I promise, Myka."  Helena whispers into her ear.  "And if your father is mad because I was here," Helena pulls away with her hands on Myka's arms, holding her steady and bending to her height, "please, Myka, just leave. Go to Pete's house.  Call me.  I'll come get you.  Okay?"  
  
Myka thinks it's absurd and a bit sensational because if she leaves when she's already in trouble, she's just going to get into more trouble.  Staying and being in trouble once is easier than being in trouble twice.  But Myka just nods because it's Helena and she wants _Helena_ to be reassured and comforted and happy, because Myka is starting to realize that she needs to help or protect or _whatever_ for Helena almost as much as Helena is trying to do those things for her.  
  
And the less that Helena knows about Myka's life and Myka's punishments and all the trouble that Myka gets into, the happier Helena will be.  So Myka nods because it's what Helena needs.  
  
"Okay."  Helena smiles and she hugs Myka again. "I'll see you soon, Kiddo."  And she kisses Myka's cheek and if not for all of the confusing things that Myka had just witnessed, it might be more comforting, more splendid, more enchanting even, than it feels.  But it's none of those things.  It's almost nothing at all. It feels empty.  Myka, suddenly, feels very empty.  
  
She wants to ask Helena about the letter again and she wants to tell Helena how much she loves her and she wants Helena to know that she doesn't want her to leave.  She wants to go with Helena.  She wants Helena to take her with her.  Go to the park and sit and hold her hand and watch her cry and tell her so many reassuring things about how awful her dad hasn't been lately.  And kiss her cheek and her tears and kiss _her_.  
  
But Myka doesn't say anything.  Helena pulls away from her and Helena says goodbye and Helena slips slowly from her grasp as Helena wipes at her eyes and Helena walks to the door.  And as the sound of the bell that is attached to the front door of the book store triggers Myka to _finally_ blink, Helena, she realizes, is gone.  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother flashes a gentle smile at her when she comes upstairs later.  She nods her head toward Myka's bedroom and Myka holds her breath, expecting to see her dad as she pushes the door open.  But he isn't there, and she sighs.  She inhales deeply and she exhales her relief.  
  
On her bed is the brown bag and Myka moves to it quickly, sits down and pulls it into her lap, opens it up, peeks inside.  
  
She wants to roll her eyes at its contents because she's expecting to see Helena's clothes.  Helena's clothes that Helena knows very well Myka would not wear but would probably covet for other reasons.    
  
Myka sees, instead, why Helena made her wait to look: boxes of pads, tampons, body freshener, and a small purple pouch with neon green squares for holding all these things, Myka assumes.  And Myka is already red at the thought of Jeannie telling Helena what had happened yesterday.  But Myka hadn't totally not expected that.  She just hadn't expected Helena to care like _this_.  Not about _that_.  
  
At the bottom of the bag, there's a new journal with a packet of pens, a note written inside.  
  
Myka reads it.  She falls back onto her bed.  She reads it again.  She smiles.  She let's the book fall over hear chest as if to cradle her heart, then she reads it again.  
  
She reads it maybe thirty times before her mother eventually calls her for dinner and another ten times after that.  Her smile never leaves her face.  And she _gets_ it, the not quite acceptance, not quite rejection of Helena's words.  She reads between every little line and every little swoopy curve and every heart-dotted "i".  
  
It doesn't matter that Helena is not hers, Myka is thinking, she loves Helena even more.  Helena loves _her_ , even if in some small way.  
  
Her smile only fades when her door clicks open and her dad is there, in the doorway, and he's mad and Myka manages to tuck the book under her pillow before he notices.  So she doesn't care that he pulls her out of bed or asks her why she isn't listening to her mother, why she hasn't left her room.  But she cares about what Helena will think, so she's steady on her feet and she calls him "sir" and she apologizes and she listens and she starts setting the table that still hasn't been set, and she sits quietly as her mom plates their dinner.  
  
And when her sister, Tracy, two years younger than her but a self-declared teenager, comes bouncing through the front door with her backpack and her headphones and a smile on her face, to genuine concern from the same man who just unceremoniously dragged Myka to attention, Myka holds her breath.    
  
"Why didn't you walk with your sister?"  They'll ask and Tracy will say Myka didn't wait for her and Myka will get the lecture.  "And where have you even been all this time, it's dark outside?" and Tracy will say she had to wait for her friend's mom to get home from work so she could get a ride because Myka didn't wait for her, and Myka will get a lecture.    
  
Myka isn't even mad and usually Myka will take the lecture and she'll deal with being in trouble and she'll let Tracy have another good night because Tracy almost died once and Tracy actually has friends and Tracy is _normal_.    
  
But Myka isn't feeling so generous tonight, so Myka says, "I waited, Tracy.  Pete waited with me.  It got so late that even Ms. Jane was ready to leave campus, so she drove Leena home and I went to Pete's.  You can ask Ms. Jane."  Myka also adds, "And Leena said you walked the other way with some boy named Kevin."  
  
Myka doesn't get bruises that night. She doesn't get remedial chores either.  But neither does Tracy because Tracy says she doesn't feel good, and Kevin, whoever he is, was walking her home because she was sick and he didn't know which way to go, so he got lost but she was too sick to tell him the right way.  But now, only just now as she was coming through the door, now she feels _significantly_ better.  
  
It's a horrifically unbelievable web of lies, but it earns Tracy a lecture.  That's all it earns her but it's more than she's ever gotten before, so Myka can only smile internally at the pitiful look on her little sister's face as her parents remind her of rules and responsibilities and her age and her vulnerability to _strangers_.  To _boys_.  
  
Tracy tries to argue that Myka gets to go to Pete's all the time.  She even sleeps over Pete's all the time.  Even Myka's dad laughs at that one because Pete is _Pete_ and Myka and Pete have known each other since _birth_.  They've taken baths together, they are practically brother and sister.  And even Myka's mother says now that, "Pete and Myka act more like siblings than the two of you do."  
  
"We don't even know who this other Kevin guy is.  Who are his parents, Tracy?  You can't just..."  Myka's dad slams his fist against the table and the playful nature of that conversation comes to an immediate halt.  
  
And this, Myka thinks, is where her dad draws the line for her and for Tracy.  Myka could only ever hope her dad would stop there, slam his fist on the table, sigh in frustration, continue eating his dinner for a few minutes before setting back into a lecture.  
  
But Tracy almost died, Tracy is fragile.  Tracy is _normal_.  Tracy is young and foolish and doesn't know what she's doing and with a role model like Myka to look up to, well, it's no wonder Tracy doesn't know how to act.  
  
But Myka, for once in her life, is off the hook because her mother tells her to go shower and go straight to her bedroom and put her _things_ away.  And Myka knows what that means and she's almost proud to have this secret with her mother.  So she does it quickly, and she's in bed with her light out.  She's home free today.  
  
So she has her book light clipped to her brand new journal and Myka reads to herself, with a smile she cannot contain, the world's most beautiful bed time story.  Again and again and again, until she falls asleep.  
  
***  
  
 _Einstein._  
  
 _On seven pieces of paper, you have told me more about yourself in one night than I have known of you in five years.  Your writing is beautiful, Myka, I wish you would talk to me with just as much confidence.  Until you're ready to do that, here's another journal. I have high hopes that, with your writing skills, the other is completely filled and this one won't be long to follow._  
  
 _Also, I don't hate you. I never will. Not for loving me. I've told you before that it's okay. But you also know, because you are very intelligent and I know you understand, that I can't love you like that._  
  
 _I do have love for you, Myka.  I care about you and I want the best for you, happiness, and good health, and a safe place to call home.  So, I love you but my heart is with Giselle right now and it will be there for a very long time._  
  
 _I know you understand.  I'm still looking forward to our date.  I haven't forgotten._  
  
 _Until then, please write more.  Whether it be to me or yourself or anyone else.  Just keep writing._  
  
 _Love (and hearts), Helena "H.G." Wells_  
  
***  
  
It's a Saturday and Myka's mother is beginning to question more and more why she doesn't wear the roller blades she got her for her birthday.  So Myka packs a bag with her shoes and a water bottle, two books, her journal, an extra set of clothes, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and the purple and green travel bag that Helena gifted her a while back, and she puts on the godawful roller blades and she roller blades all the way to Pete's house.  
  
She only falls once on the way there.  
  
***  
  
"What the _hell_ is on your feet?"  
  
"Shut up, Pete."  Myka is seated at the bench on the porch, removing her second roller blade when Pete opens the door and comes to stand right in front of her.  
  
"I didn't say anything."  His hands go in the air in defeat.    
  
"You _literally_ just said something."  Myka rolls her eyes as she kicks off the skate and stands to her feet.  "What was so urgent that I had to get here two hours before the movie even starts?"  
  
"You know what tonight is, don't you?" And Pete waggles his eyebrows up and down in that suggestive way that he does with that crooked smirk on his face.  
  
"Saturday?"  Myka questions.  
  
"Mykes."  Pete slaps his hand to his forehead.  "You're killing me, Smalls.  It's Junior-Senior prom night!"  Myka smiles only because Pete's exasperation is genuine and she also shakes her head and shrugs her shoulders. "And you call yourself a lesbian."  
  
"You're the only one who calls me that, _Pete_."  And she socks him in the arm for it.  
  
"I know, sorry."  Pete rubs the spot that's probably not even sore but Myka appreciates him for pretending.  "Anyway, it's mother freaking prom night, Mykes!"  
  
"And?"  Now Pete is moving into the house and Myka is following him closely and only now does she realize there are more people here.  Claire's mother and another woman that Myka doesn't recognize, are seated at the dining room table with Ms. Jane and Claire's mother greets her with a knowing smile.    
  
Mrs. Donovan is instantly on her feet and closing in on Myka.  "I haven't seen you in ages, Myka!"  She hugs her then and asks how she's doing.  And Myka tells her she's good and answers the usual round of questions about her family.  Then Mrs. Donovan says, "With Jeannie, Claire, _and_ Helena going off to college after next year, we'll be looking for a new babysitter."  And she winks at Myka who smiles politely back at her.  "Claudia really does adore you, Myka.  The last time she saw you, she wouldn't stop asking about you for two days.  I almost brought her to your father's shop."  
  
"She's really cute, Mrs. Donovan.  I wouldn't mind watching her at all."    
  
"Well, I have your mother's number.  We will certainly be in contact."  And Myka nods as Mrs. Donovan returns to her seat.    
  
"The girls are in the back getting ready, Myka you can go back."  Ms. Jane turns her eyes to Pete.  " _You_ stay out."  
  
"Like I want to see my sister half-naked."  Pete fakes a gag, much to the amusement of two of the three ladies at the table, then he grabs Myka's hand and pulls her down the hallway.  
  
" _Girls_?"  Myka questions.  
  
"Oh, right.  I meant to tell you, your girlfriend is here."  Pete is grinning now and Myka glares at him.  
  
"H.G. is here?"  He nods. "Getting ready for _prom_?"  He nods even more suggestively.  "And she's going to prom with her _girlfriend_?"  
  
Pete stops suddenly and when he looks back at her this time, his face is no longer enthusiastic. In fact, it looks almost tragically thoughtful.  Like Pete had never thought about this part of his plan.  
  
"Yeah, about that..."  Nope. Pete had never thought about this part of his plan.

"You don't learn lessons, do you?"  Myka tries hard not to sound as exasperated as Pete did moments ago.  
  
And right on cue, Pete's sister's bedroom door swings open and Jeannie is running into Pete, who she then yells at and Pete is pestering her in response and the entire interaction goes almost unnoticed by Myka because she's seeing into Jeannie's room and she's _seeing_ Helena but Helena is not seeing her.    
  
What Helena _is_ seeing is a rather tall girl with light brown skin sitting in front of her on Jeannie's bed and what Helena is _feeling_ is tight, dark brown curls in her fingers and Myka is almost one hundred percent certain that Helena can feel, very well in fact, those lips that are on hers, that are kissing her with more passion than Myka has ever even dreamed of knowing about.  
  
And Myka is also pretty sure that Helena can feel those hands that are on her back, that move lower and lower until they are in a place that Myka has never even imagined being able to put her hands.  And soon they are even lower than that, and long fingers are running up Helena's thighs and catching the bottom of Helena's prom dress and slowly slowly lifting it up until Helena's hands remove themselves from brown curls and swat those fingers away.  Much to the disappointment of the curly brown haired girl.  
  
Much to the genuine relief of one very jealous thirteen year old Myka Bering.  
  
Then Helena _sees_ her and Myka sees that Helena finally sees her and she wants to smile or wave or any sort of reassuring thing she can do, that she usually does, but more than that, she really wants to curl up into the ball she is so fond of curling up into and she wants to fall asleep and not wake up for eight more years.  
  
Myka says nothing and Helena is peeling herself away from the other girl, who is protesting and pulling her back into her, and just then Jeannie closes the door to her bedroom and she's looking down at Myka with a sort of apologetic look and she tells her, "Sorry, Kiddo, but you are banned to Pete's room, too.  Until we are done getting ready at least."  
  
And Myka blinks now and she nods and she chokes out an "okay" and follows Pete the rest of the way to his room.  
  
***  
  
"Do you hate me, Pete?"  
  
"Dude, Mykes, I'm _sorry_."  Pete has apologized for the fifteenth time. "I didn't know they were practically going to be _doing it_.  I just thought you'd like to see your girlfriend all hot and dressed up."  
  
"Don't call her that."    
  
" _Sorry_."  
  
"And I don't need to see her dressed up."  Myka adds.  "She's pretty enough _not_ dressed up.  Why do I need to see her _dressed up_?"  
  
"So you know what to expect on your 21st birthday?"  Pete asks and at this Myka does allow herself to smile.  "Which I'm still extremely jealous about because not only do you have a date with H.G. but you saw her make out with her _girlfriend_."  Myka rolls her eyes.  "Mykes, girls like H.G. only get hotter with age.  Like a _fine_ wine.  You just got a premature glimpse into your future.  You're _welcome_!"  
  
"You have no idea what that even means."  
  
"So?  At least I sound like I do."  
  
Myka smiles and throws a pillow at Pete from where she lays on his bed.  He dodges it with something mimicking a karate chop, sends it falling to the floor.    
  
"Are you going to be moping all night about it?"  Pete asks then.  "So _what_ , she kissed her girlfriend, you already knew she had one.  _Duh_ , they kiss.  They probably even have se..."  
  
"Peter Lattimer, _I swear to God_ if you finish that sentence."  
  
Pete shrugs, picks his pillow up off the floor. "Fine." He says throwing his pillow back on the bed, over Myka's face. "You stay here and _mope_ over your non-girlfriend's girlfriend.  _I'm_ going to get some ice cream and watch the show."  
  
"They're not a _show_ , Pete."  But Pete is already heading out the door.  
  
"They are to me!"  He calls back.  "The greatest show on Earth!"  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't cry.  Instead what Myka does is curl into that ball she has longed to curl into, hugging Pete's pillow, and think very long and very hard and with great accuracy about what it would be like to be like _that_ with Helena.  
  
She thinks of Helena as her babysitter again. She thinks of Helena in the book store with her. She thinks about Helena sitting on the counter top in that dress, legs crossed, head tilted to the side, one shoulder bare as hair cascades over the other.    
  
She thinks of Helena smiling at her and she thinks of telling Helena out loud what she has longed to tell her for so long and in such a way that it brings Helena to tears.    
  
"I love you, H.G."  Is what she'll say.  "Have loved you.  For too long."  And her thoughts are so vivid, so real, that she says it softly to herself even now.  And she thinks of her fingers on Helena's legs, her palms eventually there, too, and the familiar touch of Helena's hands in her hair and Helena pulling her closer.  And in her thoughts she closes her eyes, and she moves her hands around Helena's waist, moves Helena's dress with them, and Helena is about to kiss her.  They are inches away, an inch away, less than that even..  
  
There's a tap on the door that pulls Myka from her reverie and she's cursing the entire world when she sits up and turns to continue her chastising of all the many ways Pete has screwed her over today, but Pete isn't there.    
  
"H.G."  Myka breathes.  
  
And Myka's eyes meet hers for only a second before they're on her hair and taking in the make up she wears and traveling down her neck, past freckles, to _that dress_ that Myka has only gotten somewhat of a skewed glimpse of before now.  It only goes down so far, Myka notices, before Helena's bare legs appear and then Myka smiles, she can't help the smile she smiles because all of this beauty and glamor and _femininity_ has been punctuated by a pair of black Converse low-tops.  
  
Myka raises her eyes back to Helena and she lets her smile soften.    
  
"I like your shoes."  
  
Helena looks down at her own shoes and then up with a smile, rolls her eyes.  
  
"Comfort."  Is all she says.    
  
And Myka thinks this whole situation is oddly familiar.  It wasn't even two months ago that they were in this room, about to have their talk, Helena reassuring Myka of herself, Myka childishly hinting to her love of Helena. Only two months ago and Myka is suddenly embarrassed by the youthfulness of her actions.  
  
Now Helena seems at a loss of words and Myka sits further up on the bed, pulls her feet over the side and sets them flat against the floor so that she's now facing Helena. And Helena takes her cue, she closes the door and she sits beside Myka and she pulls her hands into her lap and lowers her head.  And Myka thinks Helena almost seems guilty.  Like she has something to feel guilty about.  
  
After too much silence, Helena looks to Myka and she sighs and says, "I don't ever want to hurt your feelings, Myka."  
  
"You didn't."  And even Myka is shocked by the quickness with which she responds to something that wasn't even a question.  
  
"Yes."  Helena nods.  "I think I did.  I mean, I think..." And she sighs again, looks back to her hands in her lap.  "Do you understand now why I said my love for you is different?"  
  
Myka arches her brows and shrugs.  "I guess."  Myka understands now so much of what she is missing out on.  So much of what Helena's love for _her_ doesn't mean in comparison to the love Helena has said _isn't really love_ that she has for her girlfriend.  
  
"I love you, Einstein, I just need you to know the difference between this love and that love."  
  
"I understand."  
  
"I'm sorry."  Helena shakes her head.  "Because I've been there before and I know what it's like and I'm sorry that you saw that."  
  
"H.G."    
  
And Helena looks directly at Myka now.  Myka shrugs and smiles.    
  
"I understand."  
  
What Myka further understands is that Helena is upset and also Myka understands that she will do anything to make Helena happy.  Even if it means pretending to understand why Helena's love for her doesn't reach the lengths that her love for Helena reaches.  Or Helena's so-called love for her girlfriend reaches.  
  
Myka understands that she can and will wait for as long as she needs to wait for Helena's love to reach this distance with her.  Myka understands that Helena will understand, too, how much Myka loves her. How much more than her girlfriend Myka loves her.  And Myka will wait because Myka is extremely patient.  
  
"Do you," And Helena pauses to lick her lips and smooths out some invisible wrinkle in her dress, "do you want to meet her?  Giselle?"  
  
Myka pauses for a moment because she knows she doesn't want to meet Helena's girlfriend but she also doesn't want to be rude.  But she also knows that meeting Helena's girlfriend might lead to her being inadvertently rude.  It will also lead to Myka having just about the worst night of her life trying to get the face of the girl who was touching the bare legs of _her_ Helena out of her mind.  
  
As of right now, all she is to Myka is tall with light brown skin and natural curly hair much longer than Myka's.  Nothing more.  Myka has already blocked out her lips, has already erased her too-touchy fingers from her mind.  
  
Myka finally shakes her head "no" and Helena smiles.    
  
"I didn't think so but I thought I would ask."  
  
"You're not mad?"  
  
"Not at all."  
  
Myka sighs.  Relieved.  Some unfamiliar voice calls Helena's name from down the hallway.  It's sickeningly sweet and Myka doesn't miss the change in Helena's breath at the sound of it.  One more thing for Myka to purge from her memory.  
  
"I should probably go."    
  
Myka nods as Helena stands up and heads for the door.  "You look," Myka starts and Helena stops with her hand on the doorknob and she waits, barely looking back at Myka over her shoulder, "very pretty, H.G."  
  
Helena turns back to Myka and smiles.  "Thank you, Einstein." She moves quickly to Myka, sets a kiss to her forehead and smiles,  then gently pokes at Myka's cheek.  "Don't wait up."  And she winks at Myka before she turns back and leaves the room.  
  
Myka falls back on the bed and closes her eyes and she can almost hear Pete's voice telling her, " _You are going to die at a_ very _young age_."  
  
***  
  
Helena goes to Myka and Pete's eighth grade graduation with Pete's mother and sister and Myka's mother and sister, but Myka's dad is nowhere to be found.  
  
Myka doesn't really care that he's not there because Helena is there.  She cares even less about her dad not being there when Helena finds her in the crowd after the ceremony and pulls her into a big hug, tells her she's proud of her because she knows how boring middle school must have been, and kisses her cheek.  
  
Myka is beginning to grow used to Helena's affections but only in that way you can grow used to the feeling you get on the first drop of a roller coaster ride and the rush of excitement that immediately follows.  
  
***  
  
Ms. Jane takes everyone out for dinner.  Pete and Myka decide they'll go to the graduation dance together.  Jeannie and Helena take this golden opportunity to put make up on Myka's face, straighten her hair, gush, in that way they tend to do, over how gorgeous she looks.  
  
Myka's mother isn't so sure about the make up but Myka's mother has also had a glass of wine because when she's with Ms. Jane, she always gets in that kind of mood, so all she says is to make sure it's _gone_ before she gets home.  And she's had enough wine to follow that up with, "Warren will have a conniption."

Helena promises Myka's mother that they will make sure there isn't a trace of it by then.  
  
***  
  
"Did you have fun?"  Is what Helena is asking Myka as she's helping her wash her face free of make up.  And Myka smiles, grins really.  "I'll take that as a yes."  
  
"I danced with Abigail."  And Helena arches a single brow, a coy smile slowly forming on her lips.  
  
"Who is this Abigail creature?"  Helena asks.  "And do I need to have _the talk_ with her?"  
  
"What talk?"  Myka asks.  
  
" _The_ talk."  Helena repeats.  "The one where I have to set her straight about how I expect my little Einstein to be treated."  
  
Myka smiles, she feels her cheeks flush, and Helena is taking a cloth to her eyelids to scrub away eyeshadow and the blush over her cheeks, then Helena hands it to Myka and tells her to rinse her face in warm water with the soap she's brought for her.  
  
"So, this Abigail."  Helena stands and leans against the wall while Myka bends over the sink to clean her face.  "Do you like her?"  
  
Myka shrugs.  "I don't know."  
  
"You don't know?"  Helena asks.  "Your smile says otherwise."  
  
Myka stands straight and Helena throws a dry towel over her face, laughs softly at the look Myka gives her when she pulls it off while drying her face in the process.  
  
"I don't know."  Myka says again.  
  
"It's okay, you know?"  Helena nods.  "To like her."  
  
"I know, I just..." Myka shakes her head.  "I don't know if I do because it's not the same."    
  
Helena takes the towel from Myka then and pats at the dampness on her forehead, around her eyes, beneath her nose.  And when Helena is done, Myka is squinting at her.  Mostly because she is currently blind without her glasses but also because she wants to know why Helena wants to know.  
  
"It's not the same as what, Myka?"  
  
And Myka lowers her head, fiddles with her toothbrush on the bathroom counter for a moment and turns back to Helena.  "I don't feel the same way for her, as I do for you." And Helena's brow arches again and Helena tilts her head and she kind of smiles at Myka but also looks away, somewhere over Myka's head and across the bathroom, and she sighs.  
  
"Einstein.."  
  
"I already know."  Myka says.  "That there's a difference for you and me.  I think that is the same difference I have for Abigail."  
  
"I see."  
  
"Pete says it would be _easier_ and also I might not die at such a young age."    
  
Helena rolls her eyes.  "We've already talked about what Pete says."  
  
"But it _would_ be easier."    
  
"Like I said, we've already _talked_ about what Pete says.  And you told me that sometimes he's right."  Helena shrugs. "So then I guess the question you need to ask Myka is how _easy_ do you want your life to be?"  
  
Myka wants to laugh at that because nothing about her life has been really very easy.  Not in the sense that things in Helena's life have been very easy.   So Myka shakes her head and she shrugs a single shoulder.    
  
"Dad does always call me hard-headed."  And it's meant to be a joke but Helena doesn't laugh even a little bit. She barely even smiles and she's shaking her head and crossing her arms, leaning back into the wall again.  
  
"You arent hard-headed, Myka."  Helena says.  "I hope you know that almost everything your father says about you is a lie.  You aren't irresponsible, you aren't immature, you aren't difficult or a menace or pox upon his household."

"I had the chicken pox _three_ times."  And Myka grins.  This time Helena does laugh, even if just a little bit, she is laughing.  But it's short lived and Helena is soon back to shaking her head again.

"Myka, you aren't any of those things."  
  
"Yeah."  Myka shrugs. "I guess." And Helena just stares into the oblivion across the bathroom once again.  
  
"Myka, I have to tell you something."  And Myka is quiet, and a little bit hopeful and a little bit anxious, but mostly she is just quiet and she is waiting.  "I'm going to London this summer."    
  
"London?  As in England?"  
  
"Yes, as in /where I'm from."  Helena smiles, looking at Myka now.  "I'm going to be there until school starts again."  
  
"Oh.  Okay."  
  
"I just wanted you to know that I won't be here.  My father wants a vacation and I, apparently, can't be trusted in the house all summer by myself."  Helena twists her lips to the side.  "But I want you to keep in touch.  Email me.  If anything should happen or just to say hi.  Okay?"  
  
"I don't have email."  
  
"Pete will help you with that, okay?"  
  
Myka shrugs.  "Okay."  
  
"Okay."  Helena nods, smiles.  "Time for bed then."  
  
***  
  
Summer is long.  
  
Summer is hot.  
  
Summer is exceedingly boring.  
  
Nothing of any significance happens to Myka or in Myka's life.    
  
Except that she grows.    
  
And she continues to grow.  
  
And she is as tall as Pete when she finally slows down.

And Myka doesn't just grow taller but she also grows in muscle density because in all of her extreme boredom, Pete convinces her to join him for his wrestling workouts.

And Myka does.  And it shows.  
  
Myka doesn't miss the fact that her dad has less and less to say to her the taller she gets, the stronger she gets.  Nor does she miss the fact that Abigail isn't the only person who _like_ likes her anymore.  
  
What Myka _does_ miss, completely and entirely, is Helena G. Wells' presence.


	7. Thirteen & Eighteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Myka meets Giselle. Helena returns. High school begins. Myka takes up sports. Giselle and Helena might think they're her surrogate mothers. Tracy drama. Myka learns how to communicate more effectively. Differences are noted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (1) Myka at thirteen is getting dragged out into yet another chapter. I don't know why, really, let's just say it's a "magic number"thing. Also, this is just how my brain decided to work through her "origin" story. (2) This chapter (and the next) are really "high school-y" so they might not be everyone's cup of tea, but... necessary.

Myka meets Giselle at her freshman orientation, just one week before school starts.  
  
It's been months since the last time she saw the girl and even then it was just the side of her; her skin and her hair and the length of her and the length of those fingers on Helena's legs and those lips of hers and those lips of hers all over Helena's lips.  So Myka isn't entirely sure that she's meeting Giselle until she's standing in front of her, where she sits at a table covered in orientation booklets, and Myka sees the "Hi My Name Is" sticker she wears that reads "Giselle 'Gigi' King #23".  
  
And when Giselle looks up at Myka, and Myka does credit her the beauty in those amber-green eyes, her eyes widen quite a bit and at first Myka thinks it's because she _knows_ who she is but then Giselle only says, "Man, they are putting _something_ in the water at that middle school.  How tall are you, Kid?"  
  
To which Myka answers, "Five feet seven inches."  
  
"And how _old_ are you?"  Giselle also asks.  
  
"I'm thirteen."  Giselle nods and then turns her head just a bit to the side as she further eyes Myka, both down and then up.  
  
"Do you play sports?"  The girls asks of Myka.  
  
"I fence."  And Giselle makes a face that Myka can't really decipher.  
  
"I mean like full body contact sports.  Volleyball, basketball, soccer, softball?"  Myka shakes her head. "Do you _want_ to?"  
  
"I'm really not that coordinated."    
  
"Not coordinated enough to run after a ball but coordinated enough to wave an épée at someone else's face?"  Myka would be offended if not for Giselle's playful smirk and the fact that she knows what an épée is.  
  
Myka just shrugs and she thinks Giselle sounds disappointed when she hums out an almost disbelieving "hmm" after that.  
  
"Last name?"  And she's reaching for a clipboard beside her when Myka tells her "Bering" and Giselle is scanning through pages and lists of names until she finds what is very likely the only Bering in the whole school.  Then the girl smirks and looks back up at Myka.  "Funny."  Myka doesn't say anything but raises her brows and waits for the girl to continue.  "You have Mrs. King for homeroom.  She's in the social studies building."  
  
"Oh."  Giselle picks up one of the books from the table and writes "Bering - HR: Mrs. King - RM: SS23" on the blank sticker that sits in the corner, then hands the booklet to Myka.  "Why is it funny?"  Myka asks, taking the book.  
  
"One, she's a Senior-level AP Honors teacher," Giselle arches a brow, "so you must be _all kinds_ of smart.  And two, she's my mom."  Giselle winks at Myka then and to Myka _it only figures_.  "There's a map of the campus in the booklet but if you don't know where the Social Studies classes are, there are a couple of kids giving tours around here.  You'll get your class schedule from your home room teacher the first day of school."  
  
"Thank you."  And Myka is turning to leave when Giselle calls her back with a "hey kid".  
  
"Myka, right?"  Myka nods and she can't resist smiling at the older girl in all of her relief that she says her name correctly.  "Well, Too Tall, if you find yourself miraculously more coordinated, you should consider trading in your épée for a volleyball and trying out for one of the teams.  We can use more girls with your height and build in basically every sport."  
  
Myka smiles and she nods and she says "okay" and when she's walking away from the table this final time, she forgets to remind herself how very much she doesn't actually like this girl for being Helena's girlfriend.  
  
***  
  
It's a whole _thing_ with Ms. Jane and Pete and Jeannie and Myka squished into Pete's mother's car on the hour and a half ride to the airport.  Hurricane-force winds had already delayed Helena's domestic flight by several hours, threatened to strand her a four hour flight away from home.  
  
Myka had spent her morning praying to whatever deity's or inanimate household appliances that she needed to pray to in order to calm the winds long enough for Helena to come home.  She had been counting down the weeks, the days, _the hours_ , and they kept growing longer.  
  
Now she's thanking the toaster for finally having mercy on her lovesick little soul.  Helena's plane is finally on its way.  
  
***  
  
They're way too early, of course.  Helena's flight arrival changes to something close to midnight.  Ms. Jane is already falling asleep where she sits.  Jeannie is the quietest Myka has ever seen her when she's not eating, her attention entirely on the book of crosswords that is in her lap.  
  
Pete and Myka take up three seats in a row along a wall of windows at the gate where Helena's plane is due to arrive.  They are seated across from each other and between them sits a full deck of cards being shuffled and divvied out.  Pete is the mastermind behind these several games of boredom-induced gin.  He wins five times.    
  
Myka only pretends to like the game and she wins eight.  
  
Myka is almost doing a really good job of paying attention and taking this _feeling_ as it comes in waves every time a new set of lights lands just outside of the window where they sit.  She's biting on her tongue and Pete keeps looking up at her with a brow arched and then narrowing his eyes on her mouth until she eventually realizes what he's staring at and also eventually stops.  
  
"Do you need to walk it out?"  Pete finally asks her and Myka is pulled from some place deep in her mind that has caused her eyes to drift off into nowhere and glaze over, rendering her almost as blind to the world around her as she would be had she actually taken off her glasses.    
  
"It feels like starting over."  Is the first thing she can think of to say and for a moment Pete just nods.  "What if I can't talk to her?"  
  
"Then don't."  And Myka gives him a look. "You asked."  
  
"I can't just _not_ talk to her."  
  
"Then just _do_ talk to her."  Myka gets what Pete is doing.  "Or just don't talk to her.  You only have two options, Mykes.  But you should know that I don't think H.G. will care either way."  Now Pete is giving _her_ a look.  "If you talk or if you don't."  
  
Myka's first reaction is to feel a bit insulted by the insinuation that Helena will not care about whether or not Myka talks to her.  Myka's second reaction is to think again about how sometimes Pete really does say the right things, they just don't come out the right way.  
  
It's almost midnight now and Helena's plane is landing.  
  
***  
  
Helena's hair has grown, the ends of it are touching midway down her back.  This is the first thing that Myka sees when Helena exits the plane and enters the airport.    
  
 _She_ is the first thing, in a very long time, that makes Myka's breath hitch.  
  
***  
  
Helena is greeting Ms. Jane and Jeannie with the most exhausted smile on her face, with her eyes barely open, with her arms carrying the weight of her backpack in one hand and the weightlessness of a pillow in the other.  And as she's talking to Ms. Jane on her left, who is asking her about her flight, and as she's being talked to by Jeannie on her right, who is practically singing sweet praises over her return, Pete is gently shoving Myka with his elbow, causing Myka to side-step, to have to catch her balance, and to still herself again.  Directly in Helena's line of sight.    
  
Helena's barely-open eyes catch Myka's eyes.    
  
Whatever it was that the older girl _had_ been saying, in response to either Ms. Jane or Jeannie, it is now no longer being said.  
  
***  
  
Helena's arms around her cause Myka's heart to race.  Helena's body against her warms Myka entirely.  Helena's breath in her hair, against her ear, makes Myka melt further into the hold that Helena has on her.  And Myka is almost certain that Helena's response to this is to hold her just a little bit closer.  
  
Pete leans into Myka's view and he's making some weird gesture with his arms in a circle out in front of him, then he wraps his arms around himself and begins making idiotic kissing faces.  Myka doesn't _get it_ until Ms. Jane is slapping Pete in the arm but then she's moving her arms around Helena, settling her hands on Helena's back, and returning the hug.  
  
Helena's grip on her tightens even more and Helena presses her cheek further into Myka's cheek and says, with her sleep-coated voice, into Myka's ear, "How I have missed you, Einstein."  
  
Pete grins and gives Myka two thumbs up.

Ms. Jane playfully hits him in the back of the head.  
  
***  
  
It's late and Ms. Jane is tired and _they're_ tired and Helena is barely standing on her own two feet.  So Myka picks up Helena's backpack by her side and settles it on her own back and she takes Helena's pillow from Pete as Helena moves in to greet him with a hug, too, and she pulls the pillow into her.  Hugs it close to her body.    
  
As Ms. Jane ushers them to baggage claim, Jeannie reclaims her space next to Helena, looping their arms together and pulling her in close so she can divulge all of the secrets of the summer.  A task that would typically require more than just a single weekend but one weekend is all they have left before the start of school.  
  
When Myka glances toward the two older girls to steal another look at Helena, to see more of this girl she hasn't seen anything of over the past three months, Myka's eyes immediately catch Helena's eyes.  And Helena has, presumably, has been watching Myka almost as closely as Myka doesn't have the courage to watch Helena.  
  
Helena smiles.  It's a soft smile.  Helena's cheeks turn slightly red and if not for her exhaustion, Myka thinks, Helena might have the sense to look away. But she doesn't.  Neither of them do.  Not for quite a long while.  
  
***  
  
In baggage claim, Pete is the one who swarms with the crowd to collect Helena's over-sized suitcase.  Helena is so thankful, and perhaps so delusional with her lack of sleep, that she thanks him with a quick kiss to his cheek.  Pete immediately looks to Myka who wants very badly to be glaring at him, and maybe she is, but she can't bring herself to even try to care much beyond that.  
  
Besides, she's not the one pulling a fifty pound piece of luggage to the parking garage.  Helena's backpack is heavy enough.  
  
 She's tempted to kiss Pete's cheek, too.  
  
***  
  
Myka holds the car door open for Helena, not because she thinks it chivalrous, she just doesn't think Helena could possibly pull the door open herself without falling over.  Or at all, judging by the size of her. 

The older girl stills in front of her just before getting in.  Helena brings a hand up to cup Myka's chin and Helena smiles the widest she's been able to up to this point.  
  
"You went and grew up on me, kiddo."  Her eyes are beginning to water already.  
  
Myka smiles.  "I'm sorry," is what she says on instinct and then immediately after that and with a shrug, "I couldn't help myself."  
  
Helena arches a brow, smiling fully now, then breathes out an amused hum, allowing her hand to fall back to her side.  
  
"And not a Twizzler in sight."  
  
***  
  
Helena is sitting between Pete and Myka in the backseat of Ms. Jane's car but she's left too much space between her and Pete to justify the amount of _leaning_ she's currently doing against Myka.  
  
She tries, and Myka gives her credit, to keep her eyes open through fifteen minutes of Jeannie's conversation until finally Ms. Jane tells her to turn it down, meaning both her voice and her hearing, and just like that the car is quiet.  
  
Ms. Jane turns up the radio now, if only to drown out Pete's snoring, and Myka, who has chosen this time to reflect only on the darkness outside of her window and not on the weight of Helena's body, feels Helena relax further into her.  
  
Helena's hand over Myka's wrist is what finally pulls her attention away from the window.  And when Myka looks to Helena, the older girl smiles in what Myka is certain is a bashful manner and immediately averts her barely-open eyes to the road ahead.  But she gently squeezes her grip around Myka's wrist and she doesn't let go, not like she usually does.  Even as her head begins to tilt back against the air and sways to the side, her grip remains around Myka's wrist.    
  
Myka smiles when Helena catches herself, opens her eyes, and furrows her brows just a little bit before her eyes start to close again.  
  
"H.G."  
  
Helena opens her eyes and Myka doesn't think she means to, but the older girl pouts and it looks so absolutely pathetic that Myka can only smile and watch the pout continue to devolve into the saddest sleepy face she has ever seen.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Helena's voice is barely audible. Myka thinks she sounds like she's in the throes of a cold.  "There was this baby.  On my flight from Heathrow.  And I'm just.. I'm really very tired."  
  
"It's okay." Myka says just as softly in response. "I don't mind."  
  
And Helena, whose eyes are definitely closed now, rests her head against Myka's shoulder, into the crook of Myka's neck with her hair tickling the skin of Myka's jaw.    
  
Helena's breathing softens almost instantly, her grip on Myka's wrist loosens and Myka, in her own thoughtless exhaustion, moves her hand into Helena's hand.  
  
And she's not sure if Helena is awake or if Helena is asleep when the older girl hums out a soft sigh and nuzzles herself further into Myka's neck.  Because all Myka can really do right now is try to sustain her breathing, try to remain something resembling a functional, living human being, and also try not to laugh at herself saying the words "I don't mind" to the idea of Helena cuddling against her in the back of a dark car for the hour and a half long ride back home.  
  
How, she wonders, is she even managing to endure this with her heart pounding in her ears and beating out of her chest.  
  
Myka smiles and turns her head further into Helena, presses her lips and her nose into soft black hair and closes her eyes at the thought of leaving a gentle kiss there, too, but Myka just doesn't yet have the nerve for that sort of thing. And it's okay because Helena is here with her, right now and for so many more days to come.  
  
Helena is home.  
  
***  
  
Well, Helena is not yet home.  Ms. Jane insists, when they reach town, that it's too late to drop Helena off at her house, even as Helena insists she can drive her car back to the Lattimer residence tonight, as long as she has it.  
  
Her winning point in this argument is that Ms. Jane won't have to bother with bringing her back the next day.  She knows how much Ms. Jane enjoys her late Saturday mornings.  Her robe, her slippers, her giant cup of coffee.  
  
They detour to Helena's neighborhood.  
  
***  
  
They're pulling into Helena's driveway.  
  
"Myka, would you mind going with her?"    
  
And Helena is turning an expectant gaze to Myka who can only try not to smile when she responds with, "I don't mind."  
  
Helena's smile is still soft.  Still sleepy.  
  
***  
  
"I might start calling you Goliath." Helena grins now as they enter her house into a lit foyer.  
  
"Please don't."  Myka hopes her frown is obvious.  "Pete's wrestling friends already call me The Amazon."  
  
Helena's false attempts not to laugh are almost believable as she heads for the stairs.    "Well, wrestlers are mostly quite little, don't you think?"  Myka stops just before the steps and Helena, noting her hesitation, turns back and says, "I just need to get some fresh things.  I won't be long.  You can wait down here if you'd like."  And Helena continues moving up the stairs.  "But considering your history with my house and the dark..."  
  
Myka is already, almost shamefully, on Helena's tail.  
  
In her bedroom, Helena grabs a small bag and disappears into her closet.  
  
"So, I wonder," she's calling from somewhere in the textile abyss, "what the _girls_ are calling you these days."  She peeks her head out only to smile suggestively at Myka. And Myka rolls her eyes and falls back on Helena's bed as she disappears back into her closet with a soft chuckle.  
  
"Well," And she thinks a while before she says this, weighs the reaction she may get against the amount of energy she has left in her to pursue such a conversation, "Giselle called me Too-Tall."  
  
Myka notes the immediate halt in shuffling sounds from the closet and in seconds Helena is hovering above her.  
  
"My Giselle?"  Her brow is arched, her lips are almost smiling, albeit coyly.  
  
"King?"  
  
"Yes," Helena smiles fully now, moving back to her closet, "she's certainly one to talk with her six foot tall self."  
  
"Her mom is my home room teacher."  Myka adds.  
  
"You'll love her, Myka."  Helena responds.  "Mrs. King, I mean." And Helena is exiting the closet and walking to her bathroom and Myka sits up on the bed again.  "She's lovely.  She is going to love you, too."  
  
That Myka doesn't doubt because Myka is generally well loved by all of her teachers.  She's an easy student to have. A quiet student when required.  Talkative when necessary.  
  
Helena is quiet from the bathroom for a while and when she emerges she has her bag over her shoulder and another expectant smile on her face.    
  
"Ready?"  Myka nods and pulls herself from the bed, follows Helena downstairs.  "So, how was it?  Meeting Giselle?"  
  
Myka shrugs.  "She's nice."  Helena arches her brow and looks back at Myka.  "She wants me to try out for a team.  I think basketball."  
  
"Really?"    
  
Myka nods.  Follows Helena to the kitchen where she digs her car keys out of a safe that's built into one of the cabinets there.  
  
"In that case, you should."    
  
"Why?"  
  
"It would be fun, right?  And it would keep you busy.  Keep you out of the apartment."  And Helena gives Myka a very pointed look.  A very meaningful look.  And Myka _gets_ it.  Though, she'd never thought of it quite that way before.  
  
"I've never even really played before.  Any of those sports."  
  
"Well, as long as you've learned to _duck_ , I think you'll be fine."  
  
Myka smiles.  "I've been banned from playing tether ball.  My dad would never..."  
  
"So don't tell him."  
  
"But the book store..."    
  
"Is _not_ your responsibility.  Nor is it your obligation to go _down_ with a sinking ship.  You are a _child_." Helena actually groans.  "You are meant to have fun."  
  
"Sinking ship?"  Myka questions.    
  
Helena waves the comment off and turns to Myka, sets a hand against her arm.  "Giselle and her precious volleyball, basketball, and softball.  She doesn't just go around asking random girls to try out.  If she asked you once, she probably won't stop asking.  Although," and Helena let's her hand fall to her side, "maybe it's that I know you?"  She turns to the garage and gestures for Myka to follow her to the car.  
  
"I don't think she knows that I know you."  Myka says quietly.  "I mean, I didn't tell her.  She said they needed more girls my _size_."  
  
Helena smirks at that.  Looks Myka up and then down, then shrugs a single shoulder and hums something Myka thinks might be approval.    
  
"Well in the case," Helena stands by the driver's side of her car, smiling across the roof to where Myka stands at the passenger side, "you really _really_ should.  And maybe you should talk to your mother about it instead."  
  
They get into the car and Helena is already yawning.  
  
"You're not going to pass out again are you?"  Myka asks teasingly.  "I think you drooled on me before." And Myka laughs at the face that Helena gives her as she pretends to wipe a drool spot off of her shirt.  
  
"Don't act like you've never drooled on me before, Einstein."  And Helena's face softens quickly into a smile and she shakes her head, reaching across to Myka's wrist and grasping it softly.  "I have missed you so much."

***  
  
Myka tries out for volleyball at the behest of Helena.  Or, Myka tries out for volleyball because Helena suggests she'd be great at it and Helena also promises to attend all of the games she can possibly attend if Myka makes the team.  
  
Helena escorts Myka to the gymnasium for tryouts where, for the first time, Giselle and Myka and Helena take up the same space together, all at once.  
  
"Why, dear woman, are you harassing my freshmen?"  Giselle asks when Helena walks a flush-faced Myka through the doors with her arm around Myka's shoulder.  
  
"Harassing?"  Helena's look is incredulous.  "How about recruiting?  I brought you a gift."  And Helena steps away from Myka, holds her hands up as if to present something of importance.  Myka laughs internally at the thought.  She laughs externally when Helena says, "Ta-da!"  
  
"I already recruited this Wiz Kid at orientation."  Giselle smiles and tilts her head.  She gives Helena a look that Myka cannot decipher just before she leans in very very very close to Helena and kisses her cheek.  Helena's smile is too bright.  Far too bright.  "But I'll let you pretend it was all you."  
  
Helena feigns offense, gasps.  "It _was_ all me.  I heard you really wanted Myka here, so we talked it out and she agreed to come.  So, darling Giselle, _you_ are quite welcome."  
  
"Oh. Myka."  Giselle turns her eyes to Myka now and smiles, nods like she's just now getting something.  "So, _you're_ the one with the massive crush on my girlfriend?"  
  
"Oh sod off, Giselle."  And Helena leans into Giselle with her hands on Giselle's arms, and playfully turns her around and pushes her away.  
  
"No, no."  Giselle laughs, turning back around.  "I need to at least make sure she knows what's up.  Set some boundaries, if you know what I mean."  
  
"Are you worried I'm going to leave you for a thirteen-year-old?"  Helena is grinning, crossing her arms.  "I mean, this one I might."  She turns to Myka and winks then.    
  
And Myka is a mixture of inflated and not.  She's also incredibly annoyed because Giselle is still here and she's still charming and still pretty much perfect.  And Myka can't find a single reason to hate her other than the fact that she's Helena's age and Helena's girlfriend and puts that smile on Helena's face.    
  
"Hey, don't even joke about that, Missy.  You told me she was a _kid_.  I was expecting a scrawny, puny little thing.  Not _this one_."  
  
"Yeah," Helena sighs looking back at Myka, "she used to be.  You had a busy summer while I was away in London, didn't you, Einstein?"  Helena puts her free hand on Myka's arm and squeezes.  It isn't the first time she's done that but it's the first time she acknowledges that she's done it.  "Jesus Christ, are you still fencing?"  
  
Giselle squeezes Myka's arm, too.  Her brows shoot up.  
  
"I highly doubt fencing did _that_."  
  
"I've been working out with Pete."  Myka admits.  
  
"And puberty."  Helena supplies with a grin.  "I would guess."  She wags her eyebrows suggestively at Myka and Myka thinks perhaps Helena's been spending too much time at the Lattimer household.  
  
"Dude."  Giselle says motioning to Myka and looking at Helena.  "I'm _right_ here."  
  
"Oh do shut up, Giselle."  Helena teases.  
  
"All I'm saying is that she's really cute and she hasn't got a single zit on her annoyingly precious little face."  Giselle winks at Myka.  "I wasn't expecting _actual_ competition."  
  
"She is quite adorable."  Helena smiles.  
  
"Well, you might as well be adorable _and_ useful."  Giselle motions with her head toward where the other girls gather.  "Join the ranks, Jolly Green."  
  
Helena rolls her eyes and sighs the most dramatic sigh.  "Don't even _start_ that.  Only I can call her things."  
  
Myka sets off across the gymnasium hesitantly.  "Hey."  She hears Giselle playfully scolding Helena behind her, "you go find a seat and let me work."  And when Myka turns around, she catches the kiss that Giselle gives Helena just before she turns her toward the bleachers and tells her to "get".  
  
***  
  
Giselle tells Myka, much later on in the volleyball season, that fencing has given her a lot more coordination than she gives herself credit for.  And when the volleyball season wraps up, she immediately encourages Myka to try out for basketball.  
  
Helena promises to make it to all of those games, too.  
  
***  
  
"You were right."  Myka is splayed out across Pete's bedroom floor.  
  
"I know."  He responds while never looking away from his television screen where he plays whatever new video game he has acquired from the video rental store this weekend.  "Which thing am I right about now?"  
  
"Me dying at a very young age."  
  
Pete pauses his game.  Sets the control down and turns around to face Myka.    
  
"Okay, let's hear it."  Myka gives him a look. "What? You hate when I'm playing my games when you're having an H.G. crisis, so I'm giving you my full attention.  Let's hear it. Why are you dying _this_ week?"  
  
"Pete if your sick of listening..."  
  
"No, it's not that, Mykes."  Pete is holding his hands in front of him.  "It's just that you _see_ H.G. everyday.  You see H.G. with her _girlfriend_ everyday.  And _I_ see H.G. with _you_ everyday.  So, you're right that I'm right, you're going to die at a very young age.  Cause of death? Helena Wells. Weapon of choice?  The string that she has tied to your heart, your head, and your wrist."  
  
"What does that even mean?"  Myka questions.  
  
"It's kind of weird that the three of you spend so much time together."  Pete supplies.  "It's weird that she has a girlfriend but wants to be with you while refusing to be _with_ you."  
  
"She's eighteen."  
  
"Okay."  
  
" _Okay_?"  
  
"Yes, Mykes.  _Okay_."  Myka knows Pete is brushing off whatever point he is attempting to make and Myka doesn't push the issue.  Myka never pushes the issue with Pete because on the rare occasion that they do argue, it always starts with Myka pushing the issue.  
  
"Anyway, that's part of my problem."  Myka sighs, let's her head roll to the other side.  "Giselle wants me to meet with her during my seventh period sports conditioning class so that we can practice, one-on-one.  Only it won't be one-on-one, it will be one-on-one plus one very unattainable 18-year-old _other_ _one_ in the bleachers. And God help me if Giselle tells H.G. she loves her and calls her  _Hel_ in front of me just one more time.."  
  
"You'll get really really angry and sulk a lot to yourself and then come tell me about it?"  Pete is grinning.    
  
"Pete." Myka growls and rolls onto her side, sends her fist flying into his thigh.  Pete just laughs and Myka lay flat on the ground again, throwing her arm over her face.  
  
"Okay, Mykes, take a deep breath."  Myka does. "If it's too much, you need to tell her no or quit or go back to fencing.  I'm sure you will _never_ have to worry about H.G. showing up at your fencing matches, let alone H.G. _and_ her girlfriend."  
  
"I can't do that."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"I've already committed."  Myka sighs. "Also, I actually _want_ to play, which is stupid.  I can't even play basketball."  
  
"I heard you were sinking those three-pointers like a pro."  Myka squints her eyes at Pete.  "I also heard you looked _super cute_ in the process.  Something about a wrinkle you get in your forehead when you're calculating the trajectories or some other such nonsense?"  
  
"Who, besides me, would say something like that to _you_?"  
  
"To me?  No."  Pete grins.  "To several of her nerd-friends that I may or may not have been in earshot of?  Yeah."  
  
Myka narrows her eyes at him.  
  
"Abigail."  
  
"Oh."  Myka might be blushing.  
  
"Yeah."  Pete's grin grows more mischievous. "Oh."  
  
***  
  
Myka does sink those three pointers like a pro.  The problem, however, is getting Myka to get the ball _to_ the three point line so that she _can_ sink them like a pro.  Also, getting her to sink the three-pointers like a pro despite the defensive player that will no doubt be in her face.  
  
The irony of Giselle playing this defensive role in the one-on-one practices that Myka eventually agrees to, is not lost on Myka.  Myka wonders if it is also not lost on Helena, who spends a great amount of time also at these practices, in the bleachers, with her homework in her lap and a smile on her face.  
  
At one point Giselle yells to her, "You might as well go put on a cheerleader uniform and make yourself useful."  To which Helena responds, "Oh?  And who, of the two of you, do you suppose I would be cheering for?"  
  
Giselle doesn't tease Helena about cheer leading much after that.  
  
That isn't lost on Myka either.  
  
***  
  
Mrs. King, who also happens to be Coach King, no surprise to Myka, puts her on the junior varsity basketball team because she has the height and the speed and the shots but she still needs to work on her coordination.  Because basketball is not at all like fencing and Myka and running aren't exactly the perfect combination.  So Myka and running and dribbling are an even more complex equation for Myka than either Myka or Giselle could have imagined.    
  
But she's getting it.  Even if Giselle pushes her too hard or is sometimes less than kind in their practices, she is getting it because being made to dribble a ball for several hours a day, several days a week, leaves little room for failure.  
  
And Helena tells her, eventually, "She adores you.  I think more because I adore you but also because you're adorable.  And aside from all of _that_ , she knows you can do this."  
  
"What if I can't?"  Is what Myka asks Helena in return.  
  
"You _can_." Is how Helena responds.  "She might be a little tough on you but she's a bit of an _American_ about this school and its sports.  I think she is expecting you to carry on her legacy or something."  
  
"That's weird."  Helena laughs and nods.  
  
"I guess it is a little odd."  
  
"I just mean because the situation is weird, with you and her and," Myka shakes her head, "I guess I don't know why she likes me."  
  
Helena smiles then, puts an arm around Myka and pulls her in close, leans her forehead against Myka's, too.  
  
"Despite what you think, Myka, you are a very likable person."  
  
Helena promises to talk to Giselle about the pushing too hard and the harshness in her so-called motivational speeches and particularly the length of their private practices.  
  
***  
  
"Kid, _stop_ shrugging.  I am going to throw this basketball at your head if you _keep shrugging_."    
  
Myka stills herself but her eyes wander to where Helena sits in the bleachers and Helena is watching intently and with a very concerned look on her face.  And Helena's hands, Myka notices, are at her sides, flat against the bench as if she is about to raise herself up from that spot and fly off of her perch.  But she waits and Myka looks back to Giselle and also waits.  
  
Giselle is tucking the ball under her arm and walking to Myka, "Listen, Short Stack. Do not shrug when people ask you questions.  Just answer them.  You are the smartest kid in the whole damn school, _nothing_ that you say will be as stupid as you're worried it will be.  Dialogue is going to get you more places than shrugging.  It will probably get you more girls, too."  And at that point, Giselle looks back at Helena and Myka is sure she both smiles _and_ winks because now Helena is sitting back and her hands are no longer clenching the bench and Helena both smiles _and_ blushes.  
  
And Myka is also sure that Helena had that talk with Giselle because this is new.  Even Giselle acknowledging Helena's presence before their drills end is new.  
  
"You don't know that."  Myka means it in a sort of challenging way but because she is Myka, it sounds somewhat sheepish and the exact opposite of challenging.  So she is not surprised when the intention of her tone appears to have evaded Giselle entirely, obviously, by the way the older girl turns back to her and smirks.  So Myka adds, "You couldn't possibly know the things I want to say or how they'll be perceived."  
  
Myka is thinking of _quite a few things_ she'd love to say right now.  
  
"I know."  Giselle says.  "Because I'm the third smartest kid in this school and the second smartest kid in this school," Giselle is gesturing back to Helena now who has that beaming smile on her face, "agrees with me.  So," and Giselle pulls the ball back into her hands and throws it to Myka who catches it without a single thought, "I'm going to ask you again.  Do you want to keep at this or should I talk to Coach King and have her transfer you into a regular P.E. class?"  
  
Myka doesn't shrug.  Instead Myka says, "I want to be here.  I like working out with you and I like playing basketball."  And then she looks to Helena who is hiding her grin behind the hand that is now resting just over her lips.  Myka doesn't add the part where she thinks to herself that she really also wants to be here because Helena loves her being here.    
  
Giselle is very smart, Myka thinks, but Myka is definitely smarter than Giselle because she is also smart enough to know that not everything she has to say will be received as well as Giselle thinks it will be.  
  
But Myka silently promises Giselle that she will stop shrugging, and she silently thanks Helena for somewhat taming the beast.  
  
***  
  
Myka's drills are exhausting.  So exhausting that Myka starts to think that the drills are Giselle's way of punishing her for liking her girlfriend.  And she would keep thinking it, too, if Giselle had not been doing the drills with her.  
  
They practice on off-days, when the rest of her team isn't practicing.  Before Helena has her talk with Giselle, they are practicing until 9PM.  After the talk, they are practicing until 7PM.  
  
Myka does so many laps around the gymnasium while dribbling the basketball that she can't keep track.  When it's not raining, Giselle makes her run the track.  This on top of the two mile run she does with her team during regular practices.  
  
But whenever Myka starts to feel so exhausted that she wants to literally throw in the towel, more specifically throw the towel at Giselle's face, Myka remembers that she's not at home.  And she will gladly run another two miles, in the opposite direction, for that kind of reprieve.  
  
***  
  
Myka is drenched in sweat when she hits the cold night air outside of the high school gym.  It feels so deliriously refreshing that she stops in the middle of the walkway and lets her head fall back.  
  
Behind her the gymnasium door crashes open and Helena's voice cuts into her calm with a sense of panic that Myka has not heard in her voice before.  
  
"Myka, wait."  But Myka isn't going anywhere. She stands straight and turns to Helena.  "Your mother just called."  Helena is approaching her, takes her hand and pulls gently as she continues walking on.  "I'm taking you home."  
  
"What's wrong?"  
  
Helena stops walking and lowers her head, puts her other hand over Myka's now.  She looks at Myka again.  Sometimes Myka thinks Helena can be a little _too_ dramatic because she braces herself for far worse than what she gets.  
  
"Tracy had a seizure."  
  
***  
  
Tracy isn't almost dying this time but she does manage to acquire herself a fairly large gash on her forehead from the fall.  And according to her mother who has just spoken with the doctor and relayed the information to Helena, they're not exactly sure if the fall was a result of the seizure or the cause of it.  Nevertheless, Tracy will be home in one piece later that night.  
  
"I don't understand."  Myka says toweling off her freshly washed hair and sitting next to Helena on her own bed.  
  
"You don't understand what?"  And Helena is flipping through a random cooking magazine that she found on the kitchen counter.  
  
"Why are you here?"  Helena looks up at Myka with a hurt expression.  Myka thinks it's fake or meant to be a tease but she can't exactly tell with Helena anymore.  
  
"You don't want me here?"  Helena asks.  "I can go."  
  
"No."  Myka tosses the towel into her hamper from across the room.  Helena smirks.  "I'm trying really hard not to shrug anymore.  I'm trying really hard not to apologize but also to say what's on my mind and it's not coming out right."  
  
"Myka."  Helena smiles.  "If you want to shrug, you can shrug.  Giselle is always trying to drag people, kicking and screaming, out of their comfort zones.  It's admirable but I don't necessarily agree with it."  Helena sets the magazine down on the bed beside her and turns to Myka.  "Do you have a pen and paper?"  
  
Myka nods and goes to retrieve these things for Helena from her desk.  She sits back on the bed and hands Helena the pen and pad of paper.  
  
"We're going to try something.  To help us communicate a little better.  Okay?"  
  
"Okay."  
  
Helena writes for a moment then hands the notepad to Myka.  
  
 _Write your question._  
  
Myka arches her brow and glances at Helena who smiles and nods.  Then Myka writes her response.  
  
 _It's not a question, it's a statement: I don't want my dad to hurt you._  
  
And when Myka hands the note pad back to Helena, she reads it and her smile disappears.  She looks back at Myka, watches her quietly for a moment.  Myka twists her lips to the side just before lowering her head.  
  
Helena writes and returns the note pad to Myka.  
  
 _Why do you think your dad would hurt me?_  
  
And for this, Myka speaks up:  
  
"My mom told you not to come back here until our dads had resolved whatever issue it is they have between them and I'm not entirely sure that they have.  So, I don't know why you would come back here, after the look my dad gave you, H.G."  Myka takes in a deep breath, shakes her head.  "My dad has never even looked at _me_ that way."  
  
Helena remains quiet.  She presses her lips together tight.  Breathes in deeply and when she exhales, she turns away from Myka.    
  
After several seconds of silence, she turns back to Myka and takes the notepad and pen from her.  She writes and she's writing for a while.  When she's done, she hands Myka the pen and the paper.  
  
Myka reads it to herself:  
  
 _Your father is a coward.  The only way he could possibly hurt me now is by hurting you.  And I'm not willing to let that happen.  I will do everything I can to keep that from happening._  
  
When Myka looks back up at Helena, the older girl is looking away again.  Her chin resting against her shoulder, her eyes downcast.    
  
Myka writes on the note pad:  
  
 _Wonder Woman._  
  
She taps Helena's arm and when the older girl looks back to her, she hands the notepad to her.  Helena grins and rolls her eyes.  
  
"Not quite, my friend."  Helena sighs.  "I just care a lot about you."  
  
Myka smirks.  She pulls the note pad back into her grasp and writes:  
  
 _I care a lot about you, too, H.G._  
  
A high pitched noise resembling something close to a tune pierces the silence and Helena retrieves her bag from the floor, digs around in it for a while, and pulls out a cell phone.  She pushes at some buttons on the face, holds it to her ear.    
  
"Hello?"  
  
Myka shows Helena what she's written when her eyes fall back on her.  Helena smiles at Myka and nods, presumably at whatever she's hearing in her phone.    
  
"It's not even a problem, Mrs. Bering."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes at the mention of her mother, writes on the paper:  
  
 _Cellular phone?  You're spoiled._  
  
She shows Helena that, too, and Helena glares at both the notepad and Myka with a smirk on her face.    
  
"She's been an _absolute peach_ , Mrs. Bering.  She's doing fine."  Helena takes the notepad and pen from Myka.  "No, I understand. She'll be fast asleep by the time you make it home, I'm sure.  I'll lock up tight."  Helena writes, shows Myka:  
  
 _Time for bed.  Parents coming home.  My cue to leave.  Brat._  
  
Myka laughs softly and takes the notepad back.  
  
"You're welcome, Mrs. Bering.  Anytime.  Honestly, I don't mind."  Helena smiles at Myka now.  "I love spending time with Myka."  
  
Myka shows her the notepad.  It's the letter "U" then a bunch of hearts and the letters "M" and "E".  
  
"Goodnight, Mrs. Bering."  Helena hangs up her phone and throws it back into her bag.  She let's go of an amused sigh in Myka's direction.  "Yes, I do."  Helena's coy smile returns.  "Even if you are a pain in my neck sometimes."  
  
Myka's smile is now accomplished.  Satisfied.  
  
"I must leave you now, darling child."  
  
Myka writes on the pad:  
  
 _Thank you._  
  
"For what?"  Helena asks with an arched brow, setting her bag beside her on the bed.  
  
"For everything."  Myka says and it comes out quieter than she expects.  "For looking out for me and also having a pretty cool girlfriend and for tolerating me, too."  
  
"I don't _tolerate_ you, Myka.  I _enjoy_ your company.  Immensely."  Helena smiles.  "At any rate, you're welcome.  Although I think I might benefit more from the 'cool girlfriend' than you do, so that one is a bit selfish."  
  
"You can be selfish sometimes."  Myka smirks.  "I'll allow it."  
  
Helena glares again, pulls the note pad and pen from Myka's grasp.  Writes and turns the paper around for Myka to see.  
  
"Brat."  Myka reads out loud.  "Original."  
  
"I can see our little experiment has been rather successful in opening up the lines of communication."  And at that, Myka shrugs.  They both laugh and Helena reaches for one of Myka's still-damp curls, tugs at it gently.  "Go to bed, please."  
  
"I have one more question."  Myka reaches for the pad and paper, she writes on it:  
  
 _What if I were eighteen?_  
  
Myka bites her lip and pulls the pad of paper into her arms for a moment, looks up at Helena who is waiting, looks down at the floor and again at what she has written on the page.  And Myka has lost all intention to give the pad of paper to Helena.  
  
"Never mind."  She says shaking her head.  
  
"Myka."  Helena smiles softly and she reaches for the pad of paper, hesitates only a second when Myka's eyes meet hers again, then gently pulls the note pad from Myka's grasp.  
  
Myka braces herself, shuts her eyes tight, and for what she doesn't know, but the only thing that comes is Helena's grasp on her wrist over her abdomen as if she is still clutching onto that pad of paper.  And Myka opens her eyes to Helena, who is still giving her that soft smile.  
  
"If you were eighteen, I'm sure we'd already be married."  And Helena chuckles just the tiniest bit before handing the pad of paper back to Myka.  "Although, I'm also sure that if you consulted with Giselle, she could tell you one million reasons why I'm 'unmarryable'."  
  
Helena laughs at whatever face Myka makes in response to that.  
  
"Giselle is _psychotic_."  Myka says.  "I will marry you, if she won't."  
  
"You say that _now_."  Helena is laughing softly.  "Wait until after our first date.  The general consensus so far is that I am quite the handful."  
  
Myka doesn't know what to say to that, so Helena smiles and reaches out to tussle Myka's hair as she grabs her bag up from the bed and stands to her feet.  
  
"Your parents are on their way home, so I really should get going."  
  
Myka nods.  "Yeah.  Before my dad gets here."  Helena nods, too.  
  
"Walk me out."  And Myka nods again.  Helena drapes an arm over Myka's shoulder as they walk through the apartment and to the door that leads downstairs and when they get there, Myka, who is still carrying the pad of paper and the pen, writes another thing down.  This thing reads:  
  
 _I "different kind of" love you, H.G._  
  
And Myka almost doesn't want to show this note to Helena either.  But she does and she closes her eyes tight again when she shows Helena what is written there and she only opens them when she feels Helena's hand on her right cheek, Helena's lips on her left cheek.  
  
And when Helena moves away, she has backed herself up against the door, wrapped her fingers around the doorknob.  She starts to tell Myka, "I..." then laughs softly, "I _different kind of love_ you, too, Myka."  
  
"Because you're eighteen and I'm still thirteen."  Helena nods and her smile is somewhat sheepish.  
  
"It is very _very_ different indeed, Einstein."  Helena shakes her head.  "Also, I have a girlfriend."  
  
"That, too."  Myka pouts and rolls her eyes.  And Helena's smile widens at that.  
  
"I heard you've been getting a lot of attention from a certain someone at school, too."  Helena smirks.    
  
Myka groans.  "Does Abigail tell everyone except me that she likes me?"  
  
"Abigail?  The creature from the dance?"  Helena is arching her brow now and her smile grows into a grin.  "I wasn't talking about Abigail."  
  
"I don't even want to know."  
  
"Because it's different?"  Helena asks.  
  
"It is very _very_ different indeed, H.G."  And Helena pushes at Myka playfully for her mockery.    
  
"Goodnight, Einstein."  And Helena opens the door to the apartment.  "I'll lock up downstairs, you lock up upstairs."  Helena moves backward through the doorway, waving at Myka with her free hand.  
  
"But would you marry me?"  Myka asks, unable to stop the question from materializing.  
  
Helena smirks again, stopping only momentarily to lean against the now-open door. "Is that a hypothetical question or are you getting in an early proposal, Little One?"  
  
Myka grins now.  " _Will_ you marry me, H.G.?  I mean, _eventually_."  Helena bites back her smile and rolls her eyes.  She shakes her head as if to brush off the question and closes the door ever more slightly.  
  
" _Goodnight_ , Myka Bering."  
  
Myka smiles at the slight blush that rises into Helena's cheeks.  
  
"Goodnight, H.G."    
  
And when Helena completely shuts the door, Myka leans into it, leans her forehead against it.  Flattens her palm over the wood. Sighs at the collection of new memories.  Happy memories to cancel out more of the not as happy memories.  
  
"I said lock the door!"  Helena's voice calls from the other side.  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and flips the lock.  
  
"And don't you roll your eyes at me!"  
  
Myka can't help the what sounds like a giggle that escapes her.    
  
This, she thinks to herself, is very _very_ different, indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to take this time to say a big gigantic thank you to everyone who has been following along with this story and leaving awesome comments and really getting into the underlying details of the story. The comments have helped reshape this story in many ways and I appreciate it. Please, keep 'em coming!


	8. Fourteen & Eighteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Like old times, but not great times. I'll forewarn you for implied abuse but not grand details. (Can't deal.) It's basically just one very hectic day for Myka and Helena and Giselle and Pete.
> 
> Myka grows up a little bit. Hopefully not too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will feed directly into the next chapter. Coming sooooon!

When Myka turns fourteen years old, she doesn't _feel_ fourteen.  In fact, she feels more like she's twelve years old again. Like she's still that little kid chasing her annoying little sister around the apartment complex, slipping, falling, and being scolded by Helena Wells.  Being _branded_ by her father's anger.  
  
It's been a long time since her father has branded Myka with his anger.  Myka thinks about this the night after her fourteenth birthday.  The night her dad realizes that while fourteen-year-old Myka might be _taller_ and _stronger_ than twelve-year-old Myka was, she is still no more bold.  No more courageous.  No more willing to fight back.  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't understand why her mother comes into her room afterward, she's never done it before.  Myka doesn't understand why her mother sits on the edge of her bed, just beside where she lays facing the wall in the opposite direction.  Myka really doesn't understand when her mother's hand is in her hair, gently pushing loose curls from her face, tucking them behind her ear in that way mother's who love their daughters tend to do.  
  
And Myka understands least of all when her mother actually speaks and the words that she _should_ be saying, like "I'm sorry" and "I'll fix this" and "your father is an asshole" are replaced with things like "I know this feeling you're feeling" and "it's just a phase" and "you should be more careful with your _friends_ ".  
  
Myka tries.  Myka tries _so very hard_ to be angry at her mother when the woman leaves her room without another word, her only peace offering the flipping of the light switch that leaves Myka alone in the dark.  But all that Myka can hear, all that Myka is constantly replaying in her mind now, is the sound of her mother's voice saying, "I know this feeling you're feeling, it's just a phase."  
  
Because Myka isn't so sure that her mother knows much of anything about feeling at all.  
  
***  
  
Myka isn't crying.  Not really.  Her eyes sting, wet with moisture but she is /angry.    
  
She is angry because Helena's least favorite thing to do, that she always does out of a so-called necessity now, is tug at her sleeves and touch the skin of her arms, examine the curves of her shoulders.  Myka thinks it's almost second nature to Helena now, that she doesn't really /think about it as she's doing it.  Time will slow down and Helena will give her a _look_.  And Myka has never protested because it's Helena and it's Helena's hands against her and the delicate touch of Helena's fingers over her perhaps too-sensitive skin.  
  
Myka had teased her about it only once, when the basketball season had ended and softball season had began and Helena had said, "I don't like these uniforms."  
  
She'd been tugging at Myka's shirt and Myka had playfully pushed her hand away, rolled her eyes, and flashed Helena that grin that she likes so much.  The crooked one that makes her smile and eases the sharpness of Myka's not-as-well-thought-out words, like when she eventually told Helena, "The _only_ reason you don't like them is because you can't examine my shoulders."  
  
Her grin hadn't worked so well on Helena that time but it never stopped Helena from tugging at and pushing up her sleeves.  
  
So, it isn't Helena she's mad _at_ but it is Helena's resolve she's mad _about_.  Because Helena will see the light bruise forming on the back of her arm, just under her armpit.  The place where Myka's dad's grip is strongest and where he is most in control and also it's a miracle that only her right arm is bruising.    
  
So, Helena will _see_ the bruise and Helena will get into that mood where she'll want to do _something_ about it and her something, no matter how well-intentioned that something is, will probably balloon into _another_ thing.  Another thing that is a whole lot worse than this nothing that Myka has already learned how to live with.    
  
This nothing that Myka has never really lived without.  
  
***  
  
It is 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside and Myka is wearing a long-sleeved shirt beneath her short-sleeved shirt.  It's fine because it's a /thing that everyone is doing but she doesn't typically dress that way when it's warm, so when her attempts to avoid running into Helena fail miserably by lunch time, of course Helena notices both Myka's wardrobe _and_ Myka's attempts to evade her.  
  
***  
  
"Are you not burning up?"  Helena catches her near her locker and tugs lightly at her sleeve and Myka pulls her arm away, maybe a bit too quickly because the look that Helena gives her just then is curious and a bit offended.  
  
"I'm fine."  Is what Myka tells her as she's putting textbooks from her earlier classes away, gathering textbooks for her afternoon classes into her bag.    
  
Helena says, " _I_ feel hot just from looking at you." And Myka turns to Helena, foregoing the opportunity to expand on a joke about Helena and being hot because where is Pete when you need him and also she's just not in the mood, and when she slams her locker door shut it's only somewhat accidental.  
  
"Stop looking at me then."  
  
Helena's mouth falls and Myka can't help but smirk, that in turn makes Helena glare at her which triggers Myka's smile.  
  
"You're such a brat."  
  
"I know."  
  
"I'll see you at your game."  Helena's smile has returned and she turns to leave but stops herself, turns back to Myka.  "Also, happy birthday, Einstein."  
  
Myka sighs and begins to roll her eyes until Helena has her arms around her and is holding her close.    
  
"Thank you."  Myka breathes when she finally finds the air that Helena has just knocked out of her.    
  
Helena kisses her cheek then and moves away just as quickly as she came.  Her cheeks are red and only grow more so when Myka smiles her crooked smile at her.  
  
"See you after school."  
  
Myka just nods as Helena turns to walk away and she looks back at Myka only once before she disappears around a corner.  
  
"Did I just see," Myka startles as Pete appears in front of her, slamming the palm of his hand against the row of lockers and leaning into it, "Helena Wells kissing your cheek?"  
  
"Goddamnit, Pete."  Myka is actually clutching at her chest.  
  
"That mouth."  Pete grins.  
  
"You scared the crap out of me."  
  
"What was that about?"  And he's pointing in the direction Helena just walked away in.  
  
"She was just saying happy birthday."  Myka shakes her head and for a second her eyes drift back to that corner Helena just rounded and her mind slips somewhere far away from where she stands with Pete in the hallway of her high school.  
  
"Earth to Myka, come in Mykes!"  Pete waves a hand in front of her face and Myka glares at him, punches him in the shoulder.  "Jesus Christ!"  He groans, rubbing his sore arm. "Houston, we _definitely_ have a problem because your punches are actually starting to feel like more than just a strong gust of wind."  
  
She slaps his arm this time and turns to walk away.  
  
"Ow.. hey, wait up, Mykes."  And he catches up to walk beside her.  "I brought enough lunch to share."  
  
"I'm not hungry, Pete."  
  
"Of course you're not."  He shrugs.  "That just means more for me."  He pulls open the brown paper bag as he follows Myka into the quad.  "More sandwich for me, more apple for me, more Twizzlers for me."    
  
"Pete."  Myka stops walking suddenly and Pete runs into her.  
  
"Dude, Myka, I don't know if you understand the concept of a _walk_ way but it usually involves a little something I, personally, like to call _walking_." But she's quiet, looking out across the quad at the table where she and Pete usually sit and there is Abigail, smiling and waving them over. Waving _her_ over.  
  
"Oh god."  Myka looks to Pete who finally sees what she sees and arches a brow.    
  
"I don't see what the problem is, Mykes, you're going to have to fill me in on this one."  And Myka is biting her lip and shaking her head.  "I thought you _liked_ Abigail?  I saw you _kiss_ Abigail this weekend.  Like _a_ _lot_."  
  
"The problem, Pete, is that you aren't the only one who saw me kiss Abigail this weekend."  Myka presses her lips together tight and stares at Pete expectantly and that is the clue that tells him there's more to the story than what she's saying.  It takes him a moment but eventually his face straightens and the level of seriousness that takes over his expression is almost frightening to Myka.  
  
He moves just a little bit closer to Myka, steps between her and her view of Abigail, or rather Abigail's view of _her_.    
  
"Mykes."  
  
He brings his left hand to her arm and Myka tries very hard not to flinch at the touch when his grasp lands squarely over her bruise.    
  
It doesn't work.    
  
Pete let's his hand fall and Myka holds her arm just below the bruise.  
  
"Do I need to call Mom?"  
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Myka Ophelia."  He won't bother saying her last name.  
  
"No, Pete."  And Myka lowers her head.  "I'm okay, I just.  I can't see her right now."  
  
"Myka."  
  
"I just need to go somewhere else."    
  
Pete stares at her for the longest time and eventually he relents.    
  
"Are we going to leave her hanging?"  But the question is a moot point by the time he finishes asking it because Abigail is by their side and she's grinning at both Myka and Pete.  
  
"Hi, Stranger."  She says to Myka.  "Friend of Stranger."  She adds for Pete.  "I saved your table for you."  
  
"Uh, Abigail," Pete starts but Myka puts a hand over his arm to quiet him and she steps closer to Abigail.  
  
"I'm sorry, Abigail, I can't stay for lunch."  Myka clears her throat.  "Today.  I have a game and I need to go work out my arm a bit."  It isn't a completely lie, Myka thinks.  
  
"Oh, right!  Your game."  Abigail's smile softens just a little.  
  
"Maybe tomorrow?"  
  
"Sure.  Not a big deal.  I'll be here all week." Abigail grins now.  "Maybe I'll see you at your game later?"  
  
Myka nods and smiles.  "Yeah, that would be nice."  
  
"Thanks for holding down the table, Abs."  Pete adds.  
  
"Yes, of course."  Abigail's smile softens again and she moves in close to Myka, sets a quick kiss on her cheek and steps back.  "See you later?"  
  
Myka only smiles in response although Pete will later tell her it was more like a grimace.  Abigail returns to the table where her friends eventually join her and Pete has to wave his hands in front of Myka's face to snap her out of the _whatever_ she's lost herself in now.  
  
"Let's go,  Pete."  
  
***  
  
They spend their lunch seated in the dugout of the softball field where Myka's game is taking place later.  
  
"Two hot girls kiss your cheek in less than ten minutes and I can't even get Amanda to swoon over /this."  Pete is pointing to his own body and shaking his head. "What strange Twilight Zone did I wake up in this morning?"  
  
"Amanda?"  Myka questions.  "As in my teammate Amanda?"    
  
"As in your _hot_ teammate Amanda."  Myka rolls her eyes.    
  
"I didn't know you knew her."  
  
"I _just_ met her at your birthday this weekend, Mykes.  Remember skating rink, movies? _Diner_?"  Pete wags his brows.  "Oh right, you might not remember because you spent most of that time all kissy-faced in a corner with _Abigail_."  
  
"Pete."  Myka's slap is so weak this time that  concern drapes over Pete's face.  "You were talking to so many of my teammates, it's hard to tell which one you actually _like_."  
  
"Should I be taking you to a hospital or something?" Pete questions.  
  
"What?  No.  I'm fine.  I just.." She shakes her head.  "It's nothing, just sore that's all."  
  
"Mykes.  Look at me."  She does and the look that is on Pete's face sends chills up her spine because Pete is rarely this serious.  "I will _kill_ him."  
  
Myka nods and she reaches a hand to Pete's cheek and cups it gently.  "I know, Pete."  
  
"I almost did the last time."  And Pete narrows his eyes at Myka.  "You know I'm capable."  
  
Myka just smiles and let's her hand fall back into her lap.    
  
"You spoke of Twizzlers?"  She asks expectantly, holding out a hand.  
  
"You get zero Twizzlers until you eat one other thing in this bag."  And just like that, Pete's expression is soft and playful again.  "So what'll it be?  And no, H.G. is  _not_ on the menu."  
  
"Oh my _God_."  Myka groans and she's sure her face has accurately portrayed her repulsion by the way Pete doubles over with laughter.  "You are _disgusting_."  
  
"What?"  Pete asks still laughing.  "How do you think girls _do it_ , Mykes?  Gosh, you are the _worst lesbian ever_."  
  
"I am not a lesbian, Pete."  
  
"Sorry," Pete grins, "an H.G.-bian and also an Abigailbian.  Oh and a that-one-girl-that-works-at-the-skating-rink-bian, judging by the smile that was on your face."  He holds up three fingers.  "Three for three, Mykes."  
  
This time Myka's punch is forceful and effective and she rolls her eyes and holds out her hand again.  "Hand me your goddamn apple."  
  
***  
  
Fifth period English worsens Myka's mood.  When it's over she practically sprints outside of the English building for fresh air.    
  
Helena finds her again.    
  
"Pre-calculus?" Helena asks her.  Myka nods.  "Will you wait for me?  I forgot something in Ms. Calder's class-"  
  
"I can't, H.G.  I have a quiz, I need to go." Myka doesn't think Helena knows how often she pouts.  Or maybe she knows exactly how often.  Either way, Myka is determined not to fall for that pathetic face today because Myka is definitely trying to blow Helena off.  "I can't."  Is all she says before she heads off. And she's walking backward, mouthing her apologies, as Helena straightens out her pathetic pout into a pathetic smile and turns to head back into the English building.  
  
Myka does have a quiz but it's so easy that she finishes that quiz in five minutes.  
  
She spends the other fifteen trying to forget that pouty face she left behind.  
  
***  
  
Giselle is in a bad mood during warm ups and it throws Myka into a worse mood than the mood she was in that morning before school.  So when Giselle tries to chastise Myka about wearing a long-sleeve shirt under her uniform, Myka meets her head-to-head.    
  
"Go take that long-sleeve off, Bering!"  
  
"Why?"  And the look that Giselle gives her is a mixture of surprise and annoyance.  
  
"I'm not going to have you stroking out at the base.  Go _take it off_."  
  
"I'm not taking it off."  
  
"Are you really arguing with me right now?"  And Giselle is approaching her where she stands at her position on first base.  "Just go take the thing off."  
  
" _No_."  
  
"Fine, get off my diamond."  And Giselle turns to walk away.  "You can sit out the game."  
  
"Over a goddamn shirt?!"  Myka yells after her and Giselle swings around and stomps back.  
  
"Now it's over your goddamned choice of language.  Get off my base and go get dressed.  You can sit in the dugout keeping everybody's seat warm while they play and _you_ do not." And Giselle is so close to Myka that Helena is on her feet now, standing at the chain link fence.  
  
"Giselle."  Helena is scolding.  "Stop it."  
  
"Stay out of it, Hel."  
  
"Don't talk to her like that."  Myka says narrowing her glare on Giselle.  
  
"And you stay out of my relationship with my girlfriend."  Giselle pokes at Myka's shoulder with a finger.  "You'd also do well to remind yourself that she is, in fact, _my_ girlfriend."  
  
Myka glares.  Giselle glares back at her.  
  
"Okay, I think it's time to call a time out on you two." Helena's voice wavers this time and neither of them looks at her but Myka can sense she's closer now, no longer behind the fence but moving toward them.  
  
"Helena.  _Go_."  Giselle orders and turns her glare on Helena.  
  
"Giselle. _No_."  Helena responds and she's beside them now, putting a hand on Giselle's shoulder and gently pushing her back.  "And if you touch her again," Helena says, "there will be no relationship left for you to be so territorial about."  
  
"You don't have to worry about me doing _anything_ with her anymore."  Giselle says turning away with only a momentary glance at Myka.  "Myka is off the team."  
  
"Giselle, you're overreacting!"  
  
"Get your little girl toy off of my diamond!"  
  
Helena turns back around.  "Myka?  What is going _on_ with you today?"  
  
Myka just shakes her head as Helena steps toward her.   Myka steps back and she drops her mitt to the ground and blinks away the tears that sting in her eyes.  
  
"Myka."  Helena calls again.  
  
Myka takes off running.  
  
***  
  
Myka is pulling her long-sleeve shirt off in the girl's locker room when Helena finds her, she's carrying Myka's mitt in her hand.  And the older girl averts her eyes as Myka puts her softball shirt back on.    
  
Myka slams the locker door closed when she's done and she sees Helena flinch out of the corner of her eye as the sound echoes throughout the locker room.  
  
"I kind of had a feeling you weren't exactly joking around earlier."  Helena says quietly, still standing at the end of the row of lockers, clutching into Myka's mitt.  She looks back at Myka now, "When you told me to stop looking at you."  
  
Myka stuffs the long-sleeve shirt into her bag and let's it fall to the ground.  
  
"What do you want?"  Myka asks, leaning her head against the locker, closing her eyes at the feel of cool metal against her now definitely overheating forehead.  
  
She can hear Helena moving closer to her but when the older girl stops Myka opens her eyes to glance at Helena, she is just over an arms length away.  
  
"I want you to tell me what's wrong."  
  
"Same as always."  Myka whispers. "Me.  I'm wrong.  Everything about me.  Wrong."  
  
"Myka."  
  
"I don't need a lecture."  
  
Helena sighs and steps closer.  She sets Myka's mitt down on the bench just beside her and leans into the lockers just beside Myka.  
  
"No lecture."  Helena says softly.  "Just a question."  
  
Myka turns to face Helena now, leaning into the locker to mirror her stance.  She blinks and tears cascade down her cheeks.  Helena takes another step closer and brings her hand to Myka's cheek, gently brushes all those tears away with the backs of her fingers.  
  
"Why would you get into it with Giselle over something as stupid as a long-sleeve shirt?" Helena wipes Myka's other cheek free of tears now.  "What's _really_ bothering you?" 

Myka reaches up for Helena's hand, grasps it tightly for a moment before bringing the hand and those fingers to her lips.    
  
She watches Helena's expression closely.  Helena's brows that furrow.  Helena's lips that part just slightly.  Helena's breathing that doesn't seem to flow as evenly anymore.  Helena's cheeks with the faintest flush of pink.  Helena who isn't pulling away.  
  
Helena takes in one long, unsteady breath through those parted lips.  Exhales through her nose as she presses her lips together, as Myka presses her lips into Helena's skin.    
  
But Myka doesn't kiss her, she instead takes in several deep breaths and closes her eyes before letting Helena's hand fall from her grasp.  Before letting her own hand fall to her side.  
  
Myka turns to sit on the bench, buries her head into her hands, and braces herself.  
  
Helena's gasp is almost immediate.  
  
"Myka Bering."    
  
Helena seats herself beside Myka and pulls at her arm, brings it into her lap.  
  
"Myka."    
  
Helena already has tears in her eyes when Myka meets her gaze and her expression, Myka's sure, is that look of exasperation that she hasn't seen anything of in quite a long time.  Helena takes in slow, steady breaths through those barely parted lips of hers as she stares at the bruise on Myka's arm and then returns her gaze back to Myka eyes.  
  
"Don't you tell me a tether ball did this."  Helena glares.  
  
Myka actually puffs out a small laugh at the thought and Helena is shaking her head.  Pouting that lip.    
  
"It's not funny."    
  
"No, it's not funny."  Myka says, smiling at Helena softly.  "It's just," Myka shakes her head, "typical."  Myka pulls her arm from Helena's grasp now.    
  
"We have to tell someone, Myka.  He can't get away with this.  He can't keep getting away with-"  
  
"Don't _worry_ about it."  
  
"Myka."  
  
" _No_."  Myka glares at Helena now.  "Just leave it alone.  _You_ will only make it worse."  
  
Helena's tears are streaming down her face now and Myka has to look away.  She stares straight ahead.  
  
"Please, just let it go."  Myka is trying her damnedest not to cry again.  She's trying so very hard.  
  
"I'm not letting it go, Myka."  Helena all but growls.  "He's a menace, a bully.  He is a _child abuser_.  He is _hurting_ you!  I'm not just going to let that go."  
  
And if Myka does cry now, it isn't because of the bruise or because of her dad or because it will get worse for her.  It's because Helena is crying and Helena is upset and Helena _will_ tell someone, she'll get involved and Myka's dad will _know_.  Somehow, Myka thinks, he will know, and then somehow it will come back to Helena. 

He will find a way to hurt her.  Only Helena won't be used to it.  Helena won't know what to do with the hurt and the pain and the whatever else it is Myka knows or thinks her father to be capable of causing.   
  
"You know, my dad doesn't hurt me."  Myka says quietly.    
  
"Myka?"    
  
"It can't really hurt if you don't really care."  
  
Helena is shaking her head.  "You scare me when you say stuff like that, Myka."  
  
"I'm not trying to scare you."  Myka sighs. "I'm trying to reassure you.  That I'm fine.  I _am_ okay.  Bruises fade away but _you_ care too much.  _You_ can be hurt."  
  
"Of _course_ I care!  You shouldn't have them in the first place."  
  
"You can't say anything, H.G."  Myka lowers her head again.  "Promise me you won't get involved."  
  
"Myka Bering."  Helena whispers her name and she's shaking her head.  Myka buries her face into her hands again.  
  
"Stop saying my name."  Helena's hands are on her arms now.  "Forget it, just go."  Myka can't hold back her tears anymore.  Helena pulls her closer, wraps her arms around Myka.  "Leave me alone."    
  
"Myka."  
  
She pulls against Helena's grasp on her.  "Stop, please.  Just leave me alone!"  
  
"Einstein."  
  
Myka sits up and breaks herself free of Helena's grasp entirely.  
  
"I don't care."  Myka says.  She stands to her feet now.  "I don't even fucking _care_ about what happens to me.  And if you want to tell then _go_.  I won't care what happens to you either."  
  
Helena is quiet for a long time and Myka can't look at her because Myka will fall apart beneath her gaze.  Myka just needs her to walk away.  Myka needs to _get away_.  
  
Myka reaches for her bag and Helena is on her feet, stepping toward Myka but Myka holds out her hands and is shaking her head.  
  
It stops Helena in her tracks but the surge of tears down the older girls face, as she bites on her bottom lip and closes her eyes, takes in a deep shaky breath?  Those tears are relentless. 

"You promised me, Myka."  Helena cries.  "You promised me you wouldn't talk to me like this ever again."  Helena wipes away more tears.   
  
"You never respect my space."  Myka cries now, too, and she's searching for all the wrong things to say.  All the most hurtful lies she can pull from virtually nowhere.  "You never leave me alone.  You never stop teasing me. You can't be my friend because I make you feel better about yourself.  Because I _like_ you.  Because you're-"  
  
"Same tired old argument you're always trying to make, Myka."  Helena interrupts her.  "You know, one day you'll become the mature individual that I really _hope_ you are going to grow up to be and you'll just talk to me like a normal person.  Like the person that I care so much about.  _Without_ sugar.  Without _drama_."  Helena pauses and Myka looks up at her as she forces a small smile and nods, "You'll talk to me like the person that I," and Helena laughs softly through her tears, "that I _different kind of love_ so very very much."    
  
She pauses again and her smile is gone.  Replaced by that pathetic pout that Myka always _always_ just wants to kiss away like it has no business being on her face in the first place.  
  
Then Helena adds, "Like a person who actually cares about me, too."  
  
Myka squints her eyes, opens her mouth to speak but stops when Helena shakes her head.  
  
"I don't want to hear what you have to say to me right now.  You come find me when you're ready to be my friend again."  
  
Helena leaves.  
  
***  
  
Helena is gone.  
  
When Myka returns to the softball field, Helena is not there and the game is halfway to ending.  Her team has a fifteen point lead.  
  
Giselle catches a glimpse of Myka before she can leave and she tells her to sit down in the bleachers if she values her high school reputation.  
  
Myka doesn't really.  She didn't even know she had one.  But she resigns herself to staying until the end of the game, partially because she can't stand the conflict but also because she has nowhere else to go until Pete's wrestling match is over.    
  
And he had long ago excused her from ever having to sit inside that stuffy gym with a room full of sweaty teenage boys in tights.  
  
Myka takes up a space in the bleachers.  
  
***  
  
The field eventually clears out and Myka finds herself sitting side by side in the bleachers with Giselle who is too quiet for too long before she eventually says, "We have a couple of things to talk about."  
  
Myka doesn't say anything but she looks to Giselle, as best she can with the sun in her eyes, and she waits.  
  
"To start, if you want to burn up in the sun with a long sleeve shirt on then you can but you should do it because you actually want to burn up.  Not because you're trying to keep your life a secret."  
  
Myka sighs and she feels more tears pooling in her eyes.  She licks her lips and blinks away moisture.  "She told you?"  
  
"I didn't give her a choice."  Giselle responds immediately.  "Helena doesn't cry often."  
  
"Really?"  Myka wants to smile but Giselle shoots her a look.  
  
"Helena doesn't have much _reason_ to cry around me."  It's a dagger to Myka's heart.  "I almost stopped the game trying to get her to _breathe_ properly and long enough to tell me what happened."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Yeah."  Giselle nods.  "Oh."  
  
"Is she okay?"  
  
"She's not okay."  Giselle says.  "But even her not being okay is more okay than you are."  
  
"I'm fine."  
  
"You're _not_ fine, Myka."  Giselle shakes her head.  "You can keep telling yourself you're fine but look at how you're trying to get that message across."  
  
"She wouldn't leave me alone."  
  
"You don't _want_ her to leave you alone, so why would you _tell_ her to leave you alone?" Giselle asks and she raises her voice just the tiniest bit when she asks it.  "Look, Kid, I... _understand_ where you're at right now and you are not at _fine_.  When you have to hurt the person you care most about in this world just to try and prove that you're fine?  You are the farthest from fine that you can possibly be."  
  
Myka remains quiet.  
  
"I'm not going to kick you off the team."  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"Mainly because Helena begged me not to before I made her tell me why."  Giselle sighs now.  "And now that your _relationship_ to one another makes more sense, I'm feeling a bit more sympathetic.  And maybe the tiniest bit guilty."  
  
Myka wipes at her tears.  "Thank you."  
  
"But you need to apologize to Helena."  And Giselle says this with a very pointed stare at Myka who can only nod in response.  "And you had better make it the most heartfelt apology you have ever in your life spoken before."  
  
"I will."  
  
"That doesn't mean you get to kiss my girlfriend."  
  
Myka arches a brow at Giselle who smirks at her.  
  
"Don't act like you weren't thinking about _trying_."  She teases and Myka glares at her, albeit playfully.  
  
"Do you know where she is?"  
  
"She went home."  Giselle smiles now.  "Probably to swim her anger away."  
  
Myka only somewhat smiles at that because she knows from experience.  
  
"I said awful things to her."  
  
Giselle nods.  "You did."  Myka sighs.  "But I talked to her and I think she has a better idea as to _why_ you said those things."  
  
" _I_ don't even know why I said those things." Myka presses her lips together and takes in a deep breath.  
  
"Same reasons I used to treat my best friend like shit in seventh grade."  Giselle smirks and shakes her head.  "You care about her, you don't want her to get hurt because of you, so you control the hurt yourself.  It's like a _safe_ pain, pushing people away before the real pain comes.  But it hurts just as bad for them, Myka, we just don't know it because it doesn't hurt _us_.  We're _used_ to being pushed away, emotionally."  
  
"Are _we_?"  Myka asks, turning to Giselle now.  And Giselle smirks and nods.  
  
"Yes."  She says.  " _We_ are."  
  
"Your dad, is he..."  
  
"I don't know... where he is."  Giselle actually shrugs then. "I don't care either."  
  
"Uh, Mykes."  Myka and Giselle both turn to meet Pete's questioning stare from the side of the bleachers.  "Are you okay?"    
  
"Yeah, I'm fine."  Myka turns back to Giselle. "Well, not _fine_ I guess but better."  Giselle nods.  
  
"The next time you have a problem, kid, just try _talking_ it out.  And if you can't talk to Helena without lashing out at her, talk to _someone else_."  
  
"She's just _so_ persistent."  Myka knows she's pouting. 

"And I talked to her about that, too."  Giselle nods.

"I just don't want her getting caught in the line of fire."  
  
"And that's exactly how you could have told her your concerns."  Myka is sighing her own disappointment in herself.  "Also, that girl is a lot tougher than she lets on."  Giselle smiles now.  "But the next time you need to talk, go see my mom."  Myka's eyes widen.  
  
"My social studies teacher?"    
  
Giselle nods.  "Yes, _Einstein_ ," and she means to poke fun at Helena's nickname for her, Myka is sure, "that's what makes her the perfect person to talk to."  
  
"Okay."  
  
"Also,"  Myka waits.  "I'm sorry I poked you.  I shouldn't have.  I mean, even if you weren't dealing with bullshit, I shouldn't have but especially because you _are_ , I'm sorry."  
  
" _Mykes_."  
  
"I'm coming, Pete."  Myka says looking down at him and he arches his brow and starts walking off.  Myka turns to Giselle now and smiles.  "Thank you, Giselle.  And I'm sorry, too, about the arguing and the... everything."  
  
And Myka isn't really expecting it, when Giselle moves in closer to her and wraps her arms around her, but the girl _hugs_ her.  And it's weird and awkward, for Myka, because they have such an unspoken _thing_ _,_ the two of them, about _proximity_ and touching that isn't sports or workout related.  And it may or may not have to do with their shared attraction to Helena or the fact that Helena calls them Thing 1 and Thing 2 on occasion but never tells them _who_ is Thing 1 and _who_ is Thing 2.  
  
When they part, Myka grins and says, "You're a softie at heart."  
  
"Well don't think this means you can cry on my shoulder whenever you're feeling hormonal."  Giselle jokes.  
  
"There's always H.G.'s shoulder."  Myka teases and winks.  
  
"Yeah, if you haven't pissed her off, _again_."  Giselle teases back.  Myka gives Giselle a very exaggerated shrug as she stands and makes her way down the bleachers.  "You know what get out of here, with your long ole giraffe-neck-looking self.  And you had better _fix it_."  
  
"I will fix it."  Myka nods.   " _Bye_ , Giselle."  
  
" _Bye_ , Felicia."  
  
***  
  
"Who is Felicia?"  Pete asks on their way home.  
  
Myka shakes her head.  "I have _no_ idea."  
  
"I can't keep up with all their nick names for you."  Pete shrugs.    
  
"Nor can I, Pete.  Nor can I."  
  
***  
  
They're in Pete's living room watching some godawful after-school special because Pete likes making fun of them and also making fun of Myka because she is so easily traumatized by them.    
  
But today Pete isn't really making fun so much as he's being oddly quiet and glancing at Myka occasionally and then back at the TV.  
  
"What, Pete?"  
  
"What _what_?"  He asks.  
  
"You keep looking at me like you want to say something."  
  
"How can you even _tell_ I'm looking at you?" He asks moving in close to examine her glasses, as though that is the key.  
  
"It's called peripheral vision."  Myka rolls her eyes.    
  
"Dude, why didn't you tell me you could see through walls?"  Myka turns around and glares at Pete.  "What?  All these years I've been changing in the bathroom and you can just _see through the wall_?"  He gasps. "When H.G. is changing?  No wonder you always have that awkward crooked smile on your face when you're around her."  
  
"I'll murder you."    
  
"Oh yes, speaking of murdering people."  Pete sits back and touches the tips of his fingers together, as if in deep thought.  
  
"Peripheral vision is just what you see out of the side of your eye.  As opposed to looking directly _at_ something."  The words practically soar out of Myka.  
  
"You just _had_ to get that out, didn't you?"  And Pete is shaking his head and squinting at her accusingly.  
  
"God, yes."  Myka rolls her eyes.  "Sometimes I just don't know how we are in the same grade."  
  
"Because your smart ass skipped first grade, that's how."  And it's Pete's turn to roll his eyes.  "But on a more serious note..."  
  
"Do you remember that one girl you liked in sixth grade who always wore skirts and you told me you thought she was a pescatarian?"  
  
"Yeah?  And?  I still think she's a pescatarian."  
  
" _Presbyterian_."  Myka says slowly.   
  
"Smart is your thing, Mykes."  Now Pete holds up his arm and flexes, wags is eyebrows.  "Handsome is mine."  
  
"Good God, your mother created a monster."  
  
"Although, not so smart today, I would wager," he starts, lowering his arm again, "considering that H.G. came and tracked me down and asked me to talk to you, as if _I'm_ the one, out of the both of us, who has any sense."  
  
Myka stills and closes her eyes.  
  
"And I'm guessing that has something to do with why you and _My Girlfriend's Girlfriend_ were having a heart-to-heart, and you better tell me now if she threatened you in any way because I will put the hurt on her." And he pops his knuckles.  "Also guessing this all snowballed from our previous discussion about the subject of my _earlier_ death threat.  And you're really racking up the dead bodies here, Mykes."  
  
"I have to apologize to her."  
  
Pete grimaces.  "Good luck with that, I guess?  She seemed really upset, Mykes.  And I know I kind of give you a hard time about her a lot, like saying you need to stick up for yourself and hit back with the sass, but I think _maybe_ we let our emotions wreak a tiny bit of havoc this time around?"  
  
"A lot of havoc."  Myka corrects.  
  
"I was trying to ease the blow but yes, _a lot_ of havoc."    
  
Myka sighs.  "I _really_ need to apologize to her."  And Pete widens his eyes.  
  
"And then there's still the matter of my _previous_ death threat."  
  
"Pete-"  
  
"Mykes." He's already shaking his head.  "You already know that crap you pulled with H.G. isn't going to work with me, so please don't even try."  
  
Myka knows it very well.    
  
She slumps into Pete and he immediately wraps his arms around her as tears begin to slide from her eyes.  They don't move until Ms. Jane finds them asleep that way an hour later.  
  
***  
  
Myka asks Ms. Jane to take her by the apartment where she runs in and grabs a bag of clothes and tells her mother that Ms. Jane is taking her to Helena's and she may or may not just have Helena take her to school tomorrow.  And her mother arches a brow and, much to Myka's surprise, doesn't question the fact that Myka hasn't even asked permission.  Instead, she asks her, "Why _this_ time?"  
  
Myka gives her that same guilty look that requires no response.  
  
"To apologize."  Is what her mother says as Myka nods.  She sighs and turns her attention back to her cooking magazine.  "Your dad is getting out of the shower."  
  
And that's Myka's cue to sprint down the stairs and out the door before her dad ever has time to know she's been home.  
  
***  
  
Ms. Jane clears her throat and shifts in her seat before she eventually says, "Myka." And her voice is very different, Myka thinks. Like Helena's voice before Helena is about to ask her about her week and her weekend and her family and her _dad_.  So Myka braces herself.  
  
"You know your mom and I used to be really good friends."  Myka looks to Ms. Jane because this is probably the most obvious thing she has ever said to her.  "Of course you know."  Ms. Jane smiles.  "My point is that somewhere along the line things just came to a head and lines were drawn and crossed and drawn again."  
  
"Like when you stopped allowing Pete to come to the apartment."  Myka says quietly.    
  
Ms. Jane nods.  "Yes.  Exactly that."  
  
"I understand."  
  
"I miss your mom a lot.  I mean, the way we _used_ to be, but she's become so used to how _miserable_ things can be that she tends to push out all of the good."  
  
Myka hears Giselle's voice in the words that Ms. Jane is speaking and she can't help but wonder if these conversations were planned.  Like an intervention, or if things are just coming together this way coincidentally.  She supposes it isn't just coincidence that Ms. Jane is describing her mother exactly as Giselle described _her_ just hours earlier.  
  
She supposes it isn't planned either.  
  
"I know that you are going through some really confusing things right now, Myka, and I just want you to know that if you need to, you can come to me."  Myka just watches Ms. Jane now, who smiles softly and nods when she glances to Myka.  "I'm sorry if I haven't made that obvious to you before, but I hope you can still see me like a second mother.  Like you used to."  
  
Myka smiles now as Ms. Jane is pulling up to Helena's house and she reaches for her things and gathers them into her lap.  
  
"You'd be my _only_ mother."  She says.  " _My_ mother is apparently as bad a mother as she is a friend."  
  
"Your mother is _scared_."  Ms. Jane corrects.  "Do not confuse those two things. And I have _tried_ to help her, Myka.  To help all three of you but she's scared for the both of you girls.  She thinks you're better off there because at least you have a home."  
  
Myka just stares at Ms. Jane now.  Waits for something more.  A better explanation, maybe.  And Ms. Jane sighs and turns back toward the road.    
  
"You know I'm a mandated reporter, Myka."  
  
Myka bites her lip and nods.  
  
"I know."  She says softly.  And Ms. Jane just nods, too.  
  
"Maybe you should pack a bag when you get home."  Ms. Jane adds.  "Bring some of your books and things to the house.  I'm sure Helena would be happy to help."  
  
"I don't want her anywhere _near_ him."  
  
Ms. Jane smiles now and looks back to Myka.  
  
"I hope you stay this close to _your_ best friends.  It will be better for you, in the end."  Ms. Jane adds with another nod.  Then she's waving Myka off.  "Go on then, I hear you have some _major_ graveling to do."  
  
Ms. Jane winks at her then and Myka rolls her eyes dramatically while gathering her things because  _everyone_ always seems to know _everything_ about her life.  
  
"Thank you for driving me to my _very end_ , Ms. Jane."    
  
"Anytime, Sweetheart."  
  
***  
  
It is actually hot outside and Helena is swimming laps in the pool.  When she sees Myka, she swims at least five more laps and Myka knows that she is definitely very upset.  But nevertheless, she is Helena and when she eventually swims up to where Myka stands, she masks her hurt entirely.  
  
Giselle was right, Myka thinks, Helena is tougher than she looks.  
  
"Did you bring your swimsuit?"  Helena asks and Myka nods.  Helena hums her approval.  "I suppose I don't call you Einstein for no reason at-."  
  
"I care about you, H.G."  The words practically fly out of Myka's mouth.  
  
Helena falls quiet and she averts her eyes to somewhere across the pool.  
  
"I care about you _a lot_."  Myka adds.  "It's just... maybe sometimes I think I care too much.  More than I should but I don't know..." Myka pauses and pulls at her own hair, bites her lip.  A recent habit that's replaced her ability to shrug things off when she can't find the exact words to say.  "I don't know when I go from just caring about you to caring too much about you because I've never cared about anyone before. I mean, not like this and I..."  
  
"You should get in."  Helena interrupts her.  "Before the sun goes down.  It'll be too cold then."  
  
"Right."  Myka nods.  "Okay."  
  
***  
  
"So."  Helena is pulling herself along the pool as Myka walks the length of it toward the steps, dressed in her swimsuit now.  "You were saying?"  
  
Myka thinks this scene sounds painfully familiar.  
  
"I'm sorry, H.G.  For saying a lot of awful things to you that I didn't mean." Helena stops.  "For being a brat."  Helena arches a brow and waits.  Myka sighs. "Again."  
  
"Hmm." Helena is shaking her head now and also sighs.  Myka stops where she sits on a step into the pool and is about to step in but Helena holds her hand up.  "I cannot accept that apology."  
  
Now Myka is arching her brow and turns to look down at Helena from where she stands.  
  
" _Okay_?"  She could have guessed it wouldn't be this easy.  
  
"Oh, I know."  Now Helena is smiling.  The smile is devilish.  That's the only way Myka can truly define it.  As _of the devil_.  "I will accept your apology _if_ you jump into the pool off the diving board."  
  
"What?"  Myka asks and she's sure her face relays her confusion with great accuracy.  
  
Helena's smile widens, as if it even could.  
  
"Yes.  And do that flippy thing you and Peter always do."  
  
"A flip?" Myka tries not to smile.  
  
"Yes, _that_."  
  
"I don't understand."  
  
"Maybe I _shouldn't_ call you Einstein anymore."  Helena is rolling her eyes and then says, dawning an American accent.  "Do a flip off the board and I will accept your mediocre apology.  For starters only."  
  
Myka does smile now.  "Your American accent is kind of atrocious."  
  
"Let's see you do English better."  
  
"The difference is that I'm not _trying_."  Helena glares at her.  
  
"Well, you act as though you can't understand me sometimes."  
  
"Because you say things that don't make sense sometimes.  Why do you want me to-"  
  
"Time is ticking, Einstein."  Helena cuts her off again and waves her hand as she turns away from Myka.  "The sun will be going down and it will be getting very _very_ cold."  
  
"Your pool is heated." Myka crosses her arms.  
  
"Well, it's not heated right _now_."  Helena reaches a hand up toward Myka.  "Hand me those gorgeous specks that were given to you by some amazing person that you know and care about and would do _anything_ for, including a flip off the diving board."  
  
Myka cannot help but roll her eyes as she removes her glasses and hands them to Helena.    
  
"I haven't got all day, Darling." She's waving her hand toward the diving board now.  
  
Myka's cheeks burn at the sentiment and she makes her way to the diving board, Helena watching her with a grin on her face the entire way.  
  
"I'm not sure I care _that_ much about you anymore."  Myka teases as she steps onto the diving board.  She's pretty sure Helena is making some sort of gesture or facial expression in response but Myka is too far away to decipher what is what on the blur that is Helena Wells.    
  
"I'm sorry Love, I know you're blind so let me describe to you in full detail just how very pained I am by your words."  There's a moments pause and then Helena says, "Oh, that was the end of my description."   Myka glares in her general direction.  "Flippy jump."  Helena adds.  " _Now_."  
  
"Maybe I should give _you_ a nick name."  Myka says, walking to the edge of the diving board.  
  
"We have already established that you _do_ have a nick name for me."  Myka waits because she knows it's coming.  "Future Mrs. Bering, isn't it?"  And Helena's grinning, she can hear it in the older girl's voice.  It's been a running joke between them since the night Myka had playfully proposed to her.  
  
It had tested Myka's resolve every single time.  But every single time that Helena joked about it in proximity to Giselle, it became _so_ very worth it.  Myka has grown used to it in the past couple of months.  So used to it, in fact, that it doesn't even make her blush anymore.  
  
"I'm going to flippy jump into this pool," Myka starts, "and then I'm going to flippy drown you in it, _Future Mrs. Bering_."  
  
At that, Myka steps back to get a bit of a running start and jumps, flips, canon balls into the pool.  She lands far enough forward that she just catches Helena's squeal of protest as her body hits the water and splashes Helena in the process.  And she swims to Helena's side, where she sits on a pool step, and her laugh, when Myka resurfaces, is a lot closer than she had estimated.  
  
They are face to face and Helena hums away her amusement, the devilish grin replaced by a soft smile as she rests her head against her hand, her elbow propped along the side of the pool.  
  
"You look more like a Mrs. King."  Myka smiles because it's a joke, or meant to be,  and she doesn't expect Helena's smile to disappear as quickly as it does.  Helena averts her eyes to somewhere across the pool before she returns her gaze to Myka, tilts her head to the other side.  
  
"I think I might keep my maiden name when we get married, Einstein."  She's reaching for Myka's glasses, unfolding the frames.  "Not that we _can_ get married." Helena fits Myka's glasses into place, tucking them gently behind her ears, pushing them further onto her nose with a solitary finger.  
  
Myka exhales a shaky breath and she thinks she might be shivering but the sun is still far enough in the sky to warm her skin, so Myka is not so sure her chills are temperature related.  
  
"One day the country will come to its senses."  Myka says softly and she mirrors the small and almost doubtful smile that Helena gives her.  " _Mrs. Bering-Wells_?"  
  
Helena grins now.  "Mrs. Bering-Wells."  She repeats and Myka looks away now, somewhere across the pool, across the yard, anywhere else because the way Helena is smiling at her right now is too real and genuine and also too good, Myka thinks, to be anything close to the truth.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Is what she thinks to say now and she bites on her bottom lip, reaches a finger into her own hair to pull at it and looks back at Helena.  "I panicked.  I was _really_ mean to you.  Unnecessarily mean.  You shouldn't want to even fake-marry someone who doesn't care about you."  
  
"You don't care about me?"  Helena asks her quietly, and somewhat expectantly, because she knows the statement isn't true.  "Myka?"  
  
"I do but I'm also," Myka pauses to think and imagines herself with her pen and her notepad and all the time in the world to say the right thing, "reckless." This is where she eventually settles.  "I have been reckless with your feelings and our friendship, I think."  
  
A coy smile crosses Helena's lips now and she arches her brow and tilts her head slightly to the side, as if to really examine Myka.  "How old are you again?"  
  
"Fourteen."  
  
"You sound like you're thirty."  Helena smiles.  "Also, it was a rhetorical question.  I know how old you are, Einstein."  
  
Now Helena's hand is on her arm, touching her bruise and Myka flinches slightly at the contact because one, it's Helena, and two, the skin there is still tender and still very sore.  
  
"Sorry."  Helena apologizes when Myka shuts her eyes tight and her next touch is more gentle than the first.  Myka hears her sigh as she guides her to turn so that she can get a better look at the bruise.  
  
She's been quiet too long when Myka finally opens her eyes.  She's not surprised to see Helena with tears streaming down her face.  She's more surprised that it's taken her this long to start crying again.  So Myka turns back to facing her and reaches her hand up but stops short as she stares at her hands, dripping with water.  She rolls her eyes at herself but wipes away Helena's tears anyway, leaving damp streaks across her face.  
  
"I'm sorry, H.G."  Myka says again in a whisper.  
  
"I hate him for you."  Helena says softly.  Myka lowers her arms back into the water.  
  
"I don't hate him enough?"  Myka asks.  
  
"Do you?  At all?"  Helena's eyes are on hers, almost glaring, and Myka has an overwhelming urge to kiss those angry lines in her forehead away.  Helena shakes her head.  "The way he treats you..."  
  
"That's life, H.G."  
  
"No, Myka.  That's _your_ life.  That's not how things are _supposed_ to be."  Helena sighs.  "Sometimes I think you hate yourself more than you hate him."  
  
Myka lowers her head but catches Helena's gaze out of the corner of her eye.  "Maybe I do."  
  
Helena's eyes widen at that and more tears stream down her face.  She's shaking her head again and licking her lips then pressing them tightly together.    
  
"Don't say that."  She whispers.  " _Please?_ "   
  
Myka shakes her head now, too.  "I _really_ wish you wouldn't care so much."  
  
Helena smiles softly through her tears.  "Is this why you think you can care too much about me?  Because you hate that I care so much about you?"  
  
"I don't hate it.  I just..."  Myka looks away, shakes her head again, looks back at Helena.  "Things will only get worse.  Just like the last time, it will only make matters worse.  He won't leave marks or bruises.  He'll just make me work and do chores and ground me and throw away my books, strip my room down, and take away _everything_ that I have in my life that helps me forget that he's my dad."    
  
Myka doesn't know she's crying until Helena's wet hands are on her cheeks, wiping away tears and she wipes her face with her own now-dry upper arm.    
  
"And then there's the way he looks at you and the way he says your name.  I don't think I could protect you."  She pauses.  "If I had to."  
  
"Myka."  
  
"I can't even protect myself."    
  
Helena's smile is sympathetic now.  "It's okay.  You don't have to protect me.  You shouldn't feel like you need to protect me.  It's not something you should be worrying about."  
  
Myka laughs softly and wipes more of her tears away and she's shaking her head.  "I'm sorry."  
  
"It's okay, Myka."  Helena smiles and she pulls Myka close to her with her hand on Myka's still-good arm, and she pulls Myka into her grasp, wraps her arms around her as Myka leans into her, rests her ear over Helena's beating heart.    
  
Myka wraps her arms around Helena's waist under the water.   Flattens her water-wrinkled palms across Helena's back and wishes they weren't in the water at all.  Because this is rare, this is a rare thing that Helena hasn't really done before and she wants to feel how warm Helena is and not how cold the water is  
  
Helena pulls Myka in closer.  They sit this way for the longest time, until the sun has gone down so low that Myka can no longer blame Helena for the goosebumps along her arms.  
  
"I have an idea."  Helena says quietly as Myka reluctantly removes herself from the older girl's embrace.  Helena moves to exit the pool and Myka is wordless, seeing her in her entirety, in a two piece.  Helena holds a hand out.  "First," she smiles, "you should probably stop staring and get out of the pool before you freeze."  
  
Myka nods.  "Right."  Her cheeks flush at being caught with her eyes lingering but she takes Helena's hand and pulls herself out of the pool.  She shivers as Helena leads her to where her towel lays and Helena unfolds it and wraps it around Myka.  
  
"Second, we should distract ourselves for the rest of the night by watching a movie and eating more popcorn than reasonable."  And Helena takes Myka's hand and pulls her into the pool house. There Myka recognizes so many of Helena's _things_.  Like she's slowly been moving in and, actually, probably has.  
  
Myka smirks at Helena.  
  
"What?"  
  
"You're _spoiled_."  
  
"Shut up, Einstein.  Go get your bag, I'm going to shower."  
  
Myka obeys.  
  
***  
  
Helena sets the bowl of popcorn on the table and sits back against the couch now, maybe a little closer to Myka than Myka had been anticipating.    
  
"Is it buttered popcorn and not kettle corn?"  Myka questions.  
  
"You think I haven't lived here long enough to know how you people prefer your popcorn?"    
  
"You people?"  Myka smirks, even though Helena cannot see her from where she sits, leaning back into Myka.  " _Testy_."  
  
Myka doesn't get the opportunity to eat an unreasonable amount of popcorn, or any at all, because Helena is leaning back _further_ into her.  And maybe Myka doesn't feel like moving anymore at all either.  Maybe the only moving that Myka is willing to do is setting her hand gently on Helena's forearm and when the older girl neither moves away or protests, the only _other_ moving Myka wants to do is pulling Helena even closer to her than _that_.  
  
All Myka knows is that by the time Helena presses play on the movie, Helena is leaning into her hold and the damp hair of Helena's head is resting back against her shoulder, wetting her shirt.  And Myka could not care any less because her cheek is resting rather firmly against the top of Helena's head until Helena turns to curl _into_ her and rests her head against Myka's shoulder, nuzzles against the skin of her neck, and drapes an arm across her lap.

Myka is back in September of the previous year.  Back in the darkness of the back seat of Ms. Jane's car.  Leaving the airport with Helena.

Leaving the airport with Helena in her arms.  
  
"Don't drool on me."  Myka whispers and Helena sighs, relaxing further into her.  
  
"Don't be so _comfortable_."  
  
***  
  
By the time the movie is over, whatever the movie even was, Helena is crying and Myka is smiling because Helena is trying hard to hide the fact that she's crying but she's sniffing and Myka knows it isn't from the temperature change from the pool to the warmth of the pool house.  Especially not two and a half hours later.  
  
So when Helena sits up, Myka just continues to smile at her and Helena is rubbing at her eyes as if she has something in them and then she actually says, "I have something in my eye."  
  
And Myka responds with, "Yes, it's called your finger."  And she pulls Helena's hand away from her face and she pulls out her imaginary pen and her imaginary notepad and writes out loud, "You're suddenly self-conscious about crying around me?"  
  
Helena shakes her head.  "It's pathetic exactly how much I cry around you."  
  
"Not as pathetic as that pout you gave me after fifth period today."  Myka smirks.  Helena pulls herself almost entirely away from Myka then and looks down at her hands in her lap, fiddling with the drawstring of her pajama shorts.    
  
"Do I need to take you home right now?"  She asks only glancing momentarily to Myka who shakes her head.  
  
"Can you take me to school in the morning?"  
  
"I can do that."  Helena says softly.  "Would you do me a favor also?"  And now she does look up at Myka who nods and sets her hand over Helena's busied fingers.  They still at the contact and she hesitates, Myka thinks, a little too long before she speaking.  "Will you meet me by Ms. Calder's class after fifth period?  To walk with me to sixth period?  I know you couldn't today but maybe with a little advanced notice..."

"Yes."  Myka interrupts her.  "Helena.  I'll walk with you."  And Helena looks up at her then and smiles just a little before returning her gaze back to Myka's hands still over hers in her lap.  "I'm sorry about today, I was just..."

"Actively avoiding me."  Helena smirks at Myka now.

"Sorry."

"It's okay.  I talked to Giselle." Helena is nodding now.  "And I get it now.  I mean, I understand better."  
  
Myka arches a brow and nods slowly and Helena actually holds her hand then, loosely laces her fingers with Myka's and pokes playfully at her fingertips now.  "Is everything okay?  Because you're kind of acting like everything is not okay right now."  
  
"Fine."  Helena smiles and yawns.  "I could just use your company."  
  
"Okay."  And Myka grasps Helena's forearm again, pulls her gently toward her until Helena stretches out along the couch, rests her head against Myka's lap and closes her eyes.  "You never said if you forgave me."  
  
Myka is running her fingers through Helena's hair now, gently across her scalp, along the side of her neck and against her back.  Helena shivers under the touch and Myka doesn't miss that reaction.  She runs her fingers through Helena's hair again and the older girl squeezes her eyes tight, sniffles once more, and sighs.  
  
"I forgive you, Myka."  Helena says softly. Myka's fingers brush the hair from her temple behind her ear and Helena takes in a long shaky breath and exhales the word "brat" before her breathing eventually softens and evens out.    
  
By the time Myka draws up enough courage to lean forward and kiss Helena's ear, the older girl is fast asleep.


	9. Fourteen & Eighteen (And A Half)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two words: Shit storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I edited this chapter half-asleep. Let's just say that's my excuse for anything you find that needs excusing. I just really wanted to get it up before the weekend so that I can start into the next bit during the weekend.
> 
> All feedback and commentary is so much appreciated! It might take me a while to get back to everyone, but I will eventually! Thank you guys for sticking around for this thing. Still have quite a ways to go..

  
Everything is not _entirely_ okay the next day.    
  
First they oversleep.  And Helena blames Myka for being so comfortable, even after Myka made her wake up and _go to bed_.  And Myka blames Helena's bed in the pool house for being so comfortable, even though Helena spent the entire night curled _into_ her, _against_ her and with her arms wrapped entirely _around_ her.  
  
And waking up like that was shocking in itself for both Myka and Helena because usually Myka is five feet away from Helena on the bed and facing the opposite direction. 

But waking up like that at 0830 when school starts at 0805 is far more shocking than the positions they wake up in.  So they don't think about it or talk about it or question it at all because they are too busy _running late_ for school.  
  
Helena is throwing bananas at Myka and telling her to _eat one or else_ , and Myka left her book bag in Helena's actual house and not her pool house.  So when they split up to save time and Myka goes to the _house_ house, the doors are all locked, and Helena is still in the pool house with the house keys trying to find _something_ to wear. 

Myka goes back to the pool house to grab Helena's keys and Helena has a dress half on and half off, as in half on her head only and half off her body entirely, but the zipper is stuck in that preciously long black hair and Myka is just the right height to both see and fix the problem.  
  
And the first not so bad thing that happens this morning is Myka gently untangling Helena's hair from a zipper on a dress that is not entirely on her body.  By the time the dress _is_ on, Myka's face is flushed from embarrassment and Helena's face is just flushed from the frustration of struggling with a dress that she's already decided she'll burn at the end of the day.    
  
Somehow, they leave the house by 0847 and make it to school by 0856, even with Helena riding a flat tire for the last two or maybe three or maybe four miles.  Although, they won't know this until school is over and Pete has told them that Helena's tire is flat and, judging by the bent rim, has been flat or near-flat for a large portion of their drive.  
  
***  
  
First period is a bust.  They're on campus right as the bell rings for second period, and things finally slow down just a little bit when Myka takes her seat.    
  
There's a short break between second and third periods and Helena finds Myka and reminds her not to forget about waiting for her after fifth period.  And the look that is on Helena's face is worrying all on its own because Helena looks almost embarrassed or ashamed and it is a look she doesn't wear often at all.  So Myka smiles her crooked smile at Helena and she _might_ reach for her hand and tug at her fingers just a little bit as the bell rings for third period and they begin to set off in opposite directions.  
  
The touch works because Helena smiles even if only for a second, and before Myka lets go of her, she says very quietly to Helena, "I will not forget."  
  
Two seconds later they are no longer near each other.  Myka is speed-walking on a cloud much higher than nine to her very laughable freshman-requirement Life Skills class and Helena, she thinks because she's _definitely_ thinking about Helena right now, has Economics.  
  
***  
  
Myka's Life Skills teacher has a presenter from a local clinic on hand to show everyone how to properly place a condom onto a banana and she's suddenly thankful she didn't have the time to eat hers this morning.  But then Myka remembers that she left the damn thing in Helena's still like-new car and the high today is 92 degrees Fahrenheit with an 80% chance of Helena's car smelling like a baked banana for the next ever.    
  
She's already planning how to use her newly discovered skill of so-called adorability to best charm her way out of _that_ situation.  
  
***  
  
Fourth period, no matter what subject you actually have, is a class that most kids and especially Pete (who had, not at all surprisingly, coined the title to begin with), would call Introduction to Lunch.  
  
Even Myka had to admit she was hungry.  So hungry, in fact, that she thought very longingly about that banana that she had left behind in Helena's car.  Until she remembered the show that she'd witnessed in third period and nearly lost her appetite again entirely.    
  
She doesn't pay attention to much of her U.S. Government lecture at all.  In fact, she spends the bulk of this class, that isn't spent drooling and then cringing over the abandoned banana, remembering the way she woke up this morning.    
  
With Helena wrapped around her.  With Helena's leg hooked over and behind hers.  With Helena's hand in her hair and Helena's head tucked perfectly beneath her cheek and over shoulder.  
  
Myka is absent-mindedly biting on her bottom lip and twirling a finger around brown locks when she realizes that there's a very good chance Helena drooled in her hair last night.  
  
***  
  
Pete and Myka play the avoid game with Abigail again, only this time they don't even make it as far as the quad.  Instead, they find Helena where she usually sits with Giselle and Jeannie and Claire in the very senior-populated cafe, and Myka leans onto the table, close to Helena's side, and says very calmly, "Don't be mad."  
  
"Why would I be mad?"  And despite her attempted discretion, the entire table falls silent and turns to Helena who then turns to look up at Myka.  
  
Only Giselle thinks to follow up with, "Yeah, Too-Tall, why would she be mad?"  Her brow arch gives away her suspicion and Myka sighs.  
  
"I left my banana in your car."    
  
Half the table groans.  Helena just rolls her eyes.  
  
"So not only did you _not_ eat your banana like I told you to, you left it in my car.  On the hottest day of the year."  Myka thinks this is the first time Helena looks at her like she's the most clueless person in the world, so she just smiles.  The crooked one.  
  
Operation: Be Adorable is in full effect.  
  
Now Helena looks at her like she's the most suspicious person in the world.  
  
"Speaking of bananas," and Pete is forcing his way onto the bench between Claire and Jeannie, who is already protesting, "was anyone else subjected to the old condom-on-the-banana magic show in Life Skills?  Should I be worried that my junk isn't banana shaped?"  
  
"Pete, you are disgusting."  Claire is laughing.  Jeannie is not laughing at all.  
  
Myka groans at the memory.  "Yes."  She stands straight now as Helena reaches into her bag and pulls out her car keys.  
  
"Please go remove the banana from my car before it smells like banana for the rest of eternity."  Helena holds the keys up and gives Myka a _look_ that is something like a smolder but beneath _that_ her lips begin to curl into a smile so soft that it is barely there at all.  
  
"Yes, ma'am."  Now Myka looks to Pete who has already emptied his buffet onto the table and stuffed a sandwich into his mouth.  "Really Pete?"  
  
"What?"  He gestures to the smorgasbord before him.  "I'll save you an apple."  
  
"I'm ordering you a burger."  Giselle speaks up, glancing back at Myka.  
  
"I'm not that hungry."  
  
"You need carbs and protein, Kid."  
  
"A salad," Helena says looking back up at Myka, "with grilled chicken and you had better devour the _entire_ thing."  
  
"The _entire_ confection."  Pete mocks.  
  
"Yes, Mother."  Myka rolls her eyes.  
  
"Don't sass your mother."  Giselle adds.  
  
"Yes, _other_ Mother."  Myka _is_ joking but she's also giving them both the most confused face she can possibly muster because that's just the sort of day this has been.  
  
***  
  
 ~~Myka saves the banana.  Or Myka saves the banana-scented car rather.  Or maybe she doesn't even _save_ the car since it already smells like banana..?~~  
  
Myka _retrieves_ the banana.    
  
Then Myka throws the now-mushy banana away and heads back to the cafe to give Helena back her car keys.  
  
***  
  
Myka eats the grilled chicken salad that Helena bought for her and while she's doing _this_ , Jeannie says _and_ signs, "Happy late birthday, Myka."  Myka smiles, thanks her, and notes that she has always enjoyed Jeannie's sign for her name.  It's a combination between the letter "M" and the sign for the word "smart".  
  
"Yeah, we heard you had a good time."  Claire adds gesturing toward Pete with a nod of her head.  
  
"It was a pretty good time for turning _fourteen_ , I guess."  Pete says with a shrug and some string cheese hanging out of his mouth.  "Fifteen will be better."  
  
"Says the almost sixteen-year-old."  Helena smirks.  
  
"Yeah, it was fun."  Is all Myka adds.  
  
" _Just_ fun?"  Pete arches a brow.  "Understatement of the century for someone who spent the entire night with Abi-" Myka kicks Pete from under the table, "Ow-wah!  What was _that_ for?"  
  
"Where is Abigail anyway?"  Now Jeannie is winking at Myka from across the table, and Myka is trying very hard to bury her face into this salad and cursing her appetite because it's half gone and there's _nowhere_ to hide.  
  
"We've been playing a little game called Avoidance."  Pete offers and Myka rolls her eyes.    
  
"Abigail?  The _creature_?"  Helena smiles at Myka now.  
  
" _Why_ do you call that girl _the creature_?"  Giselle asks almost accusingly.  
  
"Because she's creeping on _my_ Einstein."  Helena responds as though she's stating something obvious and gives Giselle a look to match.    
  
"Uh, you have a _Gigi_.  What about people creeping on _me_?"    
  
"Oh, Darling," Helena reaches up to pat Giselle's cheek, "there are none."  
  
Myka chokes out a laugh and almost chokes on her salad dressing simultaneously.  
  
"To be fair, there are none because Helena has made it very clear to the many that there _were_ that Giselle is taken."  Claire elaborates with a prideful smile, like she's some kind of couples advocate or counselor.  
  
Myka's eye roll goes almost unnoticed except that Helena is looking at her, and kind of tries not to smile at her, and Jeannie is looking at her and makes a gagging expression when she and Myka make eye contact.    
  
Pete is none the wiser, already neck-deep in his third turkey sandwich.  
  
"Hey Romeo?"  Giselle calls looking across Helena to Myka now.  " _You_ should be creeping on _Abigail_.  It's not polite to kiss and run."  
  
Myka is sure she's turning five shades of red.  More so when Helena turns back to her and gasps and smiles and asks, almost too loudly, "You kissed her?" And then stops smiling and asks, "Why does everyone know about this except me?"  
  
"Why do you think?"  Giselle asks elbowing Helena.  
  
Helena is making that pathetically pitiful face again. Myka wants to kiss _her_.  She settles for avoiding eye contact and taking another bite of her swiftly-disappearing salad.  
  
Pete proceeds to summarize the particulars of Myka's fourteenth birthday through a mouthful of sandwich, much to the bittersweet enjoyment of the other girls at the table.  Or most of the other girls at the table.  
  
"You're in trouble."  Helena whispers into Myka's ear.  
  
***  
  
Myka knows Helena's version of "trouble" isn't really trouble so much as it is a series of facial expressions directed at her, all of which just make Myka want to _k_ _iss that ridiculous face_ of Helena's more and more.  A problem that has only exacerbated itself since she discovered what kissing someone you actually want to kiss feels like.  
  
And while she had _really_ wanted to kiss Abigail and _really_ enjoyed kissing Abigail, Myka really _really_ wants to kiss Helena.  She is sure she'd enjoy that, too.  
  
Either way, she picks up Helena's bag in the cafe and throws it over her shoulder, she collects both Helena's _and_ Giselle's trash with hers from the table and tosses it into the garbage.    
  
She even waits patiently and quietly somewhere far enough away to not make witness when Helena says bye to Giselle, although she does notice that Helena's goodbyes to Giselle don't last quite as long as they used to.  
  
When Helena joins her outside of the cafe, and as they begin to walk toward the English building, Helena begins her face assault with an arched brow.  And the longer Myka ignores that arched brow, the less it arches.  Eventually it is just a glare and even that eventually softens back into _t_ _hat face_.  
  
"I'm not so sure that I enjoy this."  Helena finally speaks.  
  
"Enjoy what?"  Myka dares ask.  
  
"You."  Helena says and when Myka looks at her almost concerned she adds, "Getting older.  _Challenging_ my authority."  
  
"I'm carrying your _bag_."  Myka smiles.  "Your authority is unchallenged."  
  
Myka stands just a little bit straighter now because when she does, she's almost taller than Helena as opposed to just as tall as her.  And judging by the look on Helena's face, the arch in her brow that isn't judgmental like before but _curious_ , if not just a little bit pleased, Helena is not as put off by Myka's aging as she so often claims to be.  
  
"I _see_ you trying to be taller than me."  Helena walks into Myka, bumping her shoulder with Myka's shoulder. "It's going to happen eventually.  Soon.  Don't rush it."  
  
Myka just smiles and bumps back into Helena.    
  
***  
  
Helena takes extra care not to pull Myka's hair as she lifts her bag from Myka's shoulders, over her head.    
  
The hall around them is still busy with other students pushing, laughing, talking their way toward class from lunch.  The bell has yet to sound but neither Myka nor Helena questions the five minute lead that's finally given them time to slow down.    
  
Now, standing in front of the locked door to Ms. Vanessa Calder's class, Myka is leaning against the wall facing Helena who leans back against the wall just beside her.  And suddenly things are beginning to feel too slow, so very far from the rush of the morning.  
  
Myka watches Helena's eyes scan the hallway several times.  She's biting on her lip a bit to fervently for a class she's only a teacher's aid in.  For any class at all, really.  
  
"You're doing it again."  Myka eventually says and Helena almost doesn't appear startled when her eyes blink several times before she looks to Myka.  
  
"Huh?"  Is all she manages through her now parted lips, the bottom slightly swollen and red.  
  
Myka fights back an urge that is only faintly familiar to her.  Something she's never felt this strongly before.  Something that screams in her to move forward, to _lunge_ , to hold and pull and tug and _swarm_ this woman in front of her.    
  
Her stomach flips.  
  
Myka tries to hide her sigh as her mind echoes the words _this woman_.  
  
This _beautiful_ woman.  
  
This _goddamn_ beautiful woman.  
  
She swallows hard and faces out into the hallway, shoves her hands into the pockets of her jeans.  
  
"You look like everything is not okay."  It comes out a lot softer than she'd heard it in her own mind but the hall is suddenly quieter than it had been seconds ago.  Less populated, even if only for a moment, so Helena hears her.  
  
When Myka looks back at Helena she's not quite smiling.  She slides along the wall slowly until her shoulder comes to rest against Myka's shoulder and she stays that way, silently, until she finally asks, "Why didn't you tell me?  About Abigail?"  
  
Myka shakes her head.  "I didn't tell  _anyone_ about Abigail.  Everyone else told _everybody_ else."  Myka leans further into Helena then, too.  "Including my dad."  
  
Helena nods her understanding.  
  
"Fair enough."  
  
"Did you _want_ to know?"  
  
Helena blinks a few more times.  Myka thinks this is her way of stalling.    
  
"I want to know whatever you want me to know."  Helena says quietly.  "And you should know that by whatever, I mean absolutely whatever."  
  
"You want me to talk about girly things with you."  Myka accuses with a grin now as she squints her nose at Helena in mock disgust.  Helena who rolls her eyes and tries not to be as amused by that tease as she is so she stands straight now and crosses her arms.  "I bet you want to braid my hair, too."  Myka teases.  
  
"That impossible mane?"  Helena makes herself sound affronted.  
  
"You love it."  Myka smiles.  
  
Helena sighs, rolls her eyes, and continues not looking at Myka. "I do love your curls."  
  
"Remember when you tried to paint my nails when I was ten?"  
  
"Do I remember?"  Helena asks dropping her arms and turning back to Myka.  "There's still a giant glittery purple Myka-shaped stain on my bedroom floor. "  
  
"Would you like one to match in your new princess pad?"  
  
Myka's smile widens and Helena narrows her eyes.  
  
"You are a Myka-shaped brat."  
  
***  
  
Fifth period English is nothing short of a joke. Myka has already read ten times as many books as are required in the basic reading and writing skills class that she's not exactly sure how she got stuck in anyway.    
  
She guesses her writing is just that horrible.  
  
On top of that, her teacher is a bit of a religion nut who occasionally goes off on long tangents about current events for so long that their entire class period is wasted on one-sided debate.    
  
Instead of listening, Myka drifts away into her thoughts.    
  
***  
  
Myka thinks of Helena in the hallway, of Helena standing against the wall.  Helena smiling in that way she does and then pouting and biting her lip in the way she does those things, too.  
  
Myka thinks of herself in the hallway with Helena.  Myka thinks of herself standing in front of Helena, leaning _into_ Helena, one hand against the wall just behind Helena, the other pushing hair away from Helena's shoulder, touching lightly against the newly exposed skin there.  Moving in close to kiss that skin.  
  
Helena's hands, Myka thinks, come to rest against her waist, pull her in close. Then just the tiniest bit closer.    
  
Myka thinks of leaning further into Helena, closing the sliver of a gap between their bodies.  Closing, even, the larger gap that exists between their mouths.  
  
In Myka's thoughts, the halls are quiet, empty.  It is evening and everything is dimly lit.  
  
 _Locked in._   She thinks is what happened.  She and Helena had stayed too long after school, standing against that wall.  Had waited forever for everyone to leave.  For everything to slow down, to come to a stop. To dim and darken.    
  
To be left in solitude.  
  
She pulls from her memory the so many different ways that Helena says her name and she imagines those lips, not fully parted from hers, whispering her name in one of these ways.  In the way that has always caused the most damage to Myka's resolve. That has always taken her days to recover from.  
  
 _Myka,_ she hears Helena say and she brings her hand to Helena's side, pulls the fabric of her dress into her fist.  Pulls at the dress that is just as beautiful on Helena as it is halfway off of Helena.  Pulls Helena closer still, slides her open palm around to the small of Helena's back and lower than that.    
  
She pulls Helena's hips even closer and the older girl smiles into the next kiss.  She says Myka's name again.  Myka kisses her _again_.    
  
Her hand moves up to cup Helena's cheek and she pulls away, imagines Helena's eyes as reduced to mere slits, her breathing incredibly staggered through parted, swollen lips.  Myka moves her thumb over Helena's cheek gently, touches the tip of her nose, settles against lips and over the warmth of Helena's exhalations.  Taps the swell of her bottom lip.    
  
 _I love you,_ Myka imagines herself saying.  _It's a different kind of love._   She adds.  Followed by, _because you love me, too_.  
  
And this time Helena, or the Helena she imagines standing here, kisses her first.  
  
***  
  
"Ms. Bering."  
  
Myka blinks several times as moisture falls from her eyes and she meets the concerned and watchful eye of her teacher.    
  
"Do you need to excuse yourself from the classroom to get your emotions in order?"  
  
"What?"  Myka shakes her head wiping at the tears on her cheeks.  "Oh, no.  No, I'm sorry, Mr. McPherson.  I just,"   Myka sighs and smiles softly, "I had something in my eye."  
  
***  
  
The halls are buzzing again and Myka is leaning into the wall just across the hall from Ms. Calder's class like the obedient little thing that Helena has praised her to be.  
  
"Stranger."  Myka looks up to meet the voice owned by brown eyes not quite as piercing as Helena's but alluring all the same.    
  
"Abigail."  She breathes out and she begins to immediately formulate an apology for all the times she hasn't seen her since yesterday.  "I'm sorry, I..."  
  
"It's not a big deal."  Abigail stops her and she smiles but it's weak and almost as hopelessly pitiful as Helena's pout can be but not quite there on the scale of things Myka. desires.    
  
 _That's_ the word she had been looking for, an hour ago with Helena in the hallway.  The word defined by the feeling that led to Myka's over active imagination which then led to an unstoppable force of _other_ feelings that have set her heart racing at the speed it is _still_ racing at while standing outside of Ms. Calder's class.    
  
Waiting for Helena.    
  
Looking at Abigail.  
  
"I... just wanted to give you this."    
  
Abigail holds up a small bag of Twizzlers with an intricately folded piece of paper around it.  Myka immediately smiles up at Abigail and the other girl's smile brightens.    
  
"Thank you."  Myka says taking the Twizzlers and what she's sure is a letter now that she can see the hearts around her name written across it with a gel pen.  "Thanks, Abigail."  
  
"Well, I'll see you... later?"  Myka nods and as Abigail begins to walk off, Myka calls her name, it stops the girl in her tracks.  Myka walks closer to her, fiddles nervously with the newly acquired objects in her hands and looks down at her feet, presumably to make sure they are still there.  
  
"Maybe we can do something this weekend?"  And Myka glances back up at Abigail whose smile has grown, whose nod is enthusiastic.  The voice of Myka's mother weighs heavily on the back of her mind, reminding her to be more careful with her _friends_.  
  
"I'm free if you are."  
  
"I'll... call you?"  And with another nod in affirmation, Abigail leans into Myka and kisses her at the corner of her mouth, where Myka is sure there is a goofy grin plastered on her face.    
  
"Later, Handsome."  
  
Myka's brows rise as Abigail disappears down the hallway.    
  
"You should see your face right now."  
  
Helena has the most delightfully coy smirk across her lips when Myka turns to meet her gaze head on.    
  
"Please don't."  
  
"I said nothing."  Helena smiles, holding her hands up in mock surrender.  "Although," she stalls again as she moves closer to Myka, "I do need you to not be free this weekend."  Myka gives her a look as Helena slips her arm around Myka's and tugs her toward the exit.  
  
"But Abigail..."  
  
"Just Friday night?" Now Helena's face is hopeful, brows raised and somewhat of a smile on her lips.  "For me?"  She adds.  
  
"That's not fair."  
  
"What's not fair?"  
  
"You know my weakness."  
  
" _What_ weakness?"  Helena asks looking or _trying_ to look a bit offended.  
  
"That face."  
  
Her grin gives her away.  
  
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about."  
  
Myka shakes her head.  "I might go put that banana back in your car."  
  
***  
  
Myka walks Helena to sixth period this day, which is a Tuesday, again Wednesday, and also that Thursday.  
  
Helena hasn't told her why she wants her company between these two classes but Myka more than figures out the reason by Friday afternoon.  
  
***  
  
"H.G. is being followed."  
  
"Myka."  Helena sounds exasperated, she rolls her eyes.  
  
"Excuse me?"  Giselle arches a brow at Myka then eyes Helena because her reaction not only proves to Myka that her suspicions are correct but also that Helena _knows_ and is keeping this thing a secret from even her very-capable-of-doing-something-about-it girlfriend.  
  
Now Helena is covering her face.  
  
"I'm not sorry, H.G."  Myka says then turns to Giselle.  "Pete knows the kid, his name is Leo.  He's _creepy_.  As in a _major_ creep and he's been in trouble for harassing girls before.  He's been following H.G. from Ms. Calder's class to her statistics class across campus."  
  
"Helena?"  Giselle turns to her for confirmation.  
  
"It's not a big deal."  Helena looks up and Giselle is already groaning when Helena tries to give her a reassuring smile but what she actually gives her is that smile that is the least reassuring of all her smiles.  Myka knows it well.  She's sure Giselle does, too.  "He's just a little _odd_.  He doesn't say anything to me when Myka's with me.  It's fine."  
  
And both Giselle and Myka ask at once, "He's _talked_ to you?!"  
  
But Myka and Giselle have a softball game to prepare for so Helena's explanation of what exactly has been happening gets put on hold.    
  
They both ground her to the bleachers.  
  
***  
  
Neither Giselle nor Myka take their eyes off of her for long and when Pete's wrestling match ends before the softball game, he too knowingly plants himself right next to Helena as she does her homework in the bleachers.  
  
"She gets a lot of unwanted male attention."  Giselle tells Myka at some point when they're side-by-side in the dugout.  "How did you know this kid was _following_ her?  And where else is he following her?"  
  
"She asked me to walk with her and she spent most of that walk looking behind us."  Myka is absent-mindedly chewing on a Twizzler that's sticking halfway out of her mouth.  Abigail has been keeping her well-stocked with both those and letters throughout the week.  "I noticed him on Wednesday and again yesterday.  So today I had Pete walk behind him and he followed us the entire way before he went to his sixth period class, which is clear on the other side of campus."  
  
"I'll kick his ass."  Myka turns to Giselle and arches her brow.  "Okay, I won't but I'm going to have some serious words with him."  
  
"Pete took care of that already."  
  
"What, how, why?"  
  
Myka shrugs, turning back to the game and answers all three of Giselle's questions at once with a simple, "He's Pete."    
  
***  
  
He most certainly _is_ Pete.  
  
When the game is ending, there's suddenly a crowd of people running toward the bathrooms and there's shouting and dust flying in the air.  Myka and Giselle catch each others eye at the same time and the look that Giselle gives Myka tells her they're sharing the very same thought because they both saw Helena walk away from the bleachers five minutes ago, Pete giving them a salute as he trailed behind her two minutes after _that._

And they still haven't returned.  
  
They take off after the crowd at the same time and when they make their way through it to the center, they find Pete being held back by one of the wrestling coaches and _Leo_ being picked up off the ground by one of the softball coaches.  Leo's nose is bleeding and his lip is busted and something tells Myka that he'll be sporting quite a black eye come tomorrow morning, but there's still a smirk on his face.  
  
And Helena.  Myka scans the crowd but she doesn't see her.  _Where's Helena?_  
  
"Where's Helena?"  Giselle calls, vocalizing Myka's exact thoughts to Pete.  
  
Pete is considerably distracted.  
  
"You can wipe that smug smile off of your face or I can come over there and do it for you!"  Pete yells at Leo and the wrestling coach is telling him to calm down while the softball coach is demanding answers from either of them.  
  
Leo is grinning now.  It sends panic into Myka's bones.  She still can't find Helena.  
  
"Pete, where's H.G.?"  Myka asks stepping closer to him, blocking his view of Leo.  She puts her hands on his shoulders and he stops struggling against the wrestling coach and looks at her.  
  
"I almost didn't get there in time, Mykes."  Is all he says.  "I just barely made it in time."  
  
" _Where_ is Helena?"  She asks again, a sickening feeling rises from her stomach, into her esophagus.  
  
"I'm right here, I'm here."  And Helena is pushing through the crowd.  She's pushing her way toward Myka when Giselle moves toward _her_ and wraps her arms around her.  So Helena, whose face is red and tear stained with dirt smudged on her cheek, buries that face, that pitiful pouting face, into Giselle's shoulder, and she buries _herself_ almost entirely in Giselle's arms and immediately begins to sob.  

Again she says says, "I'm right here."  
  
Myka turns back to Pete. "What happened?"  
  
"He followed her into the girl's bathroom!"  Pete's face is red and he's seething and his eyes are watering.  Myka has only ever seen Pete _this_ mad once before in her life.  Only once has Pete been this mad and it didn't end well for the person at the other end of this anger.  
  
"Helena?"  Myka looks back to Helena at the sound of Giselle's prompting and Helena is nodding, sobbing into Giselle's shirt.    
  
Clutching onto Giselle.    
  
 _Looking_ at Myka.  
  
"I had to go in there _after_ him.  I had to pull him _off_ of her."  
  
The wrestling coach tells Pete he needs to calm down, that _they'll_ handle this, that Pete should probably make his way to the principal's office to save face.  And that coach, with the help of the softball coach, practically drags Leo away from the softball fields laughing, yelling obscenities at Helena, laughing louder.  
  
Myka can't describe the anger she feels. How badly she wants to go after that kid.  The many things she wants to _do_ to that kid.  But she catches sight of Helena again, watching Myka with tears steaming down her face, then shutting her eyes tight and burying her face back into Giselle.  And all Myka wants to do now is take Helena from Giselle and tell Giselle to. Go _. Away_.  To hold Helena close to her.  To be the one Helena needs.  
  
An angry sob from Pete is what eventually grounds her thoughts.  Grabs her focus.  
  
Myka turns back to Pete, stands squarely in front of him, puts her hands on Pete's cheeks and makes him look directly at her.  
  
"Hey, Pete."  She smiles and he looks at her, wipes at his face and takes in several deep breaths before he responds with a "hey".  She whispers, "You got there in time," and pulls him into her arms and hugs him as tight as she can hug him.  "She's okay."  Myka turns back to where Helena still stands in Giselle's arms, as things begin to settle down and people start to walk away and only the rest of their softball team remains.  "Helena, are you okay?"  Helena looks to her and nods, then turns back into Giselle.  "See, Pete, she's okay.  You _got_ there."  
  
"Mykes, if I had just gone with her to begin with."    
  
"Then he would have _seen_ you and he would have backed off.  He would have tried whatever he was trying to do some other time."  Myka says softly.  "Some other time when she was _alone_.  When you weren't with her at all, when Giselle wasn't with her.  When _I_ wasn't with her."  Myka kisses Pete's cheek.  "She's okay.  Are _you_ okay?"  
  
"Yeah."  And he's clearing his throat now and pulls away from Myka to stand straight.  "I'm good."  Pete walks to Helena and Giselle and he's quiet, hesitant.  Before he opens his mouth to say anything, Helena pulls herself away from Giselle and wraps her arms around Pete, kisses his cheek and buries her face into his shoulder.  
  
"Thank you, Peter."  She's crying again and he holds her close to him.  "I didn't even see... I didn't think he would..." He holds her tighter.  
  
"Hel." Giselle puts a hand on her back.  "It's okay."  
  
There's a hand on Myka's arm then and she turns to find Abigail with a concerned look on her face.    
  
"Hey Stanger."  Abigail almost smiles and Myka turns to her and almost smiles in return.  "Some game.  You okay?"  Myka sighs, looks back to Helena who is moving out of Pete's embrace and stepping back to Giselle.  But not without looking to Myka with that pitiful pout on her lips.  And she looks beyond Myka to Abigail and back to Myka again.  
  
Giselle pulls Helena into her and whispers something into her ear.  Helena nods, still watching Myka, and Giselle kisses her temple just before taking her hand and leading her back toward the softball field.  
  
Myka turns back to Abigail, watching her with concern, and she shakes her head.    
  
"I'm not really okay."  Myka says softly and Abigail slides her hand down Myka's arm and into her hand, lacing their fingers together.  
  
"Do you want to talk about it?"  Abigail asks.  
  
"I do, Abigail, but I..."  And Myka leans into the other girl and kisses her cheek softly. "I have to check on Helena first.  I can't just leave without checking on her."  Abigail twists her lips and nods, reaching to wipe tears away from Myka's face.  
  
"Of course."  
  
"I'll be back."  And Myka leaves Abigail with a quick kiss over her lips before grabbing Pete's arm and following Helena, Giselle, and whatever is left of their team back to the diamond.  
  
***  
  
Giselle dismisses all the girls but has Amanda sitting in the dugout with Helena while she goes to collect Helena's things.  And when Myka and Pete show up, Myka asks Amanda, "Can you walk Pete to the principal's office?  I need to talk to H.G."    
  
Amanda looks up at Pete in a way she has never looked at Pete before and smiles.  "Yeah, not a problem."  She's on her feet and by Pete's side, sliding an arm around his shoulder and wiping away his tears with her free hand and says, "C'mon Superman," as she leads him out of the dugout.  
  
Myka turns to Helena who looks up at her with that face and those tears in her eyes only for a second before she turns away.  Myka sits beside her and they're quiet for a moment until Myka reaches for Helena's hand in her lap and laces their fingers together.    
  
"H.G."  And Helena looks at her and smiles.  It's an attempt at a genuine smile but it doesn't quite make it into formation before the pout returns.    
  
"I like when you call me Helena."  
  
Myka squeezes her hand and corrects, "Helena."  And before she can say anything else, tears are slipping from Helena's eyes again.  
  
"I didn't even know he was there, Myka."  And Myka looks away, tries so very hard not to cry, too.  Tries very hard to be Helena's strength.  "I froze."  Helena's head is lowered when Myka looks back at her.  "I completely froze.  I couldn't even speak.  I tried to call out... I tried but I just froze."  Helena's playing with the tips of Myka's fingers again and she looks back at her.  "I'm stronger than this, Myka.  I can't believe I let him catch me off..."  
  
"Helena."  Myka turns to her now.  "You didn't let him do anything.  He had no business being there.  You shouldn't have to _expect_ him to be.  You shouldn't have to constantly look over your goddamn shoulder to check if he's there."  Myka feels the heat rising in her cheeks and she closes her eyes and sits back against the bench.  
  
"You're mad."  Helena says.  
  
"I'm mad."  Myka echoes, her grip tightening in Helena's hand.  "Selfishly.  Because I wasn't there.  But also if I had been there, what could I have done?"  And Myka sits straight again.  "Did he... touch you?"  
  
"He said some really awful things," Helena shakes her head, "he got in my face... but he didn't touch me.  Pete got there..."  Helena lowers her head as her sentence trails off and Myka moves her hand from Helena's to push her hair from her face, tucking it behind her ear.  She wipes away the dust from her cheek, now moistened by tears.    
  
Helena leans into her then and rests her head against Myka's shoulder.  Myka lays her cheek against the top of Helena's head and sighs, continuing to run fingers through her hair.  "Will you come over tonight?"    
  
"Helena, I..."  
  
"Got your bag and all your homework, if you're ready to go," Giselle is back with Helena's things and pauses in the entry to the dugout when she sees Myka sitting with Helena, "Hel."  Her brow shoots up suspiciously.  
  
Helena sits up slowly and nods.  Both of them ignore the curious look on Giselle's face.  Myka thinks she aught to be used to them by now.  
  
"All right."  Giselle sighs.  "You need a ride, Kid?"  Helena looks back at her hopefully.  
  
"Actually," Myka sighs, "I'm going to go check on Pete and walk Abigail home."  
  
"It's about time you did."  Giselle smirks but Helena is _pouting_ and Myka doesn't look directly at her because she can't deal with that face right now.  She stands to her feet and she helps Helena to her feet and pulls the older girl into her arms.    
  
"I think Giselle's got you tonight."  Myka whispers to Helena.  And when they stand apart she adds, "I'll see you tomorrow."  
  
She says goodbye to Giselle and doesn't give Helena any time to protest, neither verbally nor with that look that's on her face, before she's at the exit toward the other end of the dugout.  
  
Myka is gone before either of them can even say goodbye.  
  
***  
  
"I'm sorry, I probably smell really bad."  
  
"You don't."  Abigail smiles, walking slowly alongside Myka as they leave the campus.  "How is Pete doing?"  
  
"He's in the office with the principal and they wouldn't let me see him."  Myka shakes her head.  "Better than Leo, I'm guessing."  
  
Just then Giselle honks and waves as she passes by in the driver's seat of Helena's car.  Helena, in the passenger seat, doesn't seem too bothered with even looking their direction.    
  
"Is _she_ all right?"  
  
"Helena?"  
  
"Mm hm."  Abigail hums.  
  
"She'll be fine."  Myka says softly and they're quiet for a while.    
  
"If you need to go be with her," Abigail starts, "I know my own way home."  
  
" _I_ am not her girlfriend."  Myka says quickly.  "She doesn't need me."  
  
"Now see,"  Abigail stops walking and puts her hand on Myka's arm to stop her, too, "when you say stuff like _that_ , it just makes me think I'm intruding.  Like you _are_ her girlfriend and she _does_ need you."  
  
"Intruding?"  Myka questions with an arched brow.  "No, Abigail, there's nothing..."  
  
"Myka."  Abigail laughs softly.  "Everyone in school knows you and Helena are really close.  Nobody in school knows _how_ close but I could quote about a dozen rumors right now if you'd like me to. I just have a bad habit of ignoring them."  
  
"There are rumors?  About me and Helena?"  
  
"Is that really news to you?"  The look that Myka gives her seems to suffice as an answer to Abigail's question because then she says, "You have no idea."  
  
"I guess I just don't really care enough."  Myka shrugs and turns away.  
  
Abigail sighs.  "That's probably why I like you so much."  Myka turns back around to face her, then holds out her hand for Abigail to take and the other girl does.  
  
"You like me because I don't care enough?" Myka asks pulling Abigail a step closer.  
  
"No."  Abigail smiles.  "Because you care when it _matters_ and not when it doesn't."  Abigail steps just a little closer to Myka so that their shoulders are touching as they continue walking.  "Also, you don't smell _that_ bad."  
  
***  
  
At Abigail's, she asks Myka to stay.  
  
"My parents aren't home.  Not for a while."  Abigail says.  
  
"I _really_ need to shower."  Myka insists.  "My post-game funk is only tolerable for so long.  Or so I've been told by Pete."  
  
"He's one to talk."   Abigail smiles.  "Doesn't he wrestle?"  
  
"I know."    
  
"You can use my shower."  And Abigail looks hopeful.  That same awfully hopeful look that Helena had given her in the dugout just an hour ago.  But this is different because Abigail is a possibility, a tangibility.  Not someone's girlfriend.  Not too old.  Not Helena Wells.  "I have way too many good-smelling soaps you can choose from.  My mom makes them from scratch."  
  
It's enough to convince Myka, who is almost very certain she saw a couple flowers wilting in her wake on the walk over, to stay and shower.  
  
***  
  
Myka feels fresh and Abigail must really approve of the soap she picked out, some sort of pomegranate and orange mix, because they're in her oversized backyard laying on clean blankets on the deck of a too-large tree house and Abigail's nose is pressed into the skin of her neck.    
  
And she's breathing in and then out. In slowly, steadily, deeply.  Out with a sigh.  
  
"You're going to sniff all the good smell away."  Myka smiles and turns to face Abigail. "I'll have to take another shower."  
  
At that, Abigail takes in another breath and leans in to sigh a kiss against Myka's lips.  
  
When they part, Abigail's expression has fallen into something thoughtful.  They're quiet for a while, watching each other, until Abigail says, "Okay, talk."  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"You said you weren't okay earlier."  Abigail turns to lay flat on her back, staring up at leaves, through branches, into a darkening blue sky as the sun begins its descent.  "So let's talk about it."  
  
"I was enjoying the not talking."  Myka says softly.  "I actually _really_ enjoy all the not talking that we do."  
  
"I think I should be offended by that but I'm not exactly sure."  Abigail sighs.  She turns her head back to Myka.  "Because I enjoy the not talking, too, but then I feel like not talking is all we do.  Like during your birthday."  
  
"I enjoyed all _that_ not talking, too."  
  
"But then I don't get to know anything about you."  Abigail continues.  "And I want to know things about you, too.  Beyond how well you don't talk."  
  
Myka takes that opportunity to lean into Abigail and not talk some more with her lips against hers and then against her cheeks and her eyelids and then softly against her forehead before she lays back down.  Stares back at the sky.  
  
"What are the rumors?"  Myka asks.  "About me and Helena?"  
  
Abigail still watches her intently, a hint of a smile on her face remaining from all the not talking she'd just done.  The smile grows a bit wider.  
  
"You're secretly dating behind Giselle's back.  Or you've been dating Helena since sixth grade.  Or you guys are just friends with loads of non-talking benefits."  Myka laughs softly.  "Also, that all three of you are dating one another."  Now Myka's laugh is not so soft.  And Abigail chuckles, too.  
  
"That's actually kind of horrifying."  Myka says to the thought of dating Giselle, too.  
  
"So you guys have never dated?  At all?"  
  
"She's eighteen!"  Myka laughs.  "No."  
  
"Is that really you're only reason?"  Abigail asks.  "Because I know _nineteen year old guys_ at school who are dating _fourteen year old girls_.  And teachers know.  Their parents know.  And no one cares."  
  
"Older guys and younger girls have the same exact level of maturity."  Myka isn't sure if she means it as a joke.  She doesn't entirely mean it as a joke.  "That's like if Pete dated my twelve year old sister.  It would probably be okay with everyone because he's mentally a nine year old.  And she thinks she's sixteen."  
  
"But he's not _physically_ a nine year old."  Abigail is arching a brow now.  "He's fifteen and he'll be sixteen over summer, right?  I'm not saying he can't date a twelve year old now or a fourteen year old later but a nineteen year old guy is probably more physically, _sexually_ mature than most fourteen year old girls, like us, should be and no one says anything about it.  Ever. I mean, think about some of the girls _we_ have gone to school with that are definitely _not_ mature."  
  
Myka shakes her head.  "Right."  
  
"So, why couldn't you date Helena?  Because guys are known to be less _mentally_ mature it's okay?  Or are perceived that way?  So because Helena is a girl and maybe more _mentally_ mature but maybe also more _sexually_ mature than you, a fourteen year old, it's not okay?"  
  
"I don't even know what we're talking about anymore, Abigail.  I don't want to _think_ about how sexually mature Helena is.  Are you trying to give me reasons why I should be dating Helena?"  Myka asks.  "Instead of you?"  
  
Abigail is quiet for a moment and arches her brow.  "No."  She says finally.  "I'm just challenging your logic because the only reason you give for not dating her is her age.  And you never said you're not dating her because she has a girlfriend.  Which basically says to me that her girlfriend isn't an issue for you and maybe not for her either.  Your ages are the issue.  As in, if you were older, _when_ you are older, she would or will no longer be dating Giselle.  Without question.  Unless," Abigail finally pauses and Myka wants to roll her eyes just a bit because Abigial has always been a talker.  Always been known for her ability to talk and to talk circles around people.  And she's beginning to see why they spend so much time _not_ talking.  
  
"Unless what?"  Myka asks.  
  
"Unless your age is just an easier way to say no, I guess?"  Abigail shakes her head now.  "I don't know."  
  
"Maybe."  Myka smiles and she wants to laugh at this, too.  Because the thought of dating Helena, at any age, provokes too much of her imagination.  Makes her question where her own level of _sexual_ maturity actually flatlines.  
  
"Also, we're not dating either and I don't know what the reason for that is, actually. Since it isn't age."  
  
Now Myka is quiet for a while.  And she doesn't know what to say or _how_ to say what she wants to say.  So she does with Abigail what she so often has to do with Helena, and she writes it out in her mind first.    
  
Then she's saying, "I think the fact that we just had a conversation about my attraction to Helena is probably... a very good reason."  
  
"You have strong feelings for her."  And it's not even a question.  Myka looks at Abigail now and watches her face fall into thought.  
  
"We've been through a lot."  Myka says quietly.  
  
"And even more today."  Abigail adds.  
  
"I try... to see her as a big sister sometimes."  Myka shakes her head.  "It doesn't work anymore.  It hasn't worked since I was eleven."  
  
"Can I ask," Abigail sets her hand over Myka's, between the two of them, "why you weren't okay today?"  Myka is silent for so long that Abigail eventually answers her own question.  "Giselle, right?"  
  
"Not just Giselle."  Myka shakes her head.  "I mean, I _like_ Giselle.  I hate that I like her but I do because she's amazing and..." Myka closes her hand around Abigail's hand now.  "So, I just realized that I wasn't there for Helena when she needed someone most and I didn't _find_ Helena when she was lost in the crowd and I didn't _get_ to Helena first and even if I had, I don't know what I would or could do.  I wouldn't know how to _help_ her."  Myka sighs.  "And I think, maybe, Helena deserves Giselle because Giselle can do those things.  Giselle knows what to do.  Giselle takes care of her and not the other way around."  
  
Myka sighs again and when she looks back at Abigail, tears slide down the side of her face.  
  
"Giselle can take care of Helena _because_ she's older.  She _is_ more mentally mature than me.  And probably most definitely absolutely without a doubt more _sexually_ mature than me.  I can't give Helena any of that.. support or whatever."  
  
Abigail turns onto her side and reaches to wipe away Myka's tears.    
  
"This is a stupid thing to say to _you_ , but I _love_ Helena, I'm just not good enough _for_ Helena.  I can't be anything to her and I certainly can't protect her.  So," Myka trails off.  Turns to face the sky.  
  
"Do you ever talk to her about those things?"  
  
"What things?"  Myka asks.  
  
"All those things you just said.  The fact that you like her?  _Love_ her?  Your feelings?"    
  
Myka wants to shrug but instead she says, "Not in a while.  It's not debatable."  
  
"She said she doesn't feel the same way?"    
  
Myka turns to Abigail with a brow raised.  "She says it's _different_ , her love for me, because I'm too young and we can't be together like that."  
  
Abigail watches her a while longer with that brow raised and then she smiles and laughs softly.  
  
"What?"  
  
"She obviously likes you a lot."  
  
"No, she doesn't."  And Myka isn't laughing.  "She's just letting me down gently.  Has been for years, I just never paid attention.  Because I'm _mentally_ less mature and also,"  
  
" _Mentally_ less mature and also _sexually_ less mature?  Is that what you're about to say?  Because you should stop right now."  Abigail smiles.  "And remember you're talking to someone who really loves _not_ talking with you.  And you're _really_ good at not talking.  So there's no doubt in my mind that you are quite mature about more things than you actually think you are because no one who ignores gossip at fourteen is _less_ mentally mature and no one who kisses like you do is less..." Abigail stops and doesn't finish her thought and instead says, "Her loss."  
  
"I still don't understand your motive."  Myka rolls onto her belly now and leans in over Abigail.  "Are you trying to get me to date you or Helena?"  
  
"I'm not trying to get you to date anyone."  Abigail shrugs.  "But you should probably know that I charge for my counseling services.  Like ten kisses per hour.  And the soap, that'll cost you about five."  
  
"That soap is expensive."  Myka laughs.  "You inhaled half of it off of me, I think I should get a discount."  
  
"If anything, you'll get charged interest for how long it's lasted despite all of my sniffing."  
  
Myka squints her eyes at Abigail who chuckles beneath her and smiles very wide.    
  
"I like you."  Myka says softly.  "You make me talk about Helena so much that I don't even want to think about her anymore.  And now all I want to think about is paying you back."  
  
"I like you, too, Myka."  Abigail is grinning.  "I think I'll like you more when you repay your debt."  
  
Myka leans into Abigail, presses her lips against hers, again and again and again, until finally she says, "I think we're even."  
  
And Abigail pouts but then smiles, tilting her head to the side just a bit and asking, in a voice so soft that it makes Myka's heart swell, "No tip?"  
  
Myka leaves a tip at the corner of Abigail's smile.  
  
***  
  
Myka stays for dinner with Abigail's family. Her mother and father, her two brothers, one older and one younger, plus her much younger twin sisters.  All crowded around one table in the dining room, and all very happy to have Myka joining them.    
  
It's surreal to Myka, different from everything she knows because the table feels so full.  The family feels so complete.    
  
Even when she's having dinner with Pete's family, there's always that emptiness that used to be filled by Pete's father, that keeps Ms. Jane from sitting and enjoying meals with them.  Keeps her on her feet and busying herself while everyone eats.  Until everyone is done eating and she finally eats, too.    
  
Even after all these years, there's always that emptiness.  
  
The emptiness at her own dinner table, with her own family, is so much different because everyone is physically present.  Why, she doesn't know.  But Myka's father is emotionally far away and Myka's mother is emotionally far away.   And they are both so emotionally far away from one another that neither of them is ever present until something happens that forces them to be present.  And Myka is mentally far away, even when things force them to be present because Myka prefers to stay distant.  It just hurts less that way.  Hurts almost not at all that way.  
  
So she disconnects from her family and from that emptiness.  
  
And then there's Helena's family.  
  
Myka thinks of Helena and her family and  then Myka is suddenly saddened because Helena's true family is Pete's family and Helena's family is her.  Because Helena's brother is always gone to who knows where and Helena's father is always gone to everywhere but home.  So Helena is usually by herself or she's with the Lattimers or she's with Myka.    
  
Except tonight Myka isn't with her.  
  
Tonight, she guesses, Helena is with Giselle. And it makes Myka feel a little better, knowing that Helena is with _someone_ , but she wishes Helena were here, experiencing this family with her.  This, Myka thinks, is what a family is supposed to be like.  How family dinner is supposed to feel.  
  
Sons asking mothers to pass biscuits, sisters yelling at sisters to stop kicking them under the table, older sisters helping little sisters cut up their food, big brothers teasing little brothers about their newfound love of girls. Fathers reprimanding their children for playing with their food, for talking with their mouths full, for _kicking_ each other under the table but all the while smiling in the process.  
  
Cherishing every bit of it.  _Enjoying_ every single one of them the same way.  
  
"So Myka, how is your mother?"  Mrs. Cho's voice breaks through her thoughts and Myka, startled, sits straight and swallows back whatever emotions had been forming that giant lump in her throat and threatening to well up in her eyes.    
  
"She's fine, Mrs. Cho, thank you for asking."    
  
"How's Tracy?"  Abigail's little brother asks.  "She had another seizure at school today."  
  
"Did she?"  Myka asks.  
  
"I don't think Myka knew that."  Abigail says looking to her worried.  
  
"Do you need to call your mother?  Should I take you home?"  Mrs. Cho asks and Myka shakes her head.    
  
"It's all right."  Myka smiles.  "She's recently been diagnosed as epileptic and still adjusting to her medication, so she's been having them pretty frequently.  I'll call my mom in a bit but she's usually okay.  I kind of just get in the way."  
  
"Oh, well that's unfortunate."  Mrs. Cho is shaking her head.  "We are all too familiar with that process."  
  
"The twins are epileptic."  Abigail interjects.  
  
"You're epilepdic!"  One twin says pointing at the other twin.  
  
"No, you're epilepdic!"  The other accuses.  
  
"You're _both_ epileptic."  Abigail's older brother adds.  
  
Abigail's father then says, "They see a specialist in the city, I'll find the number and maybe you can pass it along to your parents for your sister.  Tracy, is it?"  
  
"Yes."  Myka nods.  "Thank you, Mr. Cho."  Myka turns to Abigail then and mostly Myka wants to pinch Abigail, just to make sure she and her entire family are _real_.  She pinches herself instead and Abigail, who sees this, chuckles.  
  
"Kevin has a crush on your little sister."  Abigail says then.  "He is always talking about her."  
  
Myka turns to Abigail's younger brother then.  "Oh, so you're _that_ Kevin."  Myka smiles.  "I have heard a lot about you."  And she winks at him.    
  
The twins start in with their kissy faces and it sets the whole table off in a charade of teases and chastising.  And when that's died down, something like guilt begins to pull at Myka's gut, so she moves to excuse herself from the table, asking Mrs. Cho if she can use the phone to call home.  
  
"Of course, Abigail can show you where it is."    
  
"Thank you."  
  
And when Myka is on her feet, Abigail pulls her through the arch way of the dining room, into the dimly lit hallway, through another doorway, into a dark room and before she shows her where the _phone_ is, she shows her what she's been thinking about for the past half hour at the dinner table.    
  
Myka is against the wall and Abigail is on her tip toes, kissing her as best as she can with the slowly expanding height difference that exists between the two of them.  
  
And when Abigail steps back, she apologizes and bites her lip.    
  
"You just have this look on your face."  She says very softly and moves closer, kisses Myka again.  "I don't know what it is but it makes me want to keep not talking to you."  
  
Myka smiles into the darkness then and lowers her head.  "Your family is... really great, Abigail."    
  
"They're all right, I guess."  Abigail shrugs, stepping back. "Kind of stifling."  
  
"You should enjoy it."  Myka nods and looks back up at her, face barely lit up by the light coming through the open door.  "Enjoy _them_."  
  
Abigail arches a brow and smirks, nods.  "I do."  Only then does she flick on the light in the room and point toward a desk on the other side.  "Phone is right there."  
  
"Thank you, Abigail."  
  
The other girl smiles, stands on the tips of her toes again, plants another kiss on Myka's lips.  
  
"You're welcome," Abigail begins, as she slips out of the door, "Handsome."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and tries to contain that grin that is on her face as she moves to the phone and dials her house number.    
  
There's no answer and she debates leaving a message on the answering machine.  Not entirely sure she wants to chance her dad being nearby when her mother eventually checks the machine.  
  
She hangs up the phone before the machine picks up.  
  
***  
  
Myka is laying with Abigail in Abigail's room on Abigail's bed, barely paying attention as the opening sequence to The X-Files begins to play out on the screen.  
  
"This show is so creepy."  Abigail says and she is laying almost on top of Myka, pressing her cheek into Myka's cheek, occasionally burying her nose back into the skin of Myka's neck.  "Do you watch it?"  
  
"Sometimes."  Myka says softly, letting her eyes close.  "I don't really get to watch a lot of TV."  
  
Abigail's bedroom door swings open and it is her mother and Myka wants to jump up and move away from her but Abigail is still sprawled over her and makes no effort to move, so Myka just freezes under her weight, rests her head back against the pillow in defeat.  
  
"Abi."  Mrs. Cho is narrowing her eyes at her daughter.  "Keep this door open."  
  
"Ama!"  Abigail is groaning.  "We aren't _doing_ anything!"  
  
"You know the rules."  And Mrs. Cho arches a brow, looks at Myka.  "We don't close doors when significant others are visiting."  
  
"Oh, but I'm not..."  Abigail puts her hand over Myka's mouth just then and turns to her mother.  
  
"I already told you, Myka is just a friend."  
  
"So you said, Abi, but you're looking _extra_ friendly with your just-a-friend-Myka right now."  Her mother says with a roll of her eyes and walks out of her room.  "Leave the door open!"  
  
"I'm not sexually active!!"  Abigail yells and then laughs when she sees the wide-eyed look on Myka's face.  She moves her hand from Myka's mouth then and smiles down at her.  "Sorry, there's no such thing as privacy in this house."  
  
"Your mom doesn't care that you...?"  Myka begins but she can't find the right thing to ask before she starts asking it.  
  
"Everything is an open book with her."  Abigail says.  "Everything is a topic of conversation, up for discussion, highly encouraged to be talked about and expanded upon and explored and so on and so forth."  
  
"I can't decide if that is really cool or really weird."  What Myka _can_ decide is how exactly Abigail learned to talk so much.  
  
"It is weird."  Abigail decides for her.  "My mom is _really_ weird."  
  
***  
  
Myka is exhausted and half asleep when the doorbell rings and almost completely asleep by the time Mrs. Cho is in Abigail's doorway again.  
  
"Hey, just-a-friend-Myka, your ride is here."  
  
"Ma."  Abigail is complaining again.  
  
"My ride?"  Myka's voice is groggy and Abigail is finally rolling off of her, not that Myka had put up much of a fight before she had one arm wrapped around her and the other hand lost in the girl's hair.  "I didn't have a ride."  She says softly to Abigail.  
  
"Well, let's hope someone isn't trying to kidnap you."  Abigail smiles.  
  
When she makes it to the foyer with her things and thinking that her mother has tracked her down somehow, she's met only by a very expectant Helena Wells.  
  
"H.G.?"  
  
"Einstein."  Is the first thing Helena says and she watches Myka quietly for a moment then looks to Abigail who stands just beside her and smiles.  _Forces_ a smile, Myka thinks.  "Hello, Abigail."  
  
"Hi Helena."  Myka looks back to Abigail because she can't decide what the tone is between the two of them but when she sees Abigail's face, the girl appears genuinely okay with Helena's presence.  And when she looks back to Helena, she appears genuinely _not_ okay about her own presence.  
  
"Do you have all of your things?"  Helena asks looking back to Myka.  
  
"Are you taking me home?"  Myka asks.  
  
And Abigail leans into her then and whispers, "I think you _are_ being kidnapped."  
  
"Yes."  Helena says.  "Your mother called me.  She sounded kind of worried that you hadn't called and now she's at the hospital with Tracy again.  I told her I had an idea where you were.  That I would come get you.  And here I am."  
  
"Oh."  Myka sighs and Helena nods.  "I'm just going to say goodbye then."  
  
"Right."  Helena presses her lips together tightly and turns slightly.  "I'll wait in the car."  She hesitates a moment before turning completely around and walking back to the car.    
  
"You're definitely being kidnapped."  Abigail smiles.  
  
"I'm sorry."  Myka gives her a sheepish smile.  
  
"It's fine."  Abigail shrugs.  "Let me know if you make it out alive.  Also, hopefully your sister is all right."  
  
"She'll be fine.  Maybe we can not talk again tomorrow."  Myka smiles.  
  
"Yes."  Abigail grins.  "But we can also talk, too."  
  
"Of course."  And Myka leans in, quickly kisses Abigail, begins to step away but leans in again and kisses Abigail, not-as-quickly this time.  "Goodnight, Abigail."  And the other girl's grin widens.  
  
"Goodnight, Handsome."    
  
As Myka turns to leave, she hears Abigail's mother from behind the door saying to her, "I kiss all of _my_ just-a-friends like _that_."  
  
"Ma!"  
  
"And Handsome is good, too.  I call your father 'handsome' _all_ the time and we definitely don't have five childr-"  The door shuts but she can still hear Abigail's protest of "Ama!"  
  
Myka can't help the smile that grows on her face.  
  
***  
  
Myka gets into the back seat of Helena's car because Giselle is at the driver's seat again and Helena is in the passenger seat.  
  
Myka is already irritated.  
  
"I wanted to applaud you," Giselle begins, "but Helena threatened me."  
  
"Applaud me?"  
  
"For stepping up your game with Abigail."  Giselle grins in the rear-view mirror.  "She's a cutie. Smart, too.  But that girl is a _talker_."  
  
"Oh."  Myka smirks.  "Yeah.  She talks enough for both of us."  
  
"Also, a good distraction for you, from you-know-who over here."  Giselle adds with a wink.  
  
"Stop it."  Helena says too quietly, swatting playfully at Giselle before relaxing back into her seat, resting her forehead against the window.  
  
"Are you taking me home?"  
  
"Actually, we're taking _me_ home."  Giselle says, still glancing back at Myka in the rear-view mirror while driving away from Abigail's house.  "I'm a bit overdue, since we had to come track you down."  
  
"I thought you were staying with H.G. tonight?"  Myka questions.  
  
"I'm not _allowed_ to spend the night with H.G., Myka."  Giselle arches a brow.  "My mom would _kill_ me."  
  
"Aren't you eighteen?  You can do whatever you want."    
  
"Not if I want to live peacefully in my home until I leave for college, I can't."    
  
"So who is staying with H.G.?"  
  
"You are, Einstein."  Helena finally speaks up.  
  
"I thought you were taking me home."  
  
"About that," Giselle begins and Helena reaches across to her, sets her hand on Giselle's arm as if to silence her.  The action works, surprisngly.  Giselle says, "Never mind.  I'll let Hel broach that topic with you."  
  
"I'll tell you when we get home."  Helena says.  
  
"When we get to _your_ home."  Myka corrects then immediately asks Giselle, "Why aren't you allowed to spend the night with H.G.?"  
  
"Why do you think, Kid?  Use your imagination."  Giselle laughs, shaking her head.  "I might knock her up."  She reaches across to Helena's belly and rubs it playfully.  
  
"Don't."  Is all Helena says, swatting at Giselle's hand again.  
  
Myka groans.  
  
"Stop asking questions then."  Giselle warns Myka.  
  
"It's not that, it's just... you've been at her house all day but you're not allowed to spend the night because why?  People only knock other people up at night?"  
  
"Mom logic."  Giselle grins in the rear view mirror.  "Works in our favor."  She wags her eyebrows suggestively, setting her hand on Helena's thigh and this contact Helena does not swat away.  
  
"Your mom should be smarter than that."  
  
"Kid, don't make me dust off my Yo Mama jokes."  
  
"It just doesn't make sense."  
  
"Myka."  Helena has her scolding voice ready but Myka cuts her off.  
  
"I could have stayed at Abigail's house with _Abigail_.  I actually _wanted_ to stay at Abigail's house."  
  
"We can talk about it later, Myka."  Helena sighs and she pushes Giselle's hand off of her thigh then.  
  
The car is silent for only a moment after that before Giselle clears her throat.  
  
"Is there something happening that I'm not aware of because you kind of sound angry right now, Myka.  And I'm pretty sure I told you not even a week ago that when you start feeling angry in certain situations, toward certain people, you need to deflect that anger _elsewhere_."  Giselle eyes her in the rear-view mirror.  "Or have we forgotten all about that little pep talk?"  
  
"I haven't forgotten."  Myka slouches back into her seat and she's quiet for the remainder of the drive.    
  
***  
  
Giselle _tells_ Myka she's walking her to the door as Helena gets into the driver's seat.  Then Giselle tells Myka, "She's not in a good place right now.  So, whatever is wrong with you, you need to get it out of your system _right_ now."  
  
"Nothing's wrong."  
  
"Bering.  You couldn't tell a lie to save your own life.  It's actually one of the reasons I like you because if you ever _did_ kiss my girlfriend, I would know about it the second I saw your face."  Myka thinks Giselle looks exactly like her mother when she's lecturing in class.  "So talk."  
  
"Why can't you stay with her?"   Myka asks again.  "I can't do anything for her.  I don't know _what_ to do for her.  I can't even _drive_ her anywhere if something happens.  I was having fun with Abigail."  
  
"I totally get that and I'm glad you and Abigail are hitting it off but you are Helena's _best_ friend, Myka. Or so I've been told."  Giselle puts a hand on Myka's shoulder.  "All you have to do is keep her company.  Talk to her, get her to talk back."  Myka gives her a look and Giselle sighs.  "I know, you're too young.  Do you feel overwhelmed?  If you really cannot do this, let me know.  I'll call Claire or we can take her to Jeannie's but I think Pete is going through his own thing right now.  The cops came by the house earlier and asked Helena for a statement about what happened and," Giselle is rambling and suddenly stops, sighs, "this is too much to put on a fourteen-year-old, isn't it?"  
  
Myka narrows her eyes at Giselle and she shakes her head.  
  
"It's too much.  I'll just call Mrs. Lattimer and you and Helena can stay there tonight."  
  
"Stop."  Myka shakes her head again.  "You're making it a _thing_ and I'm too tired for this level of over-thinking.  I'll go to Helena's."  And Myka turns to walk away.  
  
"Pardon me, Your Majesty."  Giselle is pushing her front door open now.  "Just trying to make sure my girlfriend, _your_  best friend, who was _assaulted_ by a crazed stalker-boy freshman in the ladies room at our school, doesn't have to spend an entire night by herself."  
  
Myka sighs and stops in her tracks.  She looks back to the older girl who is shaking her head with a knowing expression across her face.    
  
Myka closes her eyes and throws her head back.  "I'm sorry, Giselle."  She faces the older girl again, shakes her head again.  "I'm sorry."  
  
"Like I said, I'd rather you take your frustrations out on me than taking them out on Helena."  Myka nods.  And she gets it.  She truly does now.  Because she doesn't feel irritated anymore.  She just feels guilty.  And a little bit alone.  
  
"Thanks."  Myka lowers her head to stare at the walkway.  
  
"Myka."  Giselle calls and she looks back up at the older girl.  "If there's a problem, my number is in Helena's cell phone. Call me.  I'll plead a case to the dungeon master."  Giselle is gesturing toward the inside of her house.  
  
"Got it."  Myka nods.  "Goodnight."  
  
"Night, Kid."  
  
***  
  
They don't say anything the entire drive back to Helena's house.  They don't say anything when they get out of the car or as Myka trails behind Helena on the way to the pool house.  And the first thing Helena says once they make it there is, "I'm going to change," just before disappearing into the bathroom.  
  
She returns in shorts and a tank top then wordlessly sets a t-shirt and basketball shorts next to Myka on the back of the couch before she returns to the bedroom.  
  
Myka changes and when she's done, every light in the pool house is on plus the television.  Kitchenette, living room, bedroom.  Myka moves to turn everything off until she finds herself standing in the doorway to the only bedroom in the pool house, where Helena lays curled up on the bed with her back to the door.  
  
She turns that light out, too, then turns to head back into the living area.  
  
"Myka."  Helena calls softly.  
  
"Hm?"  Myka hums turning back into the bedroom.  
  
"Please don't go."  
  
Myka sighs and leans her head into the frame of the doorway for a second before standing straight again.  
  
"Okay." She eventually says and makes her way to the bed and lays down facing away from Helena, leaving an entire sea of sheets and blankets between the two of them, like she usually does.  
  
Myka is exhausted and drifting to sleep but Helena's breathing is staggered and unsteady, her exhales are heavy and she's sniffing and, Myka thinks, she's also shaking because the bed shakes and she'll move or adjust herself, but she never settles.  And she never turns over to face where Myka is laying.    
  
And Myka isn't stupid, she knows Helena is crying but she's hesitant because she keeps thinking about how not enough she is for Helena and also about how she very much feels like enough to Abigail.    
  
But Abigail isn't here right now.  Helena is here.  And Helena isn't going away.  No matter how inadequate Myka feels laying beside her.  
  
Myka takes several deep breaths and she sits up and turns around.  She silently reaches her hand across the bed and grasps Helena's forearm just as she had when they sat together on the couch at the beginning of the week.  Like she had the first time they'd fallen asleep this close together.    
  
And she's surprised and also not surprised at all by how _easily_ Helena turns to her, and how quickly Helena moves to be by her side.  How heavily Helena's body falls into her arms and how perfectly Helena fits against her.  She readily and almost greedily curls closer to Myka when Myka lays down on the bed and tugs at her to come closer still.  
  
The tears are never a surprise anymore but the sobbing, the shaking is surprising because Helena has been holding back and now she's no longer holding back.  And for what reason has she been holding all of this in?  If she'd spent the greater half of her afternoon with Giselle, why had she held so much in?  
  
Myka wraps her arms entirely around the older girl, pulls her closer into her, runs her fingers through her hair to calm her crying.  And Helena's burying her face into Myka's neck and into Myka's curls.  And Helena wraps one arm around Myka's waist, clutching the fabric of her shirt at her back, and let's the other hand fall between them as she continues sobbing into Myka's neck, crying over Myka's shoulder.  
  
They're like this for the longest time and Myka is exhausted but her worry for Helena is the only thing keeping her from sleeping in this moment.  And when Helena does eventually calm down and her breathing begins to even out and soften, Myka whispers to her, directly above her ear, "I don't know how to make this better."  And she holds her closer into her, if she even can, and adds, "I don't know why I'm here or what you need me to do."  
  
Helena sniffs, her cry is audible, it shatters Myka's heart, and Helena raises her lips to Myka's ear.  "This."  Is what she chokes out in a whisper to Myka.  "Just this."    
  
She buries face back into Myka's neck, resting her head over Myka's shoulder, and she tightens her grip around Myka's waist.  
  
Myka closes her eyes and slips into sleep with the sounds of Helena's crying.  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't know when Helena fell asleep but she knows exactly what time they both wake up because she glances at Helena's alarm clock and the face reads 0213 in too-bright red numbers just as a loud succession of knocks on the door echoes through the pool house.  
  
She sees the clock through the smudged lenses of the glasses she still wears, now crooked on her face, as both she and Helena jolt awake and sit straight up in bed.   These knocks are not inquisitive or questioning, these knocks are demanding.  They grow even more demanding the longer they go unanswered.  
  
And then there's the voice.    
  
"Helena George, open the door!  Open the door!  Georgie Peorgie!  Open the _fucking_ door!"  
  
The knocks turn into too-loud bangs that rattle every window in the pool house.  
  
"Is that Charles?"  Myka asks and she's barely breathing, her heart thumping in her chest, pulsating in her ears.    
  
Helena looks at her with those sad eyebrows, those parted lips that pout but she makes no gestures in the affirmative.  She untangles her limbs from Myka's limbs, climbs out of the bed, grips Myka's wrist and pulls her out of the bed, too.    
  
The bangs grow louder and his voice grows angrier as his calls still go unanswered.    
  
"You're in there, Georgie!  Open the bloody door, you spoiled little cunt!  There's a fucking fire storm!  Open the fucking... Georgie!"  
  
He's kicking the door when Helena almost sprints to it, throws the second lock and a third latch to further bolt the thing into place.    
  
Even Myka knows it won't hold.    
  
Helena moves quietly, walking backward to Myka again, reaching her hand behind her until Myka reaches and takes a hold of it.  
  
"Helena." Myka whispers and Helena turns to her, holds a finger to her lips and shakes her head.  She grabs the cordless phone off the countertop in the kitchen and grasps Myka's wrist again, gestures toward the bedroom.  
  
Charles calls out for her, then kick the door.  He sing-songs her name.  Kicks at the door.  He starts _singing_ the British National Anthem.  Kicks the door again.    
  
He's emphasizing every mention of the queen, still kicking at the door.  He screams Helena's name after he says queen, kicks at the door.  
  
" _Queen_ Hel."  
  
He's _laughing_.  
  
"Queen Georgie!"  
  
Quiet.  
  
There's approximately thirty seconds of silence before the banging starts up again.  
  
Myka takes a step back, pulls Helena back a step with her.  
  
Myka thinks he's armed himself with something by now because the banging has turned into clanging and it's faster than he could possibly kick, and not as dense as the sound a foot would make against a door.  More like the sound a pipe would make against the door and then against the wall.  
  
And soon it's the sound a pipe would make against a window.  The sound a window would make when shattering. The sound glass makes when it falls to the floor.  
  
Helena's grip tightens on Myka's wrist and she's suddenly moving with some newly ignited impulse to flee.  She pulls Myka back into the room where she locks that door, then into the bathroom where she locks _that_ door and then Helena pulls her into the walk-in closet and closes that door which does not lock.    
  
She moves several boxes in front of the door, Myka helps her create a barrier between the door and the back of the closet, and she leads Myka behind that barrier, into the very back where she crouches and then sits, pulls Myka down with her.  
  
They wait.    
  
"Helena, what is happening?  What is wrong with your brother?"  And Myka doesn't know she has tears in her eyes or that she's even as scared as she is until Helena is wiping those tears from her eyes and telling her not to be scared.  But the older girl is trembling far more than Myka is and she still has the phone in her hand but she isn't _doing_ anything with it.  
  
So Myka takes the phone from her and she dials 911 while her eyes adjust to the darkness.  She sees Helena's eyes more clearly in the light from the illuminated numbers on the cordless phone in her hands.  She sees the red of her eyes and the tears that fall from them and the look of absolute terror that is washed across her face.    
  
"911, state your emergency."  
  
Myka says with more calm than even she expects to hear from her voice, "Someone is here kicking down the door, he's trying to break in.  I think he's already in."  The operator asks for her address and Myka tells them the address, the phone number, the nearest cross streets.  She also tells them that they're in the pool house in the back of that address, not in the main house.  They'll have to go through the back gate and it's likely locked.  
  
Myka doesn't know until later that the gate was made inconsequential when Charles drove his car through it upon his arrival.  A testament, she'll say then, to how exhausted they both were because they hadn't heard the crash.  
  
Myka tells the woman her name, tells her Helena's name, Helena's brother's name and the woman's voice becomes soft, fills with familiarity.  She tells Myka, "This is Claire's mom, Cleo Donovan.  The officers are on their way, just stay where you are.  Do _not_ leave that spot if you feel safe there.  Let me know if you think he's made it inside."  
  
On cue there's more glass breaking and then there are more _things_ breaking.  Things inside the pool house.  Myka thinks he's put the pipe through the television, against the tile counter, into the walls.    
  
And every time something shatters or breaks or falls or flies into the wall, Helena jumps.    
  
Myka puts her hand over Helena's, squeezes tightly.  
  
"He's inside."  She tells Mrs. Donovan.  
  
"They're coming as fast they can, Myka.  Is Helena with you?"    
  
"She's right next to me."  
  
"Ask Helena if her brother has been drinking, if he's known to do any drugs or if he has a history of mental illness."  
  
Helena must hear because she says "LSD" right away and it's all she says.  And Myka repeats that into the phone and Mrs. Donovan repeats it to someone in the room with her.  
  
"How about weapons?  Does he carry any weapons on him?  Are there any at the house?"    
  
"No. I don't..."  Helena blinks and tears cascade down her cheeks.  "Maybe a pocket knife.  A Swiss Army knife?"  
  
"He might have a pocket knife."  Myka repeats.  "He might have a pipe right now."  
  
"Your bat."  Helena says softly gripping Myka's wrist.    
  
"My aluminum bat was in my bag in the living room.  He might have that.  He's breaking everything."  
  
Mrs. Donovan relays this information to whoever is there with her.  
  
"Okay, you guys are doing great.  The officers are a few blocks away, they're almost there."  And Myka can hear the sirens.  
  
"I hear the sirens."  She tells Mrs. Donovan.  
  
"Good, they're coming as fast as they can. Just stay on the line with me, okay Myka?"  
  
"Tell them not to hurt him."  Helena barely manages the sentence.  "Please, tell them not to hurt him." She repeats louder, tugging on Myka's wrist.  
  
Mrs. Donovan hears her and tells Myka, "Tell Helena they are going to do whatever they can to detain him without harming him.  They'll do whatever they can but your safety and their safety comes first.  Absolutely first."  
  
Myka tells Helena, "They'll try their best, Helena."  
  
Myka thinks she hears the hollow of her bat against the bedroom door now and then she hears something heavier against the bedroom door.  Something being thrown at the bedroom door.  Like he's throwing his whole body against it.    
  
Again and again and again and again.  
  
Helena cries.  "He'll break down every door.  He knows where we are.  He knows where I hide."  Myka watches her for a moment in silence.  
  
The door eventually crashes open.  
  
"He's in the bedroom."  Myka says and she steadies her voice as much as possible.  Lowers it to a hushed whisper.  "He's going to try to break down the bathroom door next.  Please tell them to hurry.  The closet only has an accordion door.  It won't slow him down."  
  
The bedroom falls quiet.  
  
"You're doing fine, Myka.  Just stay where you are and try to stay calm.  You don't need to say anything else, if you think he'll hear you.  The officers are just..."  
  
The phone goes dead, followed immediately by the sound of something being thrown against the wall.  
  
"Hello?"  Myka tries not to call too loudly.  Tries not to sound too panicked.  "Mrs. Donovan?"   But the power has been cut at the base.  The base, Myka thinks, is likely in pieces in the bedroom. "Where's your mobile phone?"  Myka asks.  
  
Helena is crying, hiding her face and Myka drops the cordless phone, puts her hands on Helena's cheeks and makes her look _at_ her and asks again, "Where is your mobile phone?"  
  
"It's in the bedroom."  Helena says softly, pouting.  
  
"It's okay."  Myka takes in a deep breath.  "We're okay, the officers are almost here.  It's okay. Okay?"    
  
And Helena is shaking her head like she doesn't believe her.  She whispers, "It's not okay.  He's all messed up.  He won't stop.  He never stops."    
  
He's at the bathroom door, banging, knocking, yelling the most obscene things.    
  
He calls Helena spoiled.  Calls her a chicken.  Rambles on about her hiding in the pool house.  Says he'll break down all these doors just as easily as he broke down her bedroom door and her bathroom door in the house.  Then he'll break all of her things, everything she owns, every stupid spoiled little princess thing she has and he'll make her watch.  
  
She sobs as he throws out more insults.  
  
Spoiled. Bastard. Motherless. Cunt.  
  
Myka wraps her arms around Helena.  
  
Worthless. Motherless. Spoiled. Brat.  
  
Myka pulls Helena into her at the farthest corner of the closet.  She pulls Helena into her lap because she doesn't know what else to do.  And Helena is small enough to fit there, to fit comfortably in her hold.  So she holds Helena in her lap and cradles her in her arms and says again and again into her ear, "Don't listen to him.  Just listen to me."  
  
He's singing again, the American National Anthem this time.  Half the words he says don't make any sense.  
  
Myka says, "Just listen to my voice.  They're almost here, okay?  It's almost over."  
  
He calls her a Yankee, a slut, a bitch, a carpet munching lesbian, a bloody disgrace, abandoned by her own mother, manipulating their father into loving her more, lying about her own brother.  
  
Unloved.  Useless.  Ugly.  Motherless. Gutless. Spoiled.  
  
Helena is shaking.  
  
Myka tells her again, "Don't listen to him, just listen to me, Helena.  You're beautiful, you're intelligent, you're my best friend.  Your father loves you.  Giselle loves you.  Pete loves you.  _I_ love you.  Don't listen to him.  Just listen to me."  
  
And then there are other voices, shouting, more glass breaking and Myka can hear the officers announcing themselves as they enter the house, can hear the sound of a dog barking.  
  
Helena's cries are audible now, almost screams.  She yells for him to stop.  She yells for the officers not to hurt him.  She leans into Myka, cries into Myka's shoulder.  Asks her to make him stop.  Asks her to tell them not to hurt him.  
  
There's more banging against the bathroom door.  
  
Myka clasps her hands over Helena's ears and makes her _look_ at her again.  Myka tries to smile, tells Helena to look at _her_.  
  
"We're okay."  Myka says.  "They're here."  
  
She keeps her hands over Helena's ears as the officers get closer.  
  
They say, "Police!" Then, "Drop the bat, son."  Followed by, "I do _not_ want to shoot you, put it down!" Myka hears him drop her bat but then there's something like a scuffle.  And then, "He's running.  I got him with the taser and he's still moving.  He's out the back!"  And multiple heavy footsteps away from the pool house, someone rambles off a description of him, their voices fade away, there's a loud crash somewhere in the distance, random call signs and ten-codes that Myka cannot decipher.  
  
More sirens.  Screaming.  The shouting fades.  The foot steps disappear.  
  
Everything falls quiet.  
  
Then there's a loud banging on Helena's bathroom door.  She jumps, cries into Myka's shoulder.    
  
Myka pulls her close.  
  
"Police!  Are you in there?"  And Myka moves to get up but Helena clutches onto her, shakes her head.  
  
"Myka, don't."  
  
"It's the police, Helena."  
  
"You don't known it's the police."    
  
"I _do_ know."    
  
"Police!  Are you in there?  Are you hurt?"  
  
"It's just the police, Helena."  Myka assures.  Helena shakes her head again.  
  
"Please."  Helena says.  "You don't know my brother when he's messed up."  
  
Myka tightens her grip on Helena, kisses her forehead, whispers, "I promise you, Helena, it's the police.  It's okay.  I promise you." She kisses her cheek.  
  
"Police, is anyone in there?  I'm going to need you to unlock the door if you can."  
  
"We're coming!"  Myka calls and Helena loosens her hold enough for Myka to pull away from her, to stand and help Helena stand.  And when they're on their feet, Myka is moving away the boxes and turns to Helena and says, "I promise you, we're okay, Helena."  
  
Helena nods and she trails behind Myka as she exits the closet and stands at the bathroom door.  And when Myka unlocks the door, Helena steps back.    
  
An officer stands there, shining a flashlight at them.  Myka can almost sense Helena's panic set in, so she grabs her hand.  The officer turns off his flashlight.  
  
"Sorry about that.  Are you girls okay?"  
  
Myka sighs and she feels Helena relax behind her, in the way her grip on Myka's hand loosens enough to actually be tolerable.  
  
"We're okay."  Myka says, opening the door wider so Helena can get a better look, be more reassured.  She glances back at Helena, "Are you okay?"  
  
Helena nods and moves closer to Myka again, wraps her arms around her.    
  
"I'm sorry."  She whispers into Myka's ear.  "I'm so sorry."  
  
"It's okay, Helena."  Myka wraps her own trembling arms around the older girl.  Holds her tight.  "You're okay."  
  
***  
  
Charles makes it into a neighboring house through a front window before the police catch up to him.  He has enough sense to break the window with a rock before he tries jumping through it, but he still almost bleeds out from the amount of glass that cuts into him as he climbs inside.  
  
Helena doesn't want to go anywhere near the ambulance.  Refuses to see him this way.  In this state.  High and belligerent.    
  
Out of his mind.  
  
Myka collects their things.  Her book bag, her clothes, her softball gear.  Some clothes for Helena, Helena's book bag, her car keys, her cell phone.  
  
Helena calls her dad.  He has already booked the next flight from New York City.  
  
Myka calls Jane Lattimer and she's already around the corner.  Mrs Donovan had called her after the line disconnected, she's just been waiting for the police to let her see them.  To make sure they're okay.  
  
Both Helena and Myka are in Pete's arms when they see him.  The first thing he says is, "This entire day has been fucked up."  Followed by, "You two are shit magnets."  
  
Still, he kisses their cheeks.  Hugs them tighter.  
  
Ms. Jane only says softly, "Pete. Language."  Myka thinks because she can't disagree with him on that point and she won't even try.  
  
Jeannie doesn't normally drive but Ms. Jane let's her drive Helena's car back to their house.  
  
Helena is in the passenger seat of her own car when Myka straps her in, touches her cheek softly, receives only a lingering gaze in response, and closes her door for her.    
  
Myka and Pete ride back to the house with Ms. Jane, the two of them seated in the back seat, Myka falling completely into Pete's hold.  Barely able to keep her eyes open.  
  
"That was worse than my dad."  Myka says softly.  "So much worse."  
  
"It's over now."  Pete squeezes her in his grasp, pulls her closer.  "You're safe."  
  
"Helena's safe."  Myka corrects and buries herself further into Pete's grasp.  
  
When they get to the house, Ms. Jane ushers everyone in and says, "I think we've all had enough adventure to last us a lifetime."  
  
The only response she receives is a chorus of yawns.  
  
"You all know where the beds are."  Ms. Jane adds.  "You can sleep in the kitchen for all I care but everyone had better get some sleep."  
  
She disappears into the master bedroom.  
  
***  
  
Myka _can't_ sleep, she's focusing too much on Pete's snoring.  Reacting too much to the sounds she's hearing.  Even to the sounds she isn't hearing.  
  
The noises and even the silence make her thoughts turn to Helena.  Make her _worry_ about Helena.  She knows Helena is wide awake.    
  
Myka wanders out of Pete's room, down the hallway toward the living room.  The kitchen light is on, shining through the archway at the opposite end of the living room.    
  
This is where Myka finds Helena.  Sitting at the dining table, face hidden in one arm that rests against the table.  
  
"I don't think," and Helena startles, sits up quicker than Myka had expected, "that Ms. Jane was serious about us sleeping in the kitchen."  
  
"Myka."  Helena has tears streaming down her face and she's shaking her head.  Myka sits at the table beside her, sets her hand over hers.    
  
"Sorry I scared you."  
  
"It's fine."  Helena wipes at her tears.  
  
"Asking you what's wrong sounds really stupid but," Myka pauses, "what is wrong?"  
  
Helena licks her lips as fresh tears appear in her eyes and she shakes her head.  "Everything."  Helena whispers. "Which would be fine if I could sleep.  Forget about it for just a little while."  
  
Myka bites her lip and nods.  "Come on."  She stands to her feet, tugs at Helena's arm until _she_ is on her feet, too.  And Helena follows Myka from the kitchen without question.  Myka shuts off that light and leads Helena into the living room, sits down on the couch, tugs at Helena's hand until she sits beside her.    
  
"Myka?"  Helena calls as Myka pulls her closer.    
  
"Hmm?"  And Myka wraps Helena in her arms, the older girl leaning into her without protest, resting her head against Myka's shoulder, pulling her legs onto the couch beneath her.  
  
"You were," Helena takes in a deep breath, "you handled yourself so much better than I did.  I..." Myka thinks she must lose her thought because she doesn't say anything more.  
  
"It's been a while since I've called 911." Myka sighs.  "My dad.  Your brother..."  
  
Helena sits up and watches Myka with sad eyes, wet and red as Myka tries desperately to understand, to comprehend, anything about this night.  
  
Myka just smiles half-heartedly back at Helena, blinking lazily then batting away the exhaustion in her eyes.  
  
"Your mom asked me to keep you at my house."  Helena says as her face falls suddenly into something like guilt.  Myka arches her brow but doesn't say anything. "A social worker showed up at your house with the police, to talk to your dad and to you, while you were at Abigail's this afternoon.  Before Tracy had her seizure.  She said your dad had disappeared by then, probably to the bar across the street.  She didn't want you to show up at the house by yourself and..."  
  
Helena trails off.  She sighs, and moves closer to Myka until their foreheads are touching.  
  
"Our families."  Helena shakes her head.  "Are a bloody mess."  
  
Myka smiles and adds, with a roll of her eyes, "Literally."  And she turns to stare out across the dark of the living room, Helena's forehead still resting against the side of hers.  
  
Helena brushes her nose against Myka's cheek, leaves a gentle kiss there, too.  Whispers softly into her ear,  "I love you, too, Myka."  
  
Myka turns to her suddenly.  Her eyes narrowing, forehead wrinkled.  "What?"  
  
"Back at the house, when Charles was at the bathroom door.  When he was saying all those things," Helena pauses and breathes in deeply, "you said my father loves me, and Giselle loves me, and Peter loves me."    
  
Helena exhales a breath that Myka thinks sounds so much, too much, like Abigail sounds just before they aren't talking anymore.    
  
Helena adds with a soft whisper, "And you love me."  Tears cascade down her cheeks.  
  
"You already knew that."  Myka says.  "You've always known that."  
  
"You've never said it before."    
  
Myka's stomach is turning.  She shakes her head.    
  
"I _always_ say it."  
  
"Not like that." Helena is pouting.  
  
"I _always_..."  
  
"Myka, listen to me."  Helena's hand is cupping Myka's cheek, urging Myka to face her.  Demanding her attention. "I love you, too."  
  
"It's a different kind of love, H.G."  Myka insists steeling her expression, shaking her head, blinking away the tears in her eyes.  
  
Helena nods.  "It is very different.  Indeed."  Helena pauses again before she says, "Einstein."  
  
The silence is deafening, Myka thinks.  The way Helena is _looking_ at her is as unreal as the way Helena is moving closer to her and allowing her eyes to fall on Myka's lips as she sets her forehead back against Myka's forehead and moves her hand to the back of Myka's neck, her thumb caressing Myka's cheek.  
  
It's a gentleness and a touch that Myka has never felt before.    
  
A level of intimacy that she has never known.    
  
And Helena is moving closer still, until Myka can _feel_ the heat of Helena's breath against her lips and closer even than that.  And their lips are inches apart, an inch apart, less than an inch apart even, when the hallway light flicks on.    
  
Helena closes her eyes and she turns away and Myka has never been so thankful in all her life, she realizes, when she exhales the breath that she had been holding onto for all of that time. Breath she had been trying not to breathe at all.  Breath she was almost on the verge of never breathing again.    
  
Pete rounds the corner into the living room just as Helena is sitting straight, though she's still in Myka's arms.  
  
"Hey, are you guys okay?"  
  
Helena is wiping tears from her cheeks and nodding, "We're fine, Peter.  I couldn't sleep."  And she turns back to Myka and the look Helena is giving her, Myka has only seen her give Giselle before.  "Myka's keeping me company."  
  
Myka's blinking away moisture from her own eyes, taking in steady breaths. Trying so very hard to collect herself, to focus on reality, to remember what is real.  Because this day has been a shit storm.  An absolute shit storm of events, both good and bad, and this week has been an even greater shit storm.   And now her emotions are about to take a nose dive.  
  
So what is even real, Myka wonders.  Because she's pretty sure she's not losing her mind.  She is pretty sure Helena just told her she loved her.    
  
She's also pretty sure Helena just tried to kiss her.  
  
The same Helena who is always too taken, always too old, always too wanted by all, too.. _Helena Wells_.  
  
Myka tells herself it's the day.  The events.  Everything that is going on.  Helena is confused, she's upset and she's lost and she's confused about what she wants and about who she wants it with because things have been so emotionally charged today.  
  
Things have been so stop and go and stop and go and go and go.    
  
And now that things have stopped again, Giselle isn't here for Helena, her father isn't here, her mother has never been there, and her brother may have just tried to kill them, so Helena is turning to the closest person within arms reach.    
  
Or the closest person whose arms reach around Helena.  Because now Helena is resting her head on Myka's shoulder, and her hand over Myka's other shoulder.  
  
"Well, don't let me keep you up, I just need to get a midnight snack."  
  
"It's four in the morning."  Helena says with a voice heavy with the sound of sleep-deprivation, not bothering to pull away from her position in Myka's arms.  
  
"Call it pre-breakfast breakfast then."  Pete disappears into the kitchen and while he's there, Helena's hand over Myka's shoulder finds its way to the skin of Myka's throat, and gentle fingers run even more gently down the column of Myka's neck.  To the collar of Myka's shirt, to tug at the fabric there.  
  
"Helena."  Myka says softly and Helena's fingers still.  "I really," Myka swallows, " _really_ like Abigail."    
  
Helena's hand is no longer on Myka's neck.  Her head no longer on Myka's shoulder.  She sits up again, sits straight to look Myka face-to-face.  
  
Myka's breath catches at the sight of her face and she wants to not say everything she thinks she needs to say to her, and she wants to _not_ stop this from happening because what Myka really wants, and has always wanted, is to kiss this girl and hold her close and continue kissing this girl well into the night.  But what Myka has realized in the moments before this girl has almost kissed _her_ well into the night, is that Myka cannot survive Helena.    
  
Myka can barely survive the idea of being this close to _this_ intimate with Helena.  She would not survive the real thing.  Because it isn't like her attraction for Abigail, manageable and attainable and mutual and also subtle.  Her attraction for Helena is intense and out of control, entirely unattainable, unrealistic.  One-sided even.    
  
Or it has always been in the past.  Before tonight.  
  
Before tonight, it has consumed her whole entire life.  Her every single day.  
  
Myka doesn't know how lost she is in her thoughts until Helena is moving entirely away from her and saying, "I'm sorry, Myka, I shouldn't have..."  She doesn't finish the thought.  "I think I'm just..." She doesn't finish that thought either.  
  
"It's late."  Myka offers.  Helena nods her agreement.  
  
"I'm sorry."  She says and wipes at tears.  "I'm going to go try and lay back down in the guestroom.  I'll see you in the morning."  And before Myka can say anything to that, Helena is on her feet and down the hallway.  
  
Just then Pete appears in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.    
  
"So?"  
  
Myka arches a brow.  "So _what_?"  
  
"So _that_ was interesting."  Pete walks across the living room to where Myka sits and takes a seat beside her, also takes a bite out of the string cheese that is in his hand.  "I wasn't sure turning on the hall light would be enough to derail that runaway train."  
  
"You did that on purpose?"  Myka asks.  
  
"Uh yeah, Mykes."  Pete's eyes are wide.  "You would have _died_."  
  
"I kinda of hate you and I kind of love you right now."  
  
"But which one do you 'kind of' me most?"  Pete wags his brow. "Because it wouldn't just be death by Helena Wells, it would also be death by Helena Wells' pissed off girlfriend."  
  
"Love, I think."  Myka smirks and falls back into the couch.  "But also hate."  
  
***  
  
Myka intends to follow Pete back into his room, eventually, but stalls in the hallway just outside Pete's door and just outside of the door to the mostly unused guest bedroom.    
  
Myka decides she'll detour and check on Helena once more.  
  
She taps lightly on the door and Helena's voice is barely audible when she says, "Come in."  
  
Myka closes the door softly behind her, moves blindly through the dark until her eyes slowly adjust.  She's reaching her hand out in the direction of the bed when Helena's hand is on her wrist and guides her the rest of the way.  
  
Myka sits up on the bed facing Helena as her eyes adjust to the darkness and more of the older girl begins to come into view.  
  
"I still can't sleep."  Helena says quietly, rubbing at her eye with the heel of her palm.  
  
"I know."  And Myka reaches up to push Helena's hair out of her face, behind her ear.  "Can I lay down with you?"  Myka's eyes are adjusted enough now to see Helena twist her lips to the side and slowly nod.  
  
"I think it will help."  
  
Myka climbs under the covers and lays back into the pillows, tugs at Helena's arm just enough to get the older girl to lean back into her, taking up that space beside Myka that they have both become so used to Helena taking up.  
  
After Myka's heart settles and recovers from the renewed warmth of Helena's body against hers, she asks Helena, "You know how sometimes you say you forget how young I am because of the way I talk?"  Helena doesn't answer out loud but Myka feels her nodding against her shoulder.  "I think... sometimes... I also forget how young I am.  How much older you are than me."  
  
Myka closes her eyes and takes in a deep breath.  She turns onto her side, facing Helena, and tries very hard to keep her eyes open.  Tries almost as hard as Helena does.  
  
"I..." And Myka is writing down in her mind, again and again, what she wants to say but the way she's writing it out is so far from what she has the nerve to say that she keeps ripping up these paper thoughts, even though they exist only in her imagination, and tossing those thoughts into the trash.  
  
"I will never judge you, Myka."  Helena speaks now, looking back up at Myka from where she still lays in her arms.  "Whatever it is you're trying to say."  
  
And Myka clears her throat and decides to just say it.  She gives herself a count.  Three seconds turned to five turned to six turned to ten.  She opens her eyes.  
  
"I want to be _ready_ for you, Helena."    
  
She almost blurts these words out but manages to make them sound less  _need_ _y_ than necessary.  And Helena is watching her with curious eyes while Myka is both praising and cursing her ability to see Helena at all.  
  
"I want to give you so much.  But I want to _know_ what I'm giving you and I want to know that what I'm giving you is absolutely everything that you deserve."  Myka clears her throat, her voice almost failing her when she adds, "It's not that I don't want to."  
  
Helena is still watching Myka as she speaks but a small smile pulls at the corner of her lips, Myka thinks.    
  
"I _am_ young and I know that I'm not at that point yet. Where I'm able to show you how much I care about you."  Myka continues.  "I'm not even close, Helena, but when I get there..."  
  
"When you get there," Helena interrupts with a smile as she pulls herself up to lean over Myka and sets the most gentle kiss against the bridge of her nose, "I will be waiting for you to sweep me off of my feet."


	10. Fourteen & Eighteen (And A Half) II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So many things happening. So little time until the end of the school year. Mostly the kids go on strike, and Helena & Myka try to figure out how this thing that is between them by not really figuring it out at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special special thanks to kla1991 for swallowing this beast of a chapter and all the great editing notes. Look at me, 30 and still learning how to do grammar and punctuation. Thanks, Friend.
> 
> Just a note, this is actually just the first half of the really long chapter I've been working on and decided to post as two chapters.
> 
> The second half will be up when I'm done editing and finishing it, to conclude Myka's 14th year. (HALLELUJAH!)

Myka tells Helena, "Sometimes the age difference between us seems like nothing at all," and she pauses and lifts her hand to palm the side of Helena's face just under her jaw, brushes her thumb across Helena's cheek to her ear then adds, "and other times, it's like a million years."  
  
Helena closes her eyes.  
  
Myka's hand is in Helena's hair, fingers gliding through black tresses, just barely scratching against the skin of Helena's scalp.    
  
The older girl's breathing softens and evens out, her body relaxing further into Myka's arms and Helena is sound asleep.  
  
***  
  
Myka is half-asleep when she feels Helena pulling away from her.  She opens one eye for less than a second before she closes it tight again, groaning at the too-much sunlight that pours into the bedroom.  
  
In another few seconds, she barely hears a curtain closing through her sleepy stupor.  She dares to open the eye again and now the room is dark.  Dark enough for her to continue sleeping, she thinks as she rolls onto her side with another slight groan.  
  
She feels the bed dip just slightly beside her before she feels soft lips against her temple and slender fingers through her hair.  Helena's voice hushes her and tells her, "Get some more sleep."  
  
Myka doesn't protest that but she does reach out for Helena's arm and pulls the older girl back into her on the bed.    
  
"Not safe," Myka mumbles.  
  
Helena doesn't protest either.  She sighs and relaxes into Myka's arms again, settling her hand against Myka's belly.  
  
"Okay, I'll stay.  Just ten more minutes,"  Helena says, her voice coated with exhaustion but still trying to sound authoritative _and_ awake.  
  
"Twenty,"  is what Myka counters with into the hair at the top of Helena's head.  
  
Myka is completely out in less than two.  
  
***  
  
By the time Myka finally manages to keep both eyes open, Helena is gone.  
  
In her place there is a soft cover book with a tiny bow on it.  A journal, Myka eventually realizes, when she moves her face close enough to the object to see it clearly without her glasses.    
  
On the cover there is a yellow Post-It note.  Myka squints her eyes to read it.  
  
 _Definitely not the most boring book in the world. (Heart), Helena._  
  
Myka smiles wide before lowering her head to the bed and laughing softly.  
  
"No," she says out loud, to no one but the walls, "I don't suppose it will be."  
  
***  
  
Myka can hear the conversation before she steps into the hallway and when she does, she isn't the only one listening in.  
  
Giselle is there leaning back against one wall, arms wrapped entirely around Helena who is leaning into her with her head tucked just under Giselle's chin.  Claire is leaning her shoulder into the opposite wall, Jeannie just behind her and Pete behind Jeannie.  
  
All of their attentions are turned to the voices emanating from the living room.  
  
Myka hears her mother's voice: "He wants her home now."  
  
"Just let the girl sleep, she had a long night," comes the familiar accented voice of Charles Wells, Sr.  
  
"He's adamant."  
  
Myka's mother sounds insistent.  It's the voice she uses with Myka when she's doing what she believes is _trying_ to help but is actually just delaying and worsening the inevitable.  
  
"She can sleep here until tomorrow.  As far as I'm concerned, she can stay here until she's eighteen."  
  
Ms. Jane sounds upset, annoyed.  Defiant.  
  
" _Jane_."    
  
Myka feels embarrassed.  
  
Her mother can't seem to sound much more than pathetic in her pleas, conditioned as she is to Myka's father's constant demands for complacency and obedience and silence.  
  
"He has no business demanding her presence anywhere.  _You_ have no business catering to his demands." Charles Wells' accent is oddly not as strong as Helena's.  
  
"She's his daughter. _My_ daughter."  
  
"When it's convenient for him to have a daughter, Jeannie."  
  
"That's not fair, Jane."  
  
"Okay, we are wildly off topic here,"  Mrs. Donovan's voice, too recently familiar, is interrupting.    
  
Myka had dreamed of that voice last night, as her mind seemed relentless in it's efforts to force her to relive those events once more, minute by minute, until the moment Helena had almost... lost her mind?  
  
"Yes, sorry, I didn't come here to listen to your lover's quarrel."  That voice is familiar, too, and also explains Giselle's presence.  
  
Giselle sighs softly and says, "Leave it to my mother," then rests her cheek against the top of Helena's head as Helena moves to wrap her arms around Giselle's waist.  
  
And they do leave it to her mother as she continues, "I came here to figure out why the school has sided with the kid who sexually assaulted my daughter's girlfriend.  This same kid was harassing two of my senior volleyball girls earlier in the school year and only received a laughable slap on the wrist for it."  
  
"I'm pretty uncomfortable sending Claire back to that school," Mrs. Donovan speaks up again.  "If this is the kind of attitude they're adopting about sexual harassment on school grounds."  
  
"Sexual _assault_."  Mrs. King corrects.  
  
"They haven't _sided_ with him.  They've given both boys equal suspensions for what they think are equally violent actions, until they can figure out how to further approach the situation."    
  
Helena's father somehow seems wildly out of place in this group.  
  
Myka wills her feet to move forward, closer to where everyone has crowded in the hallway to stare out at the adults into the living room.  
  
"Hey, Super Kid."  Giselle spots Myka first.  Helena immediately turns around, forcing a smile as she slowly removes herself from Giselle's grasp and steps to Myka.  
  
"Morning."  Her voice is a whisper.  "Well, afternoon now."  
  
"Hi."  Myka pulls her journal in against her chest.  "What's going on?"  
  
"A town hall meeting apparently."  Helena looks down at the journal in Myka's arms now.  "You got your gift."  
  
"Yes.  Thank you."   Myka nods.  
  
"Myka!"    
  
Myka's grin grows at the sight of a slightly taller and far more articulate than usual Claudia Donovan as she jumps up from her spot on the couch near her mother and runs to Myka. The tiny girl embraces Myka's legs.    
  
The parents suddenly fall silent.  
  
"Hi Myka!"  
  
"Heya, Claud."  Myka bends down and hugs the young girl, palms the top of her head.  "You're getting so big."  
  
"I'm almost five already."  
  
Myka grins.  "Jesus, you'll be taller than me soon."  
  
"I think I still have a _long_ long ways to go."  
  
"Don't get too big too soon, please."  
  
"I won't!"  Claudia leans in to Myka's ear and whispers.  "Mommy says spinach makes you grow and I give all of mine to Bishop."  
  
Bishop being her all-things consuming cocker spaniel.  
  
Myka is laughing softly until she realizes how quiet everyone has become.  How very focused they all are on _her_.    
  
She stands and steps into the living room.  
  
"Hi baby."  Her mother is pushing herself from the couch and steps toward her with arms extended.    
  
Myka arches one skeptical solitary brow.  
  
"Baby?"  She questions and huffs out a soft, disbelieving laugh.  "Is Tracy here?"  
  
"Are you okay?"  
  
Myka looks beyond her mother to Ms. Jane who is seated in a recliner while Mrs. Donovan and Mrs. King take up the rest of the space on the couch.  Helena's father, the elder Charles, is leaning into the wall of the arch way between the living room and the kitchen.  
  
"What's going on?"  Myka asks cautiously.    
  
Ms. Jane is rubbing at her forehead with her hand.  Myka's mother steps aside, likely somewhat deflated by her lack of acknowledgment.  Ms. Cleo Donovan remains quiet, Charles Sr. does not seem entirely sure of himself in this space.  
  
Myka thinks the role of parent probably feels odd to him as he does so little of it.  She also thinks it's an odd look for a man in his position.  She always thinks that, the few times she's had the opportunity to look at him.  
  
Helena approaches Myka's side, puts her hands on her arms and turns her around.  Claudia is also instantly by Myka's side and takes her hand, looks up at Myka with a smile. Glares at Helena suspiciously.  
  
"Myka, the school suspended Pete for a week."  
  
" _What_?"  
  
"Everybody's mad about it except me,"  Pete says stepping further into the living room and crossing his arms with a shrug.  
  
"It's not a _vacation_ Pete.  It goes on your school record.  It effects your college admi..." Ms Jane stops and huffs out a sigh, returning to nursing what Myka is certain is a rather large migraine.  
  
"Why was _Pete_ suspended?"  
  
"For fighting,"  Ms. Jane says, her voice further laced with annoyance.    
  
"Fighting?"  Myka questions.  
  
"For _initiating_ the fight,"  Helena adds.  
  
"He was protecting you.  He _helped_ you," she says to Helena.  Myka turns back to look directly at Charles.  Helena's father.  Her so-called _Uncle_ Charles. "He _protected_ Helena. Who knows what that kid would have done to her if Pete hadn't been there.  He _followed_ her into the bathroom."  
  
"But he didn't touch her,"  Ms. Jane groans.    
  
"What _difference_ does that even make?"    
  
"Pete knocked two teeth out of the kid's mouth,"  Ms. Jane elaborates. "Almost broke his jaw."  
  
"I'm sorry he _didn't_ break his jaw."  
  
Myka feels her adrenaline building, beginning to rush.  
  
"Myka," her mother begins to scold with the sound of exasperation in her breath.  
  
Myka turns to her and glares.  "Don't act like you suddenly care what I say."  
  
And Myka almost feels guilty for the way her mother recoils.  But the almost guilt is easily tamed with the newly triggered memory of all the hurt her mother has inadvertently caused her.    
  
All the hurt her father has caused her.  The hurt she has caused Helena.  Hurt Helena has been subjected to in the past 24-hours.  
  
All the hurt Myka suddenly doesn't know about Helena being subjected to in the years before now.  
  
She turns back to address the other parents in the room.  
  
"What about Leo?"  
  
Everyone is quiet.  
  
"Myka," Helena is squeezing her hands around Myka's arms and Myka instantly winces at the pressure on her still-aching right arm. "I'm sorry."  Helena immediately retracts her hands to cover her mouth.  
  
"Ms. Jane, what about _Leo_?"  Myka ignores Helena, addresses Pete's mother specifically. To limit the apparent disbursement of responsibility to respond that has fallen upon too many adults unwilling to talk.  
  
"The same," she says without ever looking up at Myka.  "A week's suspension."  
  
"A week suspension,"  Myka echoes.    
  
She feels her teeth clenching.  Heat rising into her cheeks.  Tension building all over her body.  Her muscles are tightening. For a second, she's sure she is on the verge of passing out.  Her eyes lose focus behind her glasses and the room spins, just slightly before it stabilizes again.    
  
"Myka, you're turning red."  Helena's voice is soft in her ear.    
  
"You're hurting my hand."  
  
She only faintly hears Claudia's tiny voice but relaxes the fist she doesn't even know she's making.    
  
"Go to Claire," Helena whispers to the young girl and Claudia departs without protest.  Helena is back by Myka's ear, turning Myka toward her, watching her closely.  "Breathe, Myka."  
  
Myka takes in a deep breath.  Her hand now loose by her side is shaking.  The journal she holds in her other hand, still against her chest, is bent in half under the pressure of her grip.  
  
"Breathe, Myka."  Helena whispers to her again.  
  
Myka exhales and she's shaking her head.  Eyes watering.  Stinging beneath the moisture.  
  
"Why?" It's barely audible. It must be because the only person who answers her is standing beside her.    
  
"They have a zero tolerance policy, Myka," Helena says softly.    
  
"He _protected_ you," Myka whispers.  
  
"I know."  
  
"That's not acceptable."  
  
"They're trying to make an example of him, Myka."  Now Mrs. King is speaking.  "By saying these issues can be resolved without resorting to physical violence."  
  
"Issues?"  Myka asks.  "A kid assaulting a woman in the bathroom on school grounds isn't an _issue_.  It's not like the cafeteria ran out of tater tots."  
  
"Now _that_ is an issue."  Pete says under his breath.    
  
"Quiet, Pete." At least three voices command at once.  
  
"Sor-ry."  
  
"They're saying it could have been resolved by other means.  He could have told an instructor or just detained him..."  
  
"Right."  Myka is smiling through her tears now.  She turns back to Pete and says, "Next time, you should just run and get a teacher and let her be assaulted by the predatory lunatic on school grounds."  She turns back to the parents and more specifically her so-called _Uncle_ Charles.  "Just like the next time a drug addict tries to _murder_ her, I'll try talking him down from his high."  
  
Charles stands straight now but he doesn't say anything, just averts his eyes.  
  
"Myka it's been a really stressful week for you kids, I get that, but you need to calm down." Ms. Jane's voice is full of sympathy, her eyes give away her frustration.  
  
"A really stressful week,"  Myka echoes as if saying it again will make it less of an understatement.  It doesn't.  And Myka laughs.  She laughs and her laugh is not borne of amusement.  It's incredulous.  Disbelieving. Exasperated.  Exhausted.  And very close to defeated.  
  
Too very close to defeated.  
  
"Myka."  Helena is closer, her hands are on Myka's shoulders now.  "I'm okay."  
  
"I'm not okay."  Myka turns back to her and Helena has unshed tears in her eyes and the way she's looking at Myka is not okay because Myka can see that Helena isn't actually okay either.  And she tells her this.  
  
"You are not okay."  She turns to the collection of parents and shakes her head. " _This_ is not okay."  
  
"Myka, we will handle this. We will take care of it."  Ms. Jane is looking up at her with obvious concern in her eyes.  "There's lunch in the kitchen if you're..."  
  
"No, _I_ will handle this.  Pete's going to school on Monday.  I'll walk him to every class."  Myka says.  "I will fight anyone who tries to stop me."  
  
"Myka, if he goes on campus during his suspension they can expel him," Mrs. King says very pointedly.  
  
"Pete goes to school or I don't go to school."  Myka says.  "I refuse."  
  
"Myka," Ms. Jane laughs softly, shaking her head and she already has that look on her face, "you've never missed a day of school in your life."  
  
"I refuse, too,"  Helena says softly and when Myka turns to her, Helena is looking right at her.  She nods.  "I won't go.  I'm not safe there anyway."  
  
"You're not going _anyway,_ "  Charles the senior speaks out.  "You are coming back to New York with me.  You can go to a private school where these things don't happen."  
  
Helena laughs.  "Where people are paid not to talk about these things happening, I think is what you meant to say."  
  
"Not the time," he responds in a low warning sort of voice.  
  
"Father, I am not leaving this godforsaken town and all of my friends, two months _before_ graduation."  Helena is narrowing her eyes at her father.  
  
"You don't exactly have a say, Georgie."  
  
Helena winces at the sound of the nickname and she turns back to Myka and sighs.  She closes her eyes and Myka, who isn't really thinking about it when she does it, brings her hand to Helena's hip.  Rests her palm there, where it fits so perfectly, where it fit so perfectly all of last night.    
  
Helena opens her eyes back to Myka at the touch.  
  
"I'm eighteen.  I have a say.  And I say I am not going."  And whether she means to school or New York or anywhere else in the world, Myka doesn't know, but either way she is saying she's not leaving and she is saying this directly to Myka.  
  
"Guys,"  Pete starts.  "You don't have to do this for me."  
  
"I'm not going either."  Giselle says stepping into the living room.  "I can get every single girl in every single sport on campus not to go." And Giselle steps awkwardly into a space just beside Myka and Helena.  "If it isn't safe for Helena, it isn't safe for anyone."  
  
"Giselle Imani King, you can't just rally against your school two months before graduation..."  
  
"I'm sorry, Mom."  Giselle interrupts her.  "You know I love you and on a normal day I wouldn't be talking back to you but I can and I will.  Any other reason.  Any other reason at all and I might not but not this reason."  
  
Mrs. King sighs and shakes her head.  "Lord, if this child, out of all three of my children, hasn't tested my every nerve."  
  
Giselle is grinning proudly when Myka looks back at her.  
  
Claire and Jeannie soon join them.  A tiny shadow echoes their sentiments softly when she declares "I'm not going to school either," before Claire hushes Claudia amidst muted laughter.  
  
"You guys,"  Pete says nothing more than that.  Just slumps his shoulders, lowers his head into his hand, and Giselle pulls him in close to her and hugs him tight, plants a kiss on his forehead.  
  
Every adult in the room has the same look on their face.  Some strange mixture between annoyance and pride and Myka can't tell which look, which feeling, is most dominant in any of them with the exception of Mrs. Donovan, who has the biggest smile on her face.  
  
"Well."  Claire's mother speaks up.  "If you're going to miss school for any reason, I'm personally happy and proud to see that this is it."  
  
***  
  
Myka and Pete lay side by side on his bed, both staring up at the ceiling in silence.  They are this way for ten minutes before Myka reaches for Pete's hand.    
  
He clasps his hand tight around hers.  
  
"You guys are the stupidest bunch of smart people that I know,"  he eventually says.  
  
"It's no fair, Pete,"  Myka responds.  "You helped her.  It's not fair that you've both been suspended for a week.  He was going to do something to her and you were protecting her."  
  
"But I'm being made an example of,"  Pete sighs.  "What example am I being made into exactly?"  
  
"That it's not okay to stop people from sexually assaulting other people in the girls bathroom."  Myka feels the heat rising in her face again.  "By whatever means necessary."  
  
Pete squeezes her hand in his.    
  
"I did try just yelling at him,"  Pete says.  "He ignored me.  He was in her face.  He had her backed up against the stall and he just..."  
  
"Pete, I'm sorry, I can't,"  Myka interrupts. "I can't hear that right now."  
  
"Sorry, Mykes,"  Pete sighs.  "Imagine seeing it."  
  
They fall quiet again.  Myka is trying very hard not to imagine seeing it but now it is all she sees.  When her grip tightens in Pete's hand, he squeezes her hand twice to let her know it's okay.  He can take it.  
  
"You guys should just go to school,"  Pete sighs.    
  
"It'll be okay, Pete."  Myka assures him although she herself is not quite sure that it will be okay as she herself has never been so reckless with her school attendance.  
  
"I'll get to play video games for a week, it's no big deal."  
  
"It's the principle."  
  
"The guy is kind of a dick."  
  
"No, Pete."  Myka rolls her eyes and hits his leg with his own hand, still clasped around hers.  "The P-L-E, principle of the matter.  They can kick you off the wrestling team."  
  
Pete shrugs.  "I'd do it again," He says quietly.  "Exactly the same.  Probably worse if I could have actually _heard_ what he was saying to her.  Has she told you?"  
  
"No."  
  
"I couldn't hear him.  I'd still do it again.  Let them kick me off the team."  
  
"It's not right.  It's not acceptable."  
  
"Yeah, so you keep saying."  Pete turns to look at her.  "Leo's dad is some big wig lawyer that lives in H.G.'s part of town and they threatened to press charges.  Expulsion and paying his medical bills or they'd press charges, I think that was the deal he originally wanted."  
  
Myka is quiet.  
  
"Both Mom and the vice principal _laughed_ at him.  Said he will be lucky if H.G. doesn't press charges.  She's eighteen, she can do it without her dad."  
  
Myka blinks away fresh tears. She's not even sure what they're for at this point.  
  
"Mom said no way to any deals, obviously."  Pete faces the ceiling again.  "I got kicked out of the office when things got heated but Mom promised she'd be back.  Mrs. King told her the suspension is just so they can hold a hearing.  Figure out the real consequences."  
  
Myka sighs.  
  
"I just hate putting her through this because it's harder for her, when she has to play the serious parent role."  There's a beat of silence.  "It makes her wish Dad was around and then she gets her headaches and..."  
  
"Pete."  
  
Myka turns to face him and when he looks to her, he has tears in his eyes but he's making that face he makes when he doesn't want to cry.  When he tries to overcompensate for the need to not cry by steeling his expression.  
  
"It'll be okay."  
  
"Yeah."  Pete breathes in deeply and turns to face the ceiling again.  "You keep saying that, too."  
  
Myka rolls onto her belly now, sitting up on her elbows and leaning in over Pete.  
  
"It will be okay," she repeats before kissing Pete's forehead and he nods.    
  
"You're the smart one, Mykes, I trust you.  I'm just the one with the good looks."  Pete puts little effort into showing off his arm as he flexes it.  
  
Myka smiles, rolling onto her back again and staring up at the ceiling.  
  
"All this time you've been saying that and I just now realized you've kind of been calling me ugly since the first grade."  Myka is laughing.  
  
"Maybe you're not the smart one after all,"  Pete teases and Myka hits him in the leg with his own hand again.    
  
***  
  
Helena is in the doorway with those sad eyes and that forced smile which she forces wider when she sees Myka and Pete where they lay side-by-side, hands still clutched together tightly.  
  
"That's my cue,"  Pete says sitting up as Myka sits up beside him.  He's off the bed in seconds, rounding the edge toward his door, picking up his shoes from the floor along the way.  
  
"Hi Peter,"  Helena greets him as he approaches the door.    
  
"I love you a bunch H.G.," Pete shakes his head, "but please don't do anything that's going to make me have to murder your girlfriend for trying to murder my best friend for doing the exact opposite of murdering you."  
  
And with that he slips around a gaping-mouthed Helena and out of the door.    
  
Helena turns back to Myka with those lips still parted in all of her astonishment.  
  
"Did he just Protective Older Brother me?"  Helena asks stepping into the room and shutting the door behind her.  She leans back into it, her forehead still wrinkling with her disbelief.  
  
Myka cracks a smile.  "I think so."  
  
Helena pushes herself off the door and comes to stand in front of Myka where she still sits on Pete's bed and Myka looks up at her curiously, waiting.  Helena is averting her gaze to somewhere across the room but when she does finally look at her, Myka looks down at the empty spot on the bed beside her, then up to Helena again.  
  
The older girl doesn't move.    
  
Myka reaches out to Helena's hand, links her fingers with the older girl's fingers and gently tugs her forward.  Helena takes two small steps toward the bed just beside Myka before she finally falls into a seated position next her.  
  
And she sits so close to Myka and leans so much closer _into_ Myka that the front of her shoulder presses against the back of Myka's shoulder.    
  
Helena rests her chin there, over Myka's shoulder, and leans her head against Myka's.  
  
They sit quietly this way for a minute before Myka finally asks, "So, New York?"  
  
"Not happening,"  Helena says softly.  
  
Myka stays quiet and Helena moves forward, lifting her chin from her shoulder to see Myka better.  
  
And when Myka catches that look, those determined brown eyes, that wrinkle in her forehead that's returned, or maybe it never went away, Helena repeats, "Not happening."  
  
Myka sighs.  
  
"I've already prepared myself for you going to college in two months,"  Myka says.  "You leaving sooner than that..."  
  
"Is not happening,"  Helena says again. And she rests her chin back over Myka's shoulder.  
  
They're quiet a few more moments.  Helena moves her cheek to rest against Myka's shoulder, her hair tickling Myka's cheek.  And Myka tries to match her breathing with Helena's breathing, with the feel of her body moving further against and then further away from Myka's body.    
  
"I just came in to say goodbye," Helena whispers.  "We're heading into the city for the day."  
  
"Are you really not going to school on Monday?"  Myka asks softly.  Helena sits up now but doesn't move away from Myka.    
  
"Are you?" Her expression is expectant.  
  
"I'm really not going,"  Myka says.  "I'll even stand on the sidewalk across the way so they know I'm not there."  
  
Myka feels Helena's soft laugh in the way her body moves against her own.  
  
"They'll know you _are_ there because they'll _see_ you."  
  
"You know what I mean,"  Myka says turning to narrow her eyes at Helena but failing miserably at the sight of her smile.  Myka turns back around, attempts to stall the blush that creeps into her cheeks.  Stares straight ahead at Pete's door and the ridiculous number of stickers that are plastered over it.  A collection he's built up for almost fourteen years.  
  
"Giselle has already called half of the softball girls, so I really hope you are serious about this."  
  
Myka returns her gaze back to Helena now and raises her eyebrows.  
  
"Really?  This is _actually_ happening?"  
  
Helena nods and reaches a hand up to push Myka's unruly curls behind her ear.  And as much as Myka has become used to Helena leaning into her and curling up with her at night and bumping into her as they walk, Myka has still not grown used to these little touches.    
  
The tiny displays of affection that Myka thinks should probably not be reserved for her.  That are so intimate and loving.  That cause her to panic in that way she did last night when Helena- when they _both_ had nearly kissed.  
  
And Myka is lost in her thoughts of that kiss when Helena rests her cheek back over her shoulder.  
  
"So far everyone has said they are on board."  Helena sighs.  "You might have started something for Pete."  Helena sits up again to smile at Myka.    
  
"Or we're all going to be expelled."  Myka puffs out a laugh.  
  
"You are a _good_ friend, Myka."  
  
Myka laughs softly still.  "I'm just an angry friend.  Too angry sometimes."  She looks back to Helena and lets her smile fall.  "Mostly with the wrong people."  
  
Helena doesn't respond to that.  
  
Myka sighs. "Have you heard anything about your brother?"  
  
Helena licks her lips and nods.  "He's stable."  She shrugs then and looks down at her hands in her lap. "That's why we're headed into the city.  Father wants to try to visit him today if we can.  Find out what he's been taking.  It could be anything at this point... I mean, what was he even thinking or not thinking..."  
  
Helena's stumbling over her words as her voice trails off.  It's not at all like her, Myka thinks, to be nervous or at a loss for words or with jumbled thoughts.    
  
Myka can almost see the gears jamming up behind that wrinkle in her forehead.  She can't help wanting to kiss that wrinkle and all of its hidden frustrations away.  
  
She can't bring herself to do it.  
  
"Will you be okay?"  Helena doesn't immediately answer and Myka reaches for her hand over Helena's leg, laces their fingers together.  "Helena?"  
  
She nods, taking in a deep breath.  "Yeah, it's fine.  I'll be fine."  
  
"I can come with you."  
  
"Actually," Helena sighs now, turns away from Myka and stares at the ground, "Giselle is going to come with me.  She's kind of," Helena shrugs, "she knows from experience.  She knows what it's like dealing with an addict and I," Helena turns back to Myka, "this is one of those situations where I think you might be a bit too young, Myka."  
  
"Right."  Myka nods and sighs, withdrawing her hand from Helena's. Helena turns to her then and moves her mouth as if to say something but says nothing at all.  "It's okay, Helena."  
  
Helena sighs again.  
  
"Myka, I'm serious."  And her expression reflects her seriousness, despite her wavering voice.  "He's in the ICU, he's probably coming down from who knows what on top of...  everything... it's just not... pretty."  
  
"It's okay,"  Myka repeats.  "Really."  
  
Helena sighs and she's running a hand through her hair as she moves further away from Myka.  
  
"You're not okay," she says finally.  "After last night.  You're angry.  You shouldn't be this angry.  Or dealing with all of this at your age..."  
  
"I shouldn't be a lot of things,"  Myka says.  "Shocked when my mom uses affectionate terms with me?  The reason my dad hates his family and his life?  Fighting for my best friend to stay in school?"  
  
Myka pauses and looks to Helena, watches Helena for several beats.  
  
"I shouldn't be here with you.  Making that pitiful face."  
  
Helena watches her quietly for what feels like an eternity before she says, "Myka, about last night..."  
  
And Myka turns away from Helena now, lifting her hand to scratch a non-existent itch on her forehead and sighs.  
  
"It's fine, H.G.,"  Myka says.  "You don't have to explain or excuse it away or whatever you're going to say."  
  
"Myka," Helena laughs softly, "you don't even know what I'm going to say."    
  
"I have an idea."  
  
"You have _no_ idea."  Helena smiles.  "And now I have half a mind not to say it."    
  
Myka glares back at her playfully.  "After last night, I have taken a vow to never call you a brat again," Myka starts, "but you're making it extremely difficult."  
  
Helena smiles wide at her now and leans into Myka.  "I have to go," she whispers softly and she's on her feet less than a second later.  
  
"Aren't you going to tell me?"  Myka asks, arching a brow at Helena as she opens the bedroom door then closes it slightly again.  Helena leans into the wall beside the door.  
  
"I wanted to apologize to you."  
  
Myka remains quiet.  
  
"That's all."     
  
Helena's hands are in her hair again.  
  
"For what?"  Myka asks with genuine curiosity.  
  
"Can I..." Helena reaches a finger into her hair and scratches lightly at her scalp.  "Can I get back to you on that?"  Myka watches her, quietly. "I just... it's a lot.  It's everything.  And I need time to... organize my thoughts."  
  
Myka nods now.  "Sure."  
  
"Be good today,"  Helena responds softly, opening the door again and slipping out quietly.  
  
***  
  
Everyone has gone from the Lattimers' twenty minutes later.  Only Myka and her mother remain.  
  
Myka _tells_ her, "I'll walk home."  Because Myka has fallen out of the habit of asking for permission to do things as her parents have fallen out of the habit of knowing, or even caring, what she does from day to day.  
  
Her mother says, "I don't know what has gotten into you Ophelia but I can only excuse away your actions to your father for so long before he..."  
  
Myka cuts her off in the most unaffected voice she can possibly muster, "You've been making up excuses for  _his_ actions for so long, I'm sure you can at least _try_ to think of something for me, too."  
  
Her mother leaves without her.  
  
***  
  
Ms. Jane has no soothing words for Myka today.  Only offers her the guest room for as long as she wants to stay over, whenever she needs to stay over.  
  
Myka thanks her and calls Abigail before she leaves the Lattimer house.  
  
***  
  
Mrs. Cho answers the door with a sly smile on her face as she looks Myka up and down several times.  
  
"Hello, just-a-friend-Myka."  
  
"Good evening, Mrs. Cho."  Myka pushes her hair back behind her ears, looks down to her feet before returning a somewhat hesitant gaze back to Abigail's mother.    
  
"Are you here to continue _not_ courting my daughter?"  
  
Myka's eyes are wide now.  "Yes?  I mean, no.  Um, I'm not really..."  
  
"I'm teasing."  Mrs.  Cho smiles wide.  
  
"Oh."  Myka forces a soft laugh.  Swallows back whatever _that_ feeling was.  
  
"I heard about what happened yesterday, both at school and at your friend's house."  Mrs. Cho's smile fades and she leans back against the door frame.  "I just wanted you to know that you're welcome to stay overnight here.  If you ever need to.  We tend to lead _very_ boring lives."  Mrs. Cho's smile reappears, though not as bright, and she shrugs a solo shoulder.  "If you find that sort of thing enticing."  
  
"Lately?  Yes.  Very much so."  Myka laughs softly.  "Thank you, Mrs. Cho.  For your hospitality."  
  
"But the rules stand."  Mrs. Cho holds up a single finger.  "Bedroom doors do not close.  I might even throw a twin or two in there to further dissuade any hanky panky."  
  
"Right, no, of course.  I uh, I understand."  Myka nods, averting her eyes.  
  
"Well then, come inside."  Mrs. Cho stands to the side and gestures Myka in but Myka pauses just outside the door, stares down at her feet for a moment in thought before returning an unsure glance to Mrs. Cho.  
  
"Mrs. Cho, if it makes any difference I'm not... at all... sexually active either." Myka gulps, glances momentarily at the woman directly in front of her. "I mean, I'm not even close... to being ready.  In case... you were concerned or..."  
  
Mrs. Cho's smile widens again and she tilts her head.  Myka sees Abigail in her then, blushes slightly at the look she's giving her.  "And when exactly do you think you _will_ be ready, just-a-friend-Myka?"  
  
Myka's eyes widen and meet Mrs. Cho before they dart absolutely anywhere else and she thinks about a time and a place and an age and a person where all of those things might feel _just_ right to come together in _that_ way.  But all Myka can do is shake her head and gape wordlessly at Abigail's insanely gorgeous mother and eventually choke out the words, "I have absolutely _no_ idea."  
  
Mrs. Cho stands straight again, nods, and says to Myka, "Exactly."  
  
Myka doesn't even know what to say to that.   She just blinks and swallows and fights back the blush that continues to creep into her cheeks.  
  
"No one is ready until they are ready, Myka." Mrs. Cho says.  "And when you are _both_ ready, and you will _know_ when you are, I'd just really prefer it not happen in my daughter's bedroom, or anywhere within earshot of me for that matter."    
  
The woman actually shudders at that and Myka can't help the puff of laughter that escapes her lips.    
  
"So, yes, you are welcome, more than welcome, to stay here overnight but the door stays open.  Always."    
  
Myka tries very hard not to profess her love for the woman before her.  Thinks for a minute about how awkward it might be for her to like both Abigail and Mrs. Cho.  Then quietly chastises herself because one older woman in her life is already one too many.    
  
Three women in general is already two too many.  
  
Mrs. Cho's voice breaks through her own amusing thoughts. "It's just less temptation in case you happen to be ready _before_ I can kick that one out of my house."  She gestures back toward the house.  
  
"I understand, Mrs. Cho.  Thank you."  
  
A door slams in the back of the house.  
  
"Speaking of the devil spawn."  Abigail's mother grins.  
  
"Ama!"  Abigail is almost sprinting into the house, to the front door from the backyard.  "What are you saying to Myka?  Don't _talk_ to her.  She's not used to your _weirdness_.  Get away from her now, Ma."  
  
Mrs. Cho has a mischievous smile on her face when she looks from a very disgruntled and breathless Abigail back to Myka.  She winks and says, "Oh, I think she's used to it _now_."  
  
"Ma, can you please harass one of your other four children for once?"  
  
"Oh, that's actually a really good idea.  Have fun girls!"  With a wave, Mrs. Cho heads back into the living room but not before adding, "But not too much fun!  Teen pregnancy rates are _soaring_."  
  
Abigail groans, completely defeated. "I apologize for that and whatever else she said to you when I wasn't present."  
  
"I like your mom."  Myka smiles.    
  
"Not too much, I hope."  Abigail gives her a suspicious look and Myka laughs.  
  
"She's funny."  
  
"Don't you ever tell her that, please?"  
  
"She's nice..."    
  
"Too nice."  Abigail stands straight now, smiles and steps to Myka, just outside the door, and tip toes her way into a kiss.  "Too nice and too talkative.  Too much talking."    
  
Abigail pulls Myka into the house by her shirt.  
  
"I thought you _liked_ talking."  Myka grins.  
  
Abigail shuts the door and takes Myka's hand.  "I will like it much more _after_ the non-talking.  Let's go not talk in the backyard for a while and then I will talk your ears off."  
  
"You can also not-talk my ears off,"  Myka says quietly, following Abigail through her house, out the back door, across the backyard. "I think I like the not talking of my ears best."  
  
Abigail gives her a shy look and a soft smile and when they are finally on the platform of the tree house, they are standing over fresh blankets, surrounded by plates with crackers, cheese, fruits, and sun tea and books.  
  
"What's with the books?"  
  
Abigail twists her lips to the side then bites on her bottom lip.  
  
"I just thought," Abigail shrugs, "that you'd like to hang out here for a while.  Since it's nice and quiet.  So, I brought snacks and something to drink and..."  
  
Myka cuts Abigail off with a quick kiss and says to her softly, "There you go talking again."  
  
Abigail tilts her head to the side and Myka grins at how very much like her mother she is.  How very much Myka still favors this younger version.  
  
"I would really like to hang out here for a while with you, Abigail,"  She says.  "But I'm not exactly planning on reading nor being read to."  
  
Myka pulls Abigail closer to her, sets her hands on her hips and leans down into another kiss.  
  
"I was kind of hoping my ears would be otherwise occupied."  
  
Abigail smiles wide and points to the blankets beneath them. "Sit."  
  
Myka does without question.    
  
Abigail kicks off her shoes and plants herself on Myka's lap, facing her.  And Myka wraps her arms around Abigail's waist, holds her close, leans her forehead into the smaller girl's shoulder.    
  
"Myka."  Abigail lifts her hands to Myka's neck as thumbs caress her cheeks and lips find their way past curls and over her ear, kissing every bit of skin there.  "Are you sure you don't want to read a book?"  Abigail kisses her neck now, too.  "It took me half an hour to get all of these books out here."  
  
Myka sits up to face Abigail, gives her a soft smile and Abigail kisses her cheek.    
  
"I am one hundred percent positive that I do not want to read one single letter on one single page in any of your beloved books right now."   Myka presses her lips to Abigail's, settles there for several seconds before leaving a kiss.  "Now."  Myka smiles, kisses her again.  "Stop. Talking."  
  
She does.  
  
They both do.  
  
***  
  
Abigail, Myka thinks, is so unlike Helena when she curls into her.  The feel is different, she doesn't fit quite so flush against her but the warmth of her so close is just as comforting.  
  
Myka's heart doesn't skip beats, though.  Her breath doesn't become wildly uncontrollable. She doesn't feel like the asthmatic she does when Helena is against her.  She doesn't feel like she can't breathe, or like she'll never breathe again.  
  
Helena's touch does things to her that she cannot yet describe.  Makes her body feel in a way that is almost frightening.    
  
Abigail's touch makes her feel things, too, but these feelings have words like comfort and warmth and safe and pleasure. The way Abigail's touch makes her feel isn't indescribably frightening, it's relaxing and soothing.  
  
It makes Myka crave more of her.  More of her skin against Myka's skin, more of her hair between Myka's fingers, more of her lips against Myka's lips, against Myka's ears.  
  
Myka can imagine craving all these things and more from Helena but when Helena is in front of her, when Helena is looking at her in the new way she does, as though she feels so many of the same things that Myka feels, everything about Helena becomes impossible.  Even when Helena is not looking at her in the new way she does, Helena is an impossibility.  
  
It's impossible to touch her, to be so close to her, to breathe around her, to live in her presence, to survive these feelings.  
  
To _kiss_ her.  
  
Myka thinks about how easy it is to kiss Abigail.  To love kissing Abigail.  To know that Abigail wants her to kiss her and to move so comfortably with another person that you don't even have to wonder. You just have to lean in and lean closer and press your lips to their skin and wait for that smile, that laugh, that _look_.  
  
With Helena...  
  
Things are not that easy.    
  
Myka thinks things will never be that easy.  That there will never be a day that being _this_ way with Helena won't make her want to run away scared.  That there will never be a moment like the one she imagines in her mind, where Helena moves in to kiss her and she isn't on the verge of passing out or not breathing.  Where Pete doesn't turn on the hall light, where the threat of Helena's girlfriend isn't a six-foot-tall shadow that's looming over her.  
  
Where Helena doesn't close her eyes and turn away at that last moment, where Myka thinks but isn't sure but is pretty damn sure that Helena's lips brushed just slightly against hers as she turned away.  But Myka doesn't know if they did or if she's just remembering it that way because that night was _that_ night.  And it was late or early and hectic and crazy and stressful and a shit storm.  Just an absolute shit storm.  
  
Helena is an impossibility.    
  
Myka doesn't think anything will ever be so easy with Helena as it is with Abigail or anyone else for that matter, because Helena is Helena.  And her love for Helena is, has always been, will always be just a bit...  
  
Different.  
  
***  
  
The apartment is quiet and appears empty when Myka arrives home.  A good sign that her dad isn't there.  A bad sign that he will eventually return.  
  
Her mother is silent, doesn't greet her from her place in the kitchen when she walks through the door but Myka feels suddenly compelled to say /something to her.    
  
Something like, "Why can't you be as amazing as Mrs. Cho."  
  
Because Mrs. Cho makes Myka want to say more and feel more and be more expressive as a means of discovering herself and all that she's capable of.  
  
Or, "Why can't you be more like Ms. Jane."    
  
Because Ms. Jane isn't a coward and even without her husband she knows how to stand up and speak for herself.  She knows how to be an advocate for her children.    
  
Or, "Why can't you be like Mrs. King."  
  
That woman is a fighter and she is strong and she supports her daughter, her children. Protects them from even the most familiar monsters, protected them from even their own father.  And still protects them from the other monsters in the world.  
  
Or, "Why can't you be like Mrs. Donovan?"  
  
Even if just for the sweetness in her voice, the obvious pride she feels in her daughter, her ability to support her daughter's causes.  
  
Even, Myka thinks, Charles Wells, in all of his absence from Helena's life, is a more supportive parent than her own mother.    
  
"Why," she wants to ask her, "can't you be more like him?"  
  
Myka doesn't register how long she's been staring at her mother's back until the woman drops a plate back into the dish water where she stands by the sink and lets out a whispered swear in frustration.  
  
Myka blinks and walks slowly to her side, stands quietly beside her.  And she's already taller than her mother, had long ago surpassed the woman's height, so she isn't entirely surprised when her mom flinches when she finally notices Myka standing next to her.  
  
"Myka?"  And Myka doesn't know why her mother sounds scared.  She doesn't know why her mother sounding scared actually scares her too.  "Well, what is it?"    
  
Her mom is still leaning away from her when Myka leans into her and kisses her cheek.  Myka moves away from her and speaks these words that, to her recollection, have never been spoken in this apartment before.  
  
"I love you."    
  
The silence that follows is more quiet than quiet.  
  
Myka doesn't know that look on her mother's face and she's almost positive that her own mother couldn't even decipher her feelings at this point.  So Myka shakes her head and she steels her expression.    
  
"I wish you would try harder.  I wish you would try at all."  Myka says.  "But I love you anyway."  
  
Myka leaves her mom, stunned to silence, alone in the kitchen with the faucet still running.  
  
***  
  
Everything in Myka's room is gone.    
  
Everything.  
  
It's not like she had much in there to begin with, the bulk of her possessions being books, clothes, things she never found the time to be rid of, things she never wanted to be rid of, like her Teddy.  
  
Gone.  
  
Her bookshelves are empty, save for a couple of books that she had long ago outgrown.  A music box given to her by a grandparent that had long ago passed away, on her mother's side of course, is gone.    
  
All of her trophies, the bulk of which were not related to fencing but had been acquired more recently through volleyball and basketball, are gone.    
  
Her journals, aside from the one she'd just received from Helena.  Her box filled with all of the notes she had ever received from anyone at school.  
  
All gone.  
  
Her bed sheets stripped from her bed.  
  
Gone.  
  
Her bedroom door, no longer on the hinge.  
  
Just gone.  
  
It's an overreaction from her father that is both predictable and expected, whenever social services comes knocking on their door, but it is still jarring when it first happens or when Myka first happens upon it.  
  
Myka drops her book bag on the floor, her softball gear follows soon after.  Sans her aluminum bat that Helena had given her as a gift at the start of the season because that, too, was now gone.  Taken as evidence the night before.  
  
Myka sits on her bed and only then does she notice her mother standing in the doorway.  
  
She's holding a box and looking so very unsure of herself as she looks down at the box and then up at Myka and then down at the box again.  
  
"I took some of your things beforehand,"  Her mother says softly and trails off.  Myka just watches her silently as she steps cautiously forward and sets the box on Myka's bed.  She leans in to look at its contents.  
  
Her Tedddy.  Her journals.  Her notes, mostly from Abigail.  Even a fresh set of sheets.  
  
She smirks.  
  
"Thanks."  
  
Her mother sighs and runs a hand through her own graying hair.  
  
"I'll fix your bed while you shower."  
  
Myka arches a brow.  "Is that your way of telling me I stink?"  
  
"Myka."  She isn't sure why her mother sounds so exasperated until she starts shaking her head and chokes out, "I try."  
  
Myka turns away from her then, looks back at her empty shelves, her bare mattress, her desk with nothing on it.    
  
"Where's Tracy?"  She asks quietly.  
  
"Asleep."    
  
Myka nods and stands.  She walks across the room to her closet, opens it wide and sighs, relieved.  
  
He left her clothes _this_ time.  
  
Her shoes are mostly gone, which is fine because she couldn't fit most of them anyway.    
  
"Everything is in his office downstairs," her mom says.  "He didn't throw it away this time.  I just don't have the key."  
  
Myka doesn't respond.  Instead she digs into her drawers and pulls out a pair of shorts and a shirt, fresh underwear.  She spins back around to face her mother who remains in the doorway, arms folded in front of her, head tilted toward the ground, eyes barely watching Myka as she moves across the room, past her and into the hall.  
  
"I'm going to go take that shower now."  
  
***  
  
On Monday morning at 0730, Myka and Pete stand on the sidewalk directly across the street from their high school.  Directly across the street from the administration building.  Directly across the street from the attendance office.  
  
At 0732 Abigail and Amanda are by their sides.  Abigail kisses Myka's cheek.  Amanda slips her arm around Pete's arm.  Leans into him.  
  
At 0743 Helena is practically dragging Giselle down the street toward them, and Claire and Jeannie are trailing not far behind them.  Jeannie is holding a pink box.  A pink box that Pete very quickly relieves her of, because it is full of donuts for approximately two minutes before it is no longer full of donuts.  
  
By 0758 almost every single person who has ever had the pleasure of playing a sport with Gigi #23 King is standing along the sidewalk, in the grass, spilling over into the parking lot of a neighboring business.  
  
When the bell rings at 0805, approximately 87 students are not in class.  
  
At 0807 Vice Principal Frederic approaches Myka and Pete.    
  
"You're all late for class."    
  
Everyone is so quiet that Myka can hear herself gulping.  
  
"I'm not late," she starts, her voice soft until Abigail slips her hand into hers.  "I'm just not going."  
  
"And what exactly is the reason behind this rather robust level of truancy?"  
  
"You suspended Pete."  Myka says narrowing her eyes at the older woman.  
  
"I see."  Vice Principal Frederic scans the crowd of students for a moment before she nods.  "What reason do you have to oppose Mr. Lattimer's suspension?"  
  
"With all due respect, Mrs. Frederic," Abigail interjects and Mrs. Frederic slowly turns her gaze to her, "the message this school and its administration are sending to its students by suspending Pete for protecting a peer from being _stalked_ and _assaulted_ in the women's restroom is not a very comforting message at all."  When Mrs. Frederic doesn't respond, Abigail continues.  " _Is_ sexual violence against the women on this campus more acceptable to this administration than the lengths Pete had to resort to in order to subdue a _known_ habitual sexual predator?"  
  
Myka strains to stop her lip from quirking into the smile she so very badly wants to smile in this moment.  
  
She is absolutely impressed.  
  
"Well, I should hope not, Ms. Cho,"  Mrs. Frederic responds and turns her eye back to Myka.  "I just wanted to make sure you had a sound argument put together.  You haven't exactly disappointed."    
  
And Myka is almost certain she isn't the only one trying very hard not to smile in this moment, as the corner of Mrs. Frederic's lip twitches and then falls into the least convincing of all Mrs. Frederic's hardened expressions.  
  
"However, you do have one fact wrong,"  Mrs. Frederic adds, lifting a single finger.  " _I_ did not suspend Mr. Lattimer."  
  
At 0812 Vice Principal Frederic walks back across the street to a waiting mass of school staff, including a very disgruntled Principal Nielsen.    
  
All that she offers them is an exaggerated shrug.  
  
***  
  
Principal Nielsen threatens to cancel every school event until the end of the year and into the next.  
  
His threats have the exact opposite effect of what he wants.  Fewer kids come to class, a handful of teachers do not teach, they make the local news.  
  
The crowd only grows larger.  
  
Mrs. Frederic asks Helena to meet her in her office by second period on day two.  Giselle goes with her, as does Mrs. King.  The police show up half an hour later.  Helena is there for another forty-five minutes after that.  
  
By the time Mrs. King and Giselle are walking out with her, Helena's face is flushed and tear-stained, her eyes are completely blood shot.  
  
Myka wants to ask what's wrong but Giselle just shakes her head.  
  
They're taking her home.  
  
***  
  
By seventh period Mrs. Frederic has asked several more girls that Myka only vaguely knows to meet her in her office and all of them leave in much the same state that Helena had left in.    
  
The last person to enter Mrs. Frederic's office is Ms. Jane and they are inside for twenty minutes before they exit the building.  Mrs. Frederic gestures to Ms. Jane with a folder in hand before she walks across the street once again and plants herself directly in front of Pete.  
  
"Here."  She hands Pete the folder.  
  
"What's this?"  He asks.  
  
"All of the homework you've missed for the past two days."  Myka is almost certain she can see a ghost of a smile this time.  "I expect you to be completely caught up by the time you return to class tomorrow.  You might be able to convince Ms. Bering to help you out.  That is, if you aren't already too far indebted to her."  
  
"Tomorrow?"  Pete's brows are in the air.  
  
"Tomorrow," Mrs. Frederic repeats.  "And you had better not be late Mr. Lattimer.  To _any_ of your classes.  Ever again."  
  
That lip of hers quirks again.  
  
"They're canceling his suspension?"  Myka has to ask, just to clarify.  To confirm.  To be one-hundred percent certain.  
  
"Get your facts straight, Ms. Bering."  And now Mrs. Frederic really does smile.  " _I_ am canceling his suspension."  She turns her eyes back to Pete.  "See you back in class tomorrow, Mr. Lattimer."  
  
The sound the crowd makes in the following seconds is near-deafening.  
  
***  
  
"You know, you don't have to walk me to class anymore, Myka."    
  
Myka hasn't seen Helena since she left Mrs. Frederic's office the day before and now that she is seeing her, outside of Ms. Calder's class, adjusting her book bag on her shoulder with eyes cast to the floor, Myka is seeing that Helena is in a mood she has never seen her in before.  
  
"I don't think I ever _had_ to in the first place."  
  
Myka matches her tone.  Soft.  Just barely above a whisper.  
  
"I wanted to."  
  
Helena runs her hand through her hair but never looks up at Myka.  So Myka reaches for her book bag, tugs at the strap a little bit until Helena finally looks up at her and gives her a small smile.  
  
The not-very-reassuring one.  
  
"You're not okay."    
  
It's not a question.  It's not even really an observation.  Myka is telling Helena something that she's not entirely sure Helena is aware of.  
  
"I'm fine."  
  
"That sounds like something people say when they're not okay."  
  
"Long night."    
  
Helena sighs.  
  
"Oh."  Myka nods.  "This is one of those things that I'm too young for, isn't it?"  
  
Helena looks at Myka then.  She presses her lips together tightly.  Runs her hand through her hair again and nods.  
  
"I think so."  
  
"Okay," Myka says.  "I guess I will see you after school then."  Myka turns to leave and Helena catches her by her arm.  
  
"Wait, Myka."  And she does.  Turns back around to face the older girl.  "I'm sorry, things are just..."  
  
"Crazy?"  Myka supplies.  Helena smiles and nods.  
  
"Yes.  Very."  Helena lets her hand fall to her side.  "I thought maybe you'd want to walk with Abigail now."  
  
"Her class is in the opposite direction,"  Myka says.  
  
"Oh."  
  
"Your class is in the _same_ direction."  And Myka gestures toward the exit.  
  
Helena smiles.  It's small but genuine.  
  
"Okay."  
  
"Okay?"  
  
Helena nods.  
  
Myka nods in response and turns to continue her walk with Helena trailing just slightly beside and behind her.  
  
***  
  
Things are weird at school now because people know Myka's name and Pete's name.  And they probably already knew their names because it's a small school to begin with but now they don't just know their names, they use their names.  Regularly.  
  
In class, in the halls, after school, downtown, out shopping.  People know them and people acknowledge them because they're those kids that started a strike that got a bunch of other kids out of school for two days.  
  
Not necessarily because they're those kids that started a strike to show the school administration and the school district and superintendents and whoever else up the chain that punishing a person for protecting another person from being assaulted is not okay with them.  
  
Myka is slightly annoyed by the lack of passion any one of her peers actually has for the cause in comparison to their passion for not attending school.    
  
Pete gets why Myka's annoyed because she took a risk and what she risked was her entire school career, which has been the most perfect thing about her life.  The one thing she has ever had complete control over.  
  
But neither Myka nor Pete complain because Mrs. Frederic has promised to work hard to expand upon their zero tolerance issue.    
  
That being an actual issue and definitely _not_ a tater-tot sort of issue.  
  
  
***  
  
Abigail tells Myka that more than one girl has asked her if they are dating.  She also tells Myka that the "more than one girls" have applied extra gloss to their lips in her presence at the sight of Myka approaching.    
  
"Do they think you're just going to kiss them all as you're walking past them?" she asks then demonstrates the logistics behind the suggestion with a succession of kissing faces. "Are they going to kiss _you_?"  Then she pauses and tilts her head when she asks Myka, "You would like that, wouldn't you?"  
  
Myka smiles but she doesn't answer her.   She just leans closer and kisses Abigail.  
  
When Myka asks her what she has told the girls with all the questions and all of the glossy lips about _them_ , Abigail laughs it off as though the two of them officially dating is the most ridiculous idea in the world.  And then she says that only seems to further encourage the presence of both lips and gloss.  
  
Abigail also mentions, on more than one occasion, something about an upcoming Spring dance and Myka, on just as many occasions, enjoys pretending as though she has no idea that such an event even exists.  
  
So when Abigail says things like, "I wouldn't even know what to wear." Myka responds with, "Wear where?"  And Abigail will say, "To the Spring dance that I'm not going to because nobody has thought to ask me yet." And Myka will respond with, "You're really pretty, I'm sure someone will ask you eventually."  
  
Abigail will glare.    
  
Myka will wink at her.  
  
Abigail will do that thing she does where she looks away like she doesn't care but is simultaneously trying not to smile and also not to blush because the Hawaiian tan she acquired over Spring break is fading more and more with each passing day.  
  
If Pete is having lunch with them, he will groan.  If Amanda is also having lunch with them, she too will groan.  Then both Pete and Amanda will give each other that look that makes Myka and Abigail tell _them_ to get a room.  
  
And if Myka is lucky, the fifth period bell will ring, bringing along with it a very swift end to lunch and all the questions it induces in one very vocal Abigail Cho.  Because Myka has every intention of asking her to that dance, she just hasn't decided when or how she'll go about asking.  
  
***  
  
It's a Friday and Helena doesn't come to the last softball game of the season.  
  
Nobody blames her.  
  
After the game, Amanda drives Giselle, Pete, Abigail, and Myka to Helena's house where they have planned to meet up to go swimming.  Helena and her father are there overseeing repairs to the pool house.  
  
Helena greets them at the recently replaced backyard gate at the top of the drive in a two piece swim suit.  Pete and Myka share a very similar look that induces a very similar reaction from both Amanda and Abigail.  
  
"You're drooling."  Amanda tells Pete.  
  
"You are, too."  Abigail smiles at Myka.  
  
"Honey, I'm home!"  Giselle kisses Helena and Myka glares at the back of her head.  She thinks its mostly an involuntary action at this point.  
  
Abigail leans into her and says with a smile, "Now you're seething."  
  
Myka instantly relaxes her glare, rolls her eyes, slips her hand into Abigail's.  
  
"Come on,"  Myka says softly to her.  
  
"I brought the kids home from school,"  Giselle says to Helena playfully, and Helena forces a small smile, tells her thank you, and gestures everyone through the gate.  
  
Myka and Abigail are the last two through and Helena's smile is small again.  She asks Myka, "How was the game?"  
  
"We won, of course!"  Amanda answers without ever turning around.  
  
"I honestly was a bit worried."  Giselle stops and turns around, waiting for Helena.  Wraps her arm around Helena's bare waist.  "Since my good luck charm wasn't with me."  Helena rolls her eyes.  
  
"You don't need luck."  Helena stands on the tips of her toes as Giselle leans into another kiss.  "You have Myka."  
  
Abigail tugs Myka toward the pool house and whispers to her, "So at what age exactly are you two going to start dating?  Because someone needs to break the news to Giselle and I volunteer."  
  
"No age,"  Myka responds just as softly as they approach the pool house, leaving Giselle and Helena behind them.  
  
***  
  
"Homework on a Friday night?"  
  
Myka looks up from where she writes, sat in one of the lounge chairs alongside the pool, to see Helena's expectant look hovering above her.  Myka smiles and nods.    
  
"Just a stupid essay for English that I want to get out of the way,"  Myka says softly, returning to her paper.    
  
Helena leans down and pats the side of her leg and tells her, "Scooch." And Myka does, just a little bit to the side so Helena can sit on the lounge chair beside her, facing her.  
  
Myka's on page four of her essay, Helena grabs for the first three pages.     
  
"Ah ah ah, you're going to get my pages all wet!" Myka begins to protest, reaching out for her papers.    
  
"Calm down, I'm dry."  Helena smirks batting her hand away.  
  
Myka sits back and gives Helena her best accusing glare but closes her mouth completely defeated.  Helena examines the papers, her brows rising, smile widening.    
  
"Marriage Equality?"  Helena asks.  
  
"It was a prompt given to us by Mr. McPherson."  Myka sighs.    
  
"Mr. McPherson gave you a prompt about same-sex marriage?"    
  
"More specifically about our stance on the current proposition to lift the ban on same-sex marriage,"  Myka elaborates with another sigh, returning to her paper.  
  
"Myka."  Helena's voice sounds distant but still with a hint of caution.  "I'm rather suspicious of his motives.  He has tried derailing vocal students in the past with these controversial topics."  
  
"I am not even close to vocal in that class.  And what do you mean by derailing?"  Myka asks, her gaze back on a thoughtful Helena whose eyes are still scanning over her paper.  Helena is shaking her head but not speaking, still reading Myka thinks.  Until Myka reaches her hand out to Helena's bare knee and the older girl looks back up at her and smiles.  
  
"I love the way you write."  Helena smiles.  
  
"Thank you but what do you mean by derailing?"  
  
Helena averts her gaze elsewhere looking far too lost in her thoughts and Myka decides to let it go.  She sits back on the lounge, letting her hand fall away from Helena's knee and refocuses on her writing.  
  
"I don't even know why you're in his class."  Helena's eyes return to Myka's paper in her hands as she continues reading.  
  
Myka shakes her head and shrugs.  
  
"English and I don't mix, I guess."  
  
At that very moment both Myka and Helena look up at each other, catch each others gazes, try very hard to bite back their laughter and fail rather miserably.  
  
"I think," Helena says still laughing softly, setting Myka's paper back down, "that _we_ mix just fine."  
  
Myka glances at her with an arched brow.  "Most of the time."  She smirks.  
  
Helena nods.  "Enough of the time."  And Helena leans just a bit closer to Myka, setting her elbow on her own knee and resting her chin into the palm of her hand.  "You should take a break."  Helena reaches her free hand to Myka's hand, resting over the cushion of the lounge.    
  
Helena's fingers fall lightly over and between Myka's fingers and it's another one of those touches that is barely a touch at all, that makes her stomach twist in that too familiar way and causes her to catch her breath.  Causes her breath to stall entirely when Helena slowly slides her fingers further into the space under Myka's.  
  
Myka's eyes fall on their hands, just barely touching, and travel slowly up to the freckle-dotted skin of Helena's chest and the column of her neck, over lips being licked by the barely-there tip of a tongue and to Helena's eyes.  She can't read that expression: it seems almost hopeful.  For what, Myka doesn't know, but she offers Helena a small smile and hooks her fingers with Helena's and tugs her hand just an inch closer to her.    
  
The older girl smiles, face flushing slightly before her gaze falls on their fingers and then somewhere else across the yard.  
  
There's a long pause in time and space where Myka forgets who she is, what she is, where she is.  Where Myka just gazes at the side of Helena's face, the smile the older girl is trying so hard not to smile, senses the lately all-too-rare calm in her demeanor.  
  
And she tries to imagine this moment being the norm, this moment being _okay_ and not what it really is which is entirely _not_ okay because Helena's girlfriend is mere feet away and if Helena's girlfriend sees this touch, despite all of the intimate moments that she has witnessed between the two of them, so many things that are so stable and controlled and tame in Myka's life might start to crumble.  
  
But Myka imagines her and Helena in this way like it isn't new, like it doesn't require caution.  As though this is just who they are, who they have always been.  How they will always be.  
  
"How are things with the creature?"  
  
The question catches Myka off-guard and she instantly glances to the pool where Abigail is currently wrapped up in a game of water polo with Pete, Amanda, and Giselle.  Only occasionally smiling back at Myka, blowing her kisses, winking and laughing in their wake.  
  
Myka tugs lightly at Helena's index finger before pulling her hand completely away and returning to her paper.  
  
"Good." Myka nods and pushes her hair behind her ear with her now free hand, still burning from the too-intimate touch.  "She really wants to go to that Spring dance."  
  
"You don't want to take her?"  Helena asks still staring off across the yard.  
  
"I do because she wants to go.  I'm just not really... into dances."   And Helena turns to her now, tilts her head slightly to the side.  
  
"I distinctly remember you nearly one year ago," Helena smiles now, "coming home from a dance absolutely thrilled because you had spent the entire night dancing with the _her_ you are now courting."  
  
"I'm not courting _her_."  Myka corrects.  "And that was eighth grade graduation, everyone just goes to that dance because it's the end of the year and it's fun.  Hard to take seriously."  
  
"And the Spring dance is to be taken seriously?"  
  
"Are you going?"  Myka looks fully at Helena now.  
  
"Giselle calls it the poor man's prom because it's mostly a dance for the lower classes who cannot go to prom."  Helena rolls her eyes.  
  
"You didn't answer my question."  And Myka grins at Helena now because how many times has Helena said that same thing to her very vague, topic-changing responses?  "Are you _going_?"  
  
"I might."  Helena shrugs and glances back toward the pool.  "If I have reason to go."  Then Helena returns her gaze to Myka.  "I don't have a reason to go yet."  
  
Myka is quiet. Thinks.  And it's been a couple weeks since she's had to mentally write out her thoughts but she does here.  Very cautiously.  
  
"Giselle sounds like plenty of reason for you not to go."  Myka arches a brow.  
  
Helena sighs and licks her lips.  "I suppose."  
  
"Will you losers stop doing homework and get in the pool?"  Giselle yells from the water and Abigail is chuckling beside her, Amanda nodding in agreement and Pete echoing her sentiments with a round of "mm hmms" and "amens".  
  
"I'm checking her work,"  Helena calls before turning back to Myka with a coy smile and a brow arch.    
  
"The smartest kid in the school does not need her work checked by the second smartest kid in the school, Hel,"  Giselle argues.  "Get in this pool before I _get_ you in this pool."  
  
"Where do I fall on this smart kid list?"  Abigail questions.    
  
"Number four,"  Giselle answers without skipping a beat and turning her attention back to their game.  
  
"What about me?"  Pete asks.  "Wait, don't answer that.  Don't want to know."  
  
"You may have just preserved our friendship," Giselle teases.  
  
Myka looks back to Helena who rolls her eyes now and moves to stand up.  "C'mon, Einstein.  Swim with me?"  
  
"Wait."  Myka catches Helena by her wrist and gently pulls her back down to the lounge, inches closer than she as before.  Helena looks at her expectantly, arching her brow further.  
  
"What's wrong?"  Helena's voice has just a hint of concern and Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Nothing."  She smiles softly to the older girl.  "Just... sit with me?  A bit longer?  I'm almost done with my paper, you can proof read it for me if you'd like."  
  
Helena smiles, moving her hand to Myka's wrist and grasping there tightly.  "Of course, Einstein."  
  
Myka wants so badly to pull Helena into her, to feel her curling into her side on the lounge like she hasn't done in nearly a week.  
  
Myka settles for having her as close as she is right now.  
  
***  
  
It's weird in the pool house now.  Myka asks Helena if she feels safe there and Helena tells Myka she feels more safe there than she does in the too-big house, in her own bedroom.  
  
Her dad has the door changed out for a stronger door, he adds more locks even though Charles is still in the ICU and still in custody in the ICU.  But there's also Leo who actually lives in Helena's neighborhood but who even knows if he's actually a threat to her outside of school because he's never been before.  
  
Still _Uncle_ Charles adds extra locks and he even reinforces all of the other doors and adds a lockable door to the closet.  And Helena says he _wants_ to install a panic room but even for Helena that seems a bit extreme.  So instead she gets mace.  A ton of mace.  And she hides a canister in every corner and pocket of the pool house.  
  
Also, she wants to get a dog but her dad says it's pointless because she's leaving for school after summer and she's leaving for London after graduation, so she won't have time to raise a puppy into a guard dog (because a puppy is really what she wants) so that it will offer her any kind of protection.  
  
So _Uncle_ Charles reinforces the windows but he doesn't add bars because it's tacky and even Helena agrees that is too much.  That reinforcing the doors should suffice, that adding a phone line in the newly reinforced closet should suffice, that flood lights outside, and an alarm system, and a video surveillance system and maybe even extra patrol checks by both the police and the neighborhood watch should suffice.  
  
Myka tells Helena, and she sounds purposefully angry when she says it, "What would truly suffice is if neither Leo nor Charles Jr. targeted you to begin with."  And then she says, "If you want me to stay with you, I will stay with you."  
  
What Myka actually wants to do is kiss her until she is no longer thinking about it but because she can't bring herself to do it, she knows she isn't ready to do it.  
  
And because she isn't ready, and Helena _knows_ she isn't, Helena just gives her that same look she did gave Myka that night and her eyes fall on Myka's lips and jump up to Myka's eyes and before she can even start to cry over whatever the hell she's thinking of crying about now, she closes those eyes and shakes her head and excuses herself.  She walks away.    
  
Not too far away, just far enough to find Giselle in the kitchenette where she talks to Amanda and she reaches her hand out to Giselle and buries her face silently into Giselle's shoulder.  Kisses that shoulder.   Glances once more to Myka, where she's left standing in the living room with Abigail slowly approaching her from behind, with Abigail wrapping her arms around Myka's waist from behind, and Helena turns away to join Giselle's conversation with Amanda.  
  
So it's weird in the pool house now because of the so many things that happened that evening with Helena's brother, the way the pool house has become a sanctuary albeit one full of terrifying memories, and also because they are all there together.    
  
***  
  
Amanda is with Pete in the recliner that just barely holds the both of them with Amanda seated over Pete's lap.  Giselle's seated on the floor in front of the couch at Helena's feet, leaning back against Helena's legs and Helena has her hand in Giselle's hair, massaging her head.  
  
And Myka is at the opposite end of that same couch with Abigail leaning back into her and then turning to curl into her in the exact same way Helena had done at the beginning of that shit storm of a week.  Before they had overslept, before things had escalated.  Before Helena's assaults.  Before Pete's suspension.  
  
Myka's hands are in Abigail's hair but she's stealing glances at Helena who is leaning slightly against the arm of the couch with one arm while her other hand loses itself in Giselle's curls at the nape of her neck.  
  
The lights are low as a movie plays and Myka falls into that familiar space where she's hearing the movie and occasionally she's seeing the movie but she has no idea what it is or what it's about because Abigail is warm against her and her fingers in Abigail's hair are delightful to say the least.    
  
But also she's stealing these occasional glances at Helena, wishing Helena were in her arms right now, when Helena's eyes finally catch hers and Helena's eyes linger on hers even as Helena's hands are still lost in Giselle's hair.  
  
Myka looks away when the tension grows too strong for her, when the gaze lingers too long but then she'll look back to Helena and she won't quite smile.  And Helena won't quite smile at her but she has that look on her face again.    
  
The look that Myka now knows as the look Helena gets when she has to walk away.  
  
Myka sighs and Abigail tightens her hold on her.  Myka becomes slightly more needy with the motion of her hands in Abigail's hair and she pulls the other girl closer, closes her eyes to Helena for a moment, then lifts Abigail's chin so that they are nose to nose and her lips are brushing lightly against Abigail's and then her lips are being pressed ever so gently into hers.    
  
Myka kisses Abigail with this light touch that Myka knows isn't for Abigail because the look Abigail gives her now is telling her that this kiss she has just kissed Abigail with is way more intimate than anything, way more gentle than anything, too much more loving than anything Myka has had to offer her up to this point.    
  
And suddenly Myka wants to say "I love you" but it isn't Abigail she wants to say these things to.  So Myka smiles and bites back those words, swallows down this sickening feeling that rises like bile in her esophagus, and pulls Abigail back into her so that she's resting over her shoulder again.  Abigail who means so many things to Myka but will never mean as much to Myka as she wants her to because there will always be the girl who means so much more.   
  
Myka takes in a very deep breath and sets her lips against the top of Abigail's head, her nose, too, and she kisses dark hair before she closes her eyes.  
  
"I can't do this."  
  
Abigail sits up slightly and faces her with worry.  "What?"  Her voice is a whispered response and Myka moves her forehead into Abigail's forehead and she shakes her head.    
  
"Kiss me," she says even more softly.  And Abigail does and when Abigail is done kissing her, Myka sighs, touches her lips to those lips again, kisses her again.    
  
"Myka?"  Abigail questions softly.  
  
Myka kisses her again if only to keep her quiet because the voice, she thinks, ruins the illusion.  
  
And Myka bites back those words again then opens her eyes to Abigail.  She lets go of another sigh and smiles softly.  
  
"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt."  She says this softly into Abigail's ear and Abigail's smile is wide when she shakes her head.  
  
"Don't apologize for that."  Abigail says just as softly into Myka's ear.  "Just do it again."  
  
Myka smiles, kisses her again.  Allows her eyes to look up past Abigail to the older girl across the couch and Helena's eyes catch hers again.  Myka kisses the bridge of Abigail's nose and her forehead just as gently, her eyes never leaving Helena's eyes, before Abigail leans back into her, buries her face into the crook of Myka's neck and sighs deeply against her.  
  
Helena's eyes flutter, those lips falling parted, tears cascading down those cheeks.    
  
She takes in one long shaky breath, that look still on her face, before she runs her hand through her hair and turns completely away.  
  
She doesn't look back at Myka for the remainder of the movie.  
  
***  
  
They play a card game after the movie where Helena and Myka sit side-by-side on the floor by the coffee table and Abigail sits at one end while Giselle occupies another end. Pete and Amanda sit on the opposite side of the coffee table.  
  
Pete is being Pete but more so because Amanda is resting her head on Pete's shoulder and laughing at every single one of his jokes either because it's funny or because it's so _not_ funny that it's funny how bad the joke is.  And what Myka loves about Amanda is that she's not afraid to check Pete on the actual level of hilarity at which point any one of his jokes or comments need to tap out.  
  
It gives Myka a much-needed reprieve from always reining Pete in.  
  
Giselle and Abigail have a preexisting relationship because Giselle used to be close with Abigail's older brother Michael in middle school.  So Giselle teases Abigail about things and then asks her how her family is before they both launch into a full on tirade about the conundrum of hotness (if you ask Giselle) and embarrassment (if you ask Abigail) that is Mrs. Cho.  
  
Myka supplies once that, "Mrs. Cho is a dream." And when Abigail challenges her to expand on why Myka finds her mother to be /a dream, Myka as smooth as anything says, "It just makes sense that you're as beautiful as you are."  
  
Giselle demands a high five for that one and Pete attempts to stake his claim over Myka's apprenticeship unto the "Pete's School of Being Smooth As Hell With the Ladies."  
  
Amanda checks him on that joke before he even finishes it and tells him, "Myka has grown into her own.  Let her take all the credit."  
  
"Myka has been forced to grow into her own and she will _fight_ you for all the credit,"  Myka says of herself to Pete without ever looking up at anyone.    
  
Myka doesn't know if anyone is watching her, though she feels the momentary silence and lingering gazes before everyone is back to bantering in their usual way.  
  
It's moments later when Helena's fingers find Myka's fingers where their hands rest in-between them and out of view from everyone, and when Myka looks up at Helena the older girl isn't looking at her but smiling at something Amanda is saying to her and then responding to that something while also pushing her fingers gently over Myka's.  
  
And Myka tries to push away this feeling that is turning inside of her belly, that is telling her to grab Helena and hold her and kiss her and be ready for her already, although she isn't pushing away that hard but it's still there and she isn't acting on it, this impossibility.  
  
Helena is still impossible to her beyond this but she'll _take_ this, even if she thinks for a second that maybe she shouldn't be taking this.  Maybe they shouldn't be touching even in this small way.  Maybe they shouldn't be this close to each other at all.  
  
But _this_ is too easy now.  This touch is too familiar and too welcome to say no to and Myka's not sure she'd have the strength to say no to _this_.  Not like she had the strength to almost say no to those too intimate touches the night of the absolute shit storm.  
  
So Myka doesn't say no.  Instead Myka says, "Your deal, Pete," because the cards have gone untouched for too long and she doesn't know enough about what anyone is saying to jump into the conversation and she most certainly doesn't even know what game they're playing anymore because she was ousted long ago.  So she adds, "And what are we even playing again?"  
  
And she's being teased, she's sure.  Something about, "Don't you have an eidetic memory?" and "Can't you remember absolutely everything?!" and also "I could name a random book by some random author plus a page number line number and arbitrary number after that and this one will know what the word is," quickly followed by, "I don't even bother checking anymore."  
  
But Myka's eidetic memory isn't recording what Myka isn't paying attention to and right now, and for many "nows" before this one, Myka is paying very little attention to everyone and giving all of her attention to _the_ one just beside her.    
  
So what Myka's eidetic memory does capture is Helena's fingers still moving into place over hers and the impulse Myka suddenly has and acts upon to feel every one of Helena's fingers between every one of her fingers.  And when Helena's hand is over hers and her fingers are set between Myka's fingers, the only thing she can hear is the way Helena sighs next to her, the way her breathing changes so noticeably and how very quiet both of them have fallen.    
  
And it's the quiet between them that moves Myka's hand suddenly away from Helena's because Pete is already looking at her with an urgency and a slight shake of his head that makes her feel like she is in trouble because if anyone knows, _Pete_ knows.  And if _Pete_ knows then everyone else is not quite that far away from noticing.    
  
Right on cue Amanda says, "You two are awfully quiet."  
  
Helena's eyes flutter and she takes in a deep breath and puffs out a laugh.  Myka only watches her for a second more before she turns away, her eyes catching Giselle's only momentarily, as Helena starts wiping at the tears on her cheeks.    
  
"It's weird being back in here," Myka supplies.  And it's mostly a diversion but it's also true.  
  
It _is_ strange being back in this place with Helena because all Myka wants to do is pull Helena into her lap, and hold her close, and tell her she's beautiful and how loved she is and kiss that gorgeous face until Helena gets the sleep she always so desperately needs.  
  
Myka sighs.    
  
"Maybe we should start hanging out somewhere else?"  Abigail offers.  "I'm sure my mom wouldn't mind if we took up space in the backyard next weekend.  Or even the night of the Spring dance?"  
  
Abigail is smiling at Myka now and Myka shakes her head, smiles in return.  "Oh, has no one asked you to go to the dance with them yet?"  
  
"That awful excuse for a lower class prom?" Giselle questions. "Never in my life."  
  
Abigail pouts.  Myka leans over and kisses that lip.    
  
It feels weird with Helena so close.  Sitting just beside her.  And she guesses she isn't the only one who thinks it feels weird because Helena excuses herself just then and disappears hastily into the bedroom, closes the door behind her.  
  
Giselle sighs now.  "She's probably exhausted and this is probably very weird for her, too."  She looks to Amanda.  "We should probably go."  
  
"Probably," Pete adds.    
  
"I'm ready whenever you guys are."  Amanda wraps her arm around Pete's shoulder then and kisses his cheek.  "I'll drop _you_ off last."  
  
Pete wags his eyebrows and says, "Me-ow" because he has absolutely no shame.  
  
"I'm going to go check on Helena, let her know we're heading out."  
  
Giselle disappears on the same path that Helena had.  
  
***  
  
Myka is young but she isn't stupid.    
  
After fifteen minutes, Pete says, "She sure is taking a long time to 'check' on Helena."  And he makes a vulgar gesture that only results in him being hit in both of his arms by both Myka and Amanda simultaneously.    
  
"Stop."  Myka scolds.  "You're _such_ a pervert."  
  
"It's none of your business if they are."  Amanda adds.  
  
"It's my business if I'm ready to _go_."  Pete says.  "So I can do my own checking on of things, if you catch my..." Myka socks him in the arm.  "Ow!"  Amanda playfully hits him in the back of his head.  "What?  No, not you, too."  
  
Abigail says nothing at all.  In fact, she steps away from them to gather her things and Myka's things and sets them near the door.  
  
It's another fifteen minutes before Giselle comes out of the room and Myka notices her hair is different and her cheeks are slightly flushed and her mood has changed.  And when Giselle says, "She wants to talk to you," she sounds slightly exasperated but also something else that Myka cannot exactly pinpoint because she doesn't know what that is.  
  
When she enters the room she just barely catches Pete saying, "They're called quickies because they're supposed to be _quick_."  
  
To which Giselle responds, " _Nothing_ is quick with that woman."  
  
And Myka knows now that Pete knows a lot more about a lot of things that Myka knows so little about because when she steps into Helena's newly decorated room in the pool house it feels different, even apart from the new decor, and Helena is fresh from a shower, in shorts and a tee, drying damp hair and moving slowly across the room to her bed.  
  
"Hey."  Myka's smile is crooked and when Helena looks at her she stops walking and stops drying her hair for a moment to really _look_ at Myka before she throws her towel onto the disheveled bed and sits down just next to it.  Myka's smile falls away when she says, "You wanted to talk?"  
  
"About that apology," Helena starts.    
  
"You don't have to apologize to me, H.G."  Myka interrupts her.  "I don't know what reason you could possibly have to apologize to me."  
  
"I need to."  Helena says.  "Because it's so much worse now."  Helena lowers her head into her hands and sighs, slumping her shoulders.  Myka is careful in her approach, as she comes to stand beside the older girl and sits on the very edge of the bed next to her, sets her hand gently over Helena's arm.  
  
"Do you need me to stay?"  Myka asks softly.  
  
"No."  The quickness with which Helena answers pains Myka but she doesn't say anything, just watches Helena shake her head and sit straight again.  And Helena looks at her for a moment before she says, "I'm sorry, Myka, because I feel like I've led you on unnecessarily and I... I can't be this way with you.  I'm sorry, I just... _I'm_ confused about so many things right now and I can't even imagine how it makes you feel.  You're so young and maybe I'm taking advantage of your feelings.  And I'm sorry, I just," she pauses, "feel a little bit lost right now."  
  
Helena licks her lips and turns away.    
  
"You're not taking advantage of my feelings."  Myka wants to laugh but only manages a gentle smile.  
  
"I _do_ love you, Myka, it's just..."  
  
"Different.  I know."  Myka says.  "I already _know_ that."  
  
Helena turns back to her.  
  
"I don't even know everything I need to say anymore.  I just know that I need to apologize to you for putting you through all of this.  For dealing with me, my brother. My problems. My... attachments."  
  
"H.G."    
  
"It's so unfair to you."  
  
"Helena."  
  
She looks at Myka now and Myka reaches for her hand in her lap, slips her fingers between Helena's fingers.    
  
"You're my best friend."  Myka says softly.  
  
" _Pete_ is your best friend."  Helena smiles.  "I'm more like... your annoying babysitter that never goes away.  Never leaves you alone? Drags you into her turmoil like you don't have enough on your own to worry about."  
  
"Pete is my sometimes annoying older brother."  Myka laughs softly then lets her smile fall.  " _You_ are my best friend.  I care about you a lot.  I'm _here_ for you.  You think I'm too young for this stuff, and maybe some of it I am, maybe some of it is too intense for me, I mostly trust your judgment on that but I'm here for you because I love you."  
  
Helena is quiet while watching Myka.  
  
"Don't ever think you are taking advantage of me, Helena."  Myka smirks.  "Besides my I.Q. is higher than yours."  
  
Helena glares at her playfully.  "You can't measure a person's emotions, Myka."  
  
"No."  Myka shakes her head and squeezes her hand around Helena's.  "But you _know_ me.  I have neither the time nor the know-how to be a kid.  I mean, since they apparently don't have tether ball in high school."  
  
Myka shrugs and Helena just watches her for several seconds with a smile.  
  
"How old are you again?"  Helena asks with a brow arch.  
  
"Fourteen,"  Myka says softly and smirks.  Helena shakes her head and turns away, slowly pulling her hand from Myka's.  "Sorry, I know,"  Myka sighs. "Rhetorical question."  
  
"Is it round two in there or what, H.G.?"  Pete is calling from the other side of the door.    
  
Myka groans.  
  
"Pete Lattimer!"  Amanda's voice scolds.  
  
"Better not be!"  Giselle calls.  
  
"Jesus _fucking_ Christ."  
  
Myka glances with eyes wide at Helena whose face is entirely flushed red, who runs her hand through her hair and turns further away from Myka to hide that flushed face.  
  
"I might strangle him one day,"  Helena says quietly.  
  
Myka exhales a small laugh and puts her hand over Helena's again, prompting the older girl to turn back to her.    
  
"Not if I strangle him first."  
  
And Myka stands immediately to her feet and heads to the door.  
  
"Myka, wait."  Helena stands and quickly steps to her side, places her hand on the door before she can open it.  Helena leans into Myka and kisses her cheek, pulls her into a hug and whispers softly into her ear, "When you're ready.  Not one second sooner."  And she presses soft lips to Myka's ear, kisses and then sighs, doesn't let go.  "I don't ever want to make you uncomfortable like that... I don't want to push you toward something you don't want."  
  
Myka wants to tell her it isn't about something she doesn't want so much as it is about something she _really_ wants but isn't ready to handle.  Instead, Myka pulls away from Helena and tells her, "You're not pushing.  If anything, I'm pulling."  
  
Helena sighs and lowers her head.  "I have no bloody idea what you're talking about, Einstein."  
  
"Go to bed."  Myka smiles kissing the bridge of Helena's nose.  
  
"Yeah."  Helena nods, her eyelids are already heavy with sleep.  "I'm working on that.  If I _can_ sleep."  
  
"I can stay."  Myka says in a whisper.  "I can help you fall asleep."  Myka reaches up then to push Helena's hair behind her ear and Helena closes her eyes as she turns into the touch.  It's something she's never done before, something that Myka doesn't immediately know how to react to and so she just lets her fingers linger there, the tips of them against the older girl's cheek.    
  
Helena reaches up to Myka's hand, pulls her hand away from her face, let's their hands drop in-between them and shakes her head.    
  
"Not tonight, Myka," and she smiles softly, warmly, and suddenly very pointedly says, "you really cannot."  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't stay.    
  
Amanda takes everyone home.  And true to her word, she drops Pete off last.  Myka only knows this because she drops her off second-to-last even though Amanda lives in the same neighborhood as Giselle which is not very far from where Abigail lives, which isn't much further from where Pete lives but still requires her to double back to drop Myka off and then Pete.  
  
Although Myka has a sneaking suspicion by Monday morning, when Pete and Amanda are _much_ closer than they were Friday night, that no actual dropping off had ever occurred.  
  
***  
  
All this week, too, Myka meets Helena at Ms. Calder's class and Abigail will be there long enough to kiss Myka on the cheek or over her lips or to grab her hand for a moment before she throws in some quick line about the Spring dance.  
  
Like on Monday when she says, "You should see Bridget's dress for the dance, it's really cute."  
  
Or Tuesday when she says, "I heard there's going to be an actual dinner this year."  
  
Or Wednesday when she says, "Michael has found some poor girl to wrangle into going to the dance.  At least Ma has reason to leave me alone now."  
  
Or Thursday when she says, "I don't really even like dances anyway.  Except, remember when we danced last year?  That was pretty fun."  
  
And by the time Abigail leaves Myka to walk Helena across campus on Thursday afternoon, Helena is telling Myka to, "please take that creature to the dance.  I swear if I have to listen to anymore of her incessant talk about that infernal dance, I will be forced to also strangle your girlfriend alongside your best friend."  
  
"She's not my girlfriend," is Myka's automatic response.  
  
"Really?"  Helena asks.  "Is that why you kiss her every day?  To remind her that she's not your girlfriend?"  
  
Myka gives Helena a look and she smiles innocently.    
  
"My how the tables have turned in our relationship."  Helena's smile turns coy.  
  
"You're just lucky I'm so used to you.  That I can tolerate this much of you day after day." Myka teases.    
  
"Oh, darling," Helena sighs, "if you can still tolerate _the creature_ after this week, I'm more than confident that you can handle _this_."  Helena is pointing to herself and Myka smirks and arches her brows and turns away shaking her head.  "What?"  Now Helena stops in the middle of their walk and her hands are on her hips and she's _demanding_ to know what is so funny.  
  
"It's just that _that_ is the whole point."  Myka says.  "To all of this."  And for the first time in weeks, Myka feels like her twelve-year-old self in front of Helena.  Tiny and meek and unwanted and unimportant and shy and overwhelmed.  On the verge of dying at a very young age.  
  
But Helena drops her hands from her hips and steps to Myka and asks her, "What is the point?  And also what is _this_?"  
  
" _This_ being you."  Myka lowers her head so as to not see Helena's face.  "The point being I _can't_ handle it."  Myka shakes her head and doesn't look up again until she hears Helena's long exhale.     
  
"Come along,"  Helena says reaching for Myka's book bag strap where it rests near her hip and gently tugging at it.  "We'll be late for our classes."  
  
***  
  
Things are not okay again by Friday afternoon.  
  
Myka is seated in the dugout at the softball field by the time the bell to signify the start of sixth period rings.  It only takes Helena two minutes after that to find her there, although Myka had not expected to be found at all.  
  
"Einstein," is how she announces her presence, bringing Myka's attention from the field in front of her to the woman now standing beside her.    
  
And she is a woman now, Myka thinks to herself.  As much as Helena has watched Myka grow into the discombobulated teenager that she has become, Myka has watched Helena grow into this beautiful woman.  And sometimes, Myka has realized, Helena isn't as strong or unbreakable as she used to think Helena was but even this knowledge only strengthens the beauty that Myka finds in this woman that stands before her.  
  
Even in her weakness, she is a beautiful thing.  Especially in her times of need, she is a beautiful thing.  And looking at her now, watching Myka with cautious and curious eyes, stepping closer to where Myka sits with hesitant steps, sitting beside Myka slowly and distantly at first before settling back against the bench and leaning closer into Myka, Myka can see the weakness and the strength and the beauty in both of those.  
  
She's here _for_ Myka because Myka knows that Helena knows and would know right away that something is wrong.  But Helena is also here because of her own weaknesses.  Helena is even here fighting against her weaknesses.  
  
"I knew you were at school today,"  Helena says softly, looking straight ahead as Myka watches her closely.  "I was a little worried when you didn't show up at Ms. Calder's class after fifth period."  She turns to Myka now.  "Even more worried when Abigail was worried."  Helena smiles.  " _Ms. Calder_ was worried."  
  
Helena lowers her gaze to her lap, to her hands that busy themselves with movement there, to her feet where she kicks at loose rocks in the dugout.  
  
"I don't know why this is the first place I thought to look."  Helena's voice is even softer and she turns back to Myka while biting down on her lip.    
  
Myka _has_ to look away.  
  
"I feel like this school year is never going to end."  Myka's eyes are already burning with the moisture of unshed tears.  "And in a way that's good because," she pauses and looks back to Helena, "you're still here and Giselle is still here because, believe it or not, I've grown really attached to her."  Myka puffs out a teary laugh and shakes her head and looks away again.  "But shit keeps happening and I am just."  Myka is still shaking her head and turns back to Helena now.  "I am just _so_ done with this school."  
  
Helena smiles at her now, lifts a hand to wipe away tears from Myka's face.    
  
"You are very right, Myka,"  Helena says softly.  "I _am_ still here.  So please, tell me what's wrong."  
  
"I'm sorry."  And Myka reaches up to Helena's hand still on her cheek and pulls that hand into her other hand in her lap, laces their fingers together.  And this positions Helena in such a way that she remains facing her, so Helena rests her other arm, the one closest /to Myka, along the back of the bench, and Helena moves that hand to push the curls out of Myka's face, to tuck those curls behind her ear.  
  
Even when the curls are no longer astray, Helena pushes that hair back, tucks it further behind Myka's ear.  
  
"I wasn't expecting you to look for me or even find me."  Myka admits.  "I know how much you hate coming out here now."    
  
Helena tilts her head to the side, pushes back more hair and lets the tips of her fingers glide gingerly against the skin of Myka's ear.    
  
The touch makes Myka's entire body shiver.  She closes her eyes, tilts her head closer to Helena's hand.  
  
"Myka."  Helena's voice is soft and Myka opens her eyes to her again.  "Please tell me."  
  
Myka licks her lips and sits straight, releasing her hold on Helena's hand to reach into her book bag on the bench beside her.  She's only partially distracted by the fact that Helena's hand is still on her leg, that Helena's other hand is still in her hair.  
  
She pulls her essay out of her bag and turns back toward the older girl with her eyes still on the paper.    
  
"You were right," she says quietly, handing the paper to Helena.  "I mean, I finally figured out what you meant when you said Mr. McPherson has tried derailing students in the past."    
  
Myka looks up at Helena who moves her hand from Myka's leg to take the paper and removes her hand from Myka's hair to turn and take it in fully.    
  
"I don't know why he would think to target me or... I don't know, provoke me? I thought he /liked me.  I don't bother him, I just do my work.  I'm not disruptive or vocal, I just read and I do all of my work."  
  
"Myka."  Helena is still staring down at her paper where there is a "C-" marked in thick red pen.  "Have you ever in your life received anything lower than an eighty-five percent?"  
  
"Eighty-five percent?"  Myka tries very hard not to sound offended.  "Last quarter Ms. Ritter tried to give me an eighty-nine percent in art because my art wasn't to her standards or level of acceptance.  I fought it because what right does she have to grade me on how good or bad looking my art is?  I did the work, didn't I?  I did it _on time_.  I did it _as_ assigned."  
  
"Yes Love, I know you did."  Helena smiles lowering the paper into her lap.  "I remember."  
  
"I know I'm not the best writer in the world but the topic was important to me, I took really great care with my research,"  Myka can feel the tears on her cheeks again, "I mean, I thought I did.  I was writing mostly from my heart but I did do _some_ research."  
  
"Myka, this isn't a research paper."  Helena says softly.  "It's an essay from a prompt you receive and then respond to, it doesn't require research so that isn't the problem.  The problem is that he gave you a seventy-four percent for a perfectly good paper likely because of your stance on the topic and not because of any grammatical errors.  There are none.  I proofread this paper myself."  
  
Myka lowers her head.  "Maybe it isn't that great."  
  
"It's perfectly fine,"  Helena says thumbing through the pages.  "It's _beautifully_ written."  
  
"He added a note at the end."  
  
Helena sees the note and when she reads it Myka can feel her body tensing next to hers.    
  
" _You don't get extra credit for martyrdom and feminism, Ms. Bering.  Stick to the facts_."  
  
Myka thinks she might hear Helena laugh when she reads those words out loud.  
  
"Why would he write that?"  
  
"He's retaliating against you.  I have heard some comments he's made, to his classes, about.. what happened, about you and Pete and myself.  He's a prick."  Helena shakes her head and folds the paper in half.  "Do you care if I keep this?"  
  
"If I never see that paper again, it will be too soon."  Myka sighs.  Helena tucks the paper into her book bag.    
  
"So, what is the _actual_ problem?"  Helena asks.  
  
"That is the problem."  
  
"Myka."  Helena does smile now and she puts her hand back over Myka's leg, slides it closer to Myka's arm and grabs her wrist gently.  "Like you just said, you fought Ms. Ritter over that B grade.  You can just as easily fight Mr. McPherson over this C grade.  If not for his tenure, I would say you could get him fired."  Myka licks her lips and sighs.  "So what is the problem because one idiotic teacher did not make you skip our walk.  Or an entire class for that matter."  
  
Myka stands up now and Helena drops her hold from her wrist as Myka steps to the chain link fence of the dugout.  She grips it and lowers her head, pressing her forehead into the metal.  
  
"There was a debate afterward."  
  
"A debate?"  
  
"Not even a debate, really, so much as it was a platform for homophobic storytelling, I guess."    
  
"Myka."  
  
"Forty minutes of idiotic boys decrying the legitimacy of same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, homosexuality..."  Myka's fingers tighten around the fence.  "Laughing about how the government should round every one of _them_ up, in the style of Hitler, and ship _them_ off to an island, away from the children they're _preying_ on.  Away from the mothers they're disappointing.  But not away from the fathers who probably _touched_ them when they were kids because _that_ is the reason, right?  The only plausible explanation for  _them_ being _that_ way."  
  
Myka blinks and more tears burn as they fall from her eyes.  Helena stands and moves quietly to stand beside Myka who turns to her then and smiles.  
  
"And an island sounds nice,"  Myka laughs softly, more tears cascading down her cheeks.  "I would go to an island.  With you. With Giselle.  With Abigail.  With every person in this world who ever had the slightest hint of feelings for someone the same sex as them.  Just to get away.  But they don't stop there."    
  
Helena moves her hand to Myka's side now, turns Myka so that she's further facing her, puts her other hand on Myka's hip.  
  
"There would be armed men waiting on this island and they would give them a day, just one day to party.  But at night when everyone is asleep," Myka's tears are relentless now, "they'd shoot everyone.  Just walk through and everyone.  Gone.  And whoever wasn't gone?  Atom bombed.  Nuked.  Annihilated.  Deservingly so."    
  
Myka almost laughs at that one.    
  
"It's like they can't even be original or creative with their storyline.  Those assholes learn about genocide in history class, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, slavery, then use it as justification to rid the world of something as non-existent and intangible as _sin_?"  
  
Helena turns Myka so that her back is entirely against the chain link fence and she moves her hands to Myka's cheeks, wipes away more of her tears.    
  
"Myka."  Helena's voice is so soft.  
  
"Every last one of them, they said."  Myka steels her expression.  "As if they don't know me.  As if they've never seen me with Abigail.  As if they don't know you and Giselle?  Every last one of them?  Helena, our school is not that big. They _know_."  
  
Myka can feel her adrenaline begin to rush and her face grows too warm and it's already hot outside but now she's crying and she's sweating and her heart is racing inside of her and her eyes are beginning to lose focus as her fists clench tight with nothing to hold onto.  
  
"Einstein,"  Helena calls even more softly.  
  
"The thought of someone else hurting you, Helena."    
  
Myka's chest feels so tight that when she breathes or she tries to breathe, her lungs revolt and refuse to take in all of the oxygen she needs, so Myka's breathing grows more shallow as her temperature rises and her fists clench tighter.    
  
"No one else is going to hurt me,"  Helena whispers softly.  
  
"The thought of them, the idea that they can say those things, that Mr. McPherson would /allow them to say those things."  
  
Myka overcompensates for the burn in her chest, the struggling in her lungs by slowing her breathing.  By not breathing at all.  
  
And it works for a while. It works until she starts to feel unsteady against the chain link.  Until the light in her eyes begins to darken and her vision begins to tunnel.  
  
"Myka."    
  
Helena moves her hands to Myka's chest now, palms flat just below her shoulders, over her lungs.    
  
"Breathe, please."  And Myka does, or she tries.  One shallow breath forces several more to follow and Myka thinks she hears herself sob.  "Slowly, Myka."  Helena's voice is soft and Helena leans closer, moves her lips to Myka's ear.  "Breathe, Love."  
  
Myka closes her eyes tight.  
  
"It's okay."  Helena says quietly and she pulls Myka into her, wraps her arms around her, over her shoulders, hugs her tight.  "Breathe with me."  Myka leans into Helena, wraps her arms around the older girl's back and pulls her in closer.    
  
When Helena takes in a deep breath, Myka follows suit.  When Helena exhales slowly, Myka does that, too.  And they do this several times, breathing this way with one another until Myka's breathing finally returns to normal and she rests her head on Helena's shoulder and closes her eyes.    
  
Helena turns to her and kisses her cheek, pulls her in closer to her.  
  
"Good girl," she says softly. "That's my good girl."  
  
"I'll kill them if they touch you."  Myka says softly.    
  
"Myka," Helena's smile is gentle, "they're cowards.  Afraid of things they know nothing about."  Helena pulls away from her now, stands straight and forces Myka to stand straight and look at her.  "I'll be okay.  You'll be okay.  Okay?"  
  
"I can't go back to that class,"  Myka cries.  "I can't.  I don't want to..."  
  
"Let me take care of that, okay?"  Myka takes in a deep breath and nods as Helena wipes more of her tears away, cups her cheek.  
  
"Myka?" Abigail is stepping into the dugout now, slowly and apprehensively, her eyes landing first on Myka then to Helena and back to Myka again.  "Is everything okay?"  
  
"Abigail."  Myka smiles and she looks to Helena for a moment, who gives her a soft smile before Myka turns completely to Abigail, steps to her and pulls her into her arms.  "Hey."  Myka kisses her with some greed she hasn't felt for Abigail in a while.  In some attempt to make every bit of her last hour fade away into the oblivion of nonsense and lies and empty threats that she so desperately hopes they never return from.    
  
"Is everything okay?"  Abigail has so much worry in her eyes that she even turns to Helena, just behind them, and asks Helena, "Is she okay?"  
  
Helena smiles and nods.  "She's okay."  
  
"Abigail."  Myka pulls the smaller girl into her and kisses her cheek, kisses her lips.  "I _want_ to take you to that godawful dance."  
  
"Why would you want to take me if you think it's godawful?"  Abigail asks with genuine confusion.  "You don't have to go if you don't want to go.  Someone _did_ eventually ask me."  
  
"I want to take you because I want to dance with you, not because I want to go to the dance."  Myka presses her nose and her lips into Abigail's cheek.  "I just want to be close to you." she whispers softly before moving suddenly away to give her a suspicious glare.  "And _who_ asked you?  Your mom doesn't count."  
  
Abigail examines her expression and she again looks to Helena, who only shrugs,  and back to Myka.    
  
" _Someone_.  Did you bump your head on something?"  Abigail puts her hand on Myka's head.  "You don't _feel_ feverish."  
  
"Abigail."  Myka presses her forehead to Abigail's.  "I was always going to ask you to go to the dance with me."  
  
"Of course you were."  
  
Myka kisses her quickly.  "I don't even care if you don't believe me.  I'm still taking you to that stupid dance."  
  
Abigail smiles and sighs, leaning back into Myka's hold on her. "Good.  Because it was totally my mom that asked me."  
  
***  
  
The three of them walk to the administration office where Giselle is greeting them from behind the counter.    
  
Abigail asks her, "Do you actually go to school here or do you just work here and pretend to be a student?"  
  
Giselle responds with, "I happen to work in the office sixth period.  I also happen to work on the attendance and hold all of the hall passes.  Which I'm assuming you need since you are all, for some reason, not in class."  
  
Helena reaches into her bag and pulls out Myka's essay, sets it on the counter in front of Giselle.  And Giselle barely opens the page and glances at the letter grade on it before she starts laughing.    
  
"I could recognize Mr. McPherson's giant red pen just about anywhere."  Giselle rolls her eyes and flips through the pages.  "Did you choose this topic or did he assign it?"  
  
"He assigned it,"  Myka answers.  
  
"Hmm,"  Giselle hums knowingly.  
  
"It gets better on the last page,"  Helena says softly.  And they watch as Giselle turns to the back page, reads the notation there.    
  
"Oh no, now I _know_ this man has lost his damn mind."  She smiles. "Don't you worry your precious little giraffe neck about this, Kid.  I will handle this." And she looks up at Myka for a moment.  "If that's cool with you?"  
  
"Please,"  Myka says.  
  
Helena smiles to Myka and winks when Myka's brows arch.    
  
Giselle writes all three of them passes for class and when she hands Abigail her pass, she says, "And yes, I _do_ have actual classes.  I just chose to get them out of the way before lunch time."  
  
"Thanks, Gigi,"  Abigail says with a roll of her eyes.    
  
"Thank you,"  Myka echoes.    
  
"You two go straight to class.  You."  Giselle points at Helena.  "I need to keep you for a moment."  
  
***  
  
Myka walks Abigail to her class clear across campus, kisses her before she goes in, then walks back across campus to her own class.  
  
Her precalculus teacher tells her that she figured whatever happened to have made her not show up for class must have been worth not showing up for class, so she hadn't even marked her as tardy.  
  
Myka spends the rest of that class thinking about reputations and how they not only precede her but come entirely without beckoning and unannounced.    
  
***  
  
On Monday, Helena is knocking on Mr. McPherson's door jamb to get his attention in the middle of a lecture.  Because she's at least _that_ polite, she'll later tell Myka.    
  
Mr. McPherson all but growls at her but nevertheless asks her what she wants.  
  
"I'm here for Myka," she says and walks across the classroom to hand him a slip of paper.  She doesn't wait for him to read it before she is by Myka's side.  "Gather your things up."  
  
And all eyes in the class are on her before they are eventually on Helena and lingering on Helena for much longer than Myka would care to tolerate.  Much longer than Myka wants to allow.  Because what had they just been ranting about Helena's kind not even three days ago?  
  
"What's happening?"  Myka still sits a bit lost in her seat as her eyes fall on Helena, too.  
  
"Grab your bag." Helena repeats her directions softly and points down to Myka's things.  "We're going."  
  
"Okay."    
  
Because Myka is still obedient when it comes to Helena and especially when Helena uses that authoritative tone with her.  
  
"Where are we going?"  Myka asks neatly organizing her pens and notebooks back into her backpack.  
  
Helena grabs her bag and haphazardly tosses the rest of Myka's items into the open compartment while leaning into Myka and whispering, "You'll see."  
  
Myka's eyes widen and she grabs her English book, "What about the lecture?"  
  
"No more lecture," Helena says gently tugging the book from Myka's hands and placing it back on the desk. "No more book."  
  
"Helena?"  
  
Helena puts a solitary finger to her lips in an attempt to silence Myka and that's all it takes for Myka to actually shut up.  Helena zips up Myka's bag, pulls it over her own shoulder and drapes her other arm over _Myka's_ shoulders as she leads her toward the door.  
  
"Say goodbye to your English class, darling,"  Helena smirks, glaring back at Mr. McPherson.  
  
And Myka's not entirely sure if Helena actually means for Myka to say goodbye or if she's just lost her mind, but they pause in the doorway long enough for Myka's instincts to kick in and do as commanded.    
  
So Myka says, "Goodbye, English class."  
  
She feels the tight squeeze of approval under Helena's grasp before the older girl leads her out of the classroom.  
  
***  
  
Helena takes Myka to lunch nearby where Myka asks her, "Have you done something terrible?"  
  
And Helena squints her eyes at Myka and says, "That depends on your definition of terrible, I imagine."  
  
So Myka responds with, "I think my definition is pretty universal," and looks upward as she adds, "unpleasant, disagreeable, bad, horrible."  
  
Helena narrows her eyes at Myka.  
  
"You said you trust me," Helena says, suddenly very serious.  "Do you?"  
  
"I do."  Myka nods.  
  
"Okay then."  Helena's smile returns.  "Eat your salad."  
  
***  
  
Helena tells Myka to meet her in front of Ms. Calder's classroom the next day during lunch, just before fifth period starts and Myka, the obedient little thing that she is, does not question this although she has her suspicions.  
  
When she shows up, Helena pulls her into the classroom, still void of students, and pulls her to Ms. Calder, who Myka has never met in any official capacity.  Myka has only seen the teacher in passing and so rarely up close, so she's shocked to see that she is /so /young, probably not yet thirty.  And she is also quite attractive.    
  
The woman smiles warmly at her from where she sits behind her desk pushing long blond hair behind her ears.  
  
"Hello, Myka.  It's nice to finally _actually_ meet you.  As opposed to just seeing you lingering outside my classroom door."  And she holds out her hand, which Myka shakes despite a sudden reluctance that is building inside of her.  
  
"You too, Ms. Calder."  
  
"So," and Ms. Calder reaches across her desk for her glasses, pulls them onto her face and begins to thumb through a stack of papers in front of her. "Helena told me you were having a problem in your other English class."  
  
Myka looks back to Helena, who has seated herself in a desk just behind her and smiles when Myka narrows her eyes at her.    
  
"Yes, I guess you could say that."  Myka turns back to Ms. Calder.  
  
"Well, I wanted to assure you myself that you won't have those same problems in my classroom."  And now Ms. Calder looks at Myka expectantly, with wide eyes.  "I don't tolerate that kind of attitude in my classroom.  All of my students know this and if you ever have any work you don't feel comfortable sharing with the class, just let me know.  I'll read and grade it privately."  Myka raises her brows.  "Okay?"  
  
"In your classroom, Ms. Calder?  Does that mean,"  Myka looks back at Helena, who is grinning, then to Ms. Calder who is now eyeing Helena with a tilt of her head.  
  
"Helena, did you not even tell her she's been transferred into my class?"  
  
"I wanted it to be a surprise."  Helena is on her feet now and wraps her arms around Myka just before kissing her temple. "Surprise," Helena says softly.  
  
"How did you?" Myka starts but does not finish.  
  
"Helena has been meddling with administration again," Ms. Calder teases with a smile.  "I don't know how she does it but she's had no less than three disruptive students removed from my class."  
  
Myka has a bit of a clue as to _how_ she does it.  _Why_ she does it is another mystery.  
  
"Disruptive is putting it lightly,"  Helena says relinquishing her hold on Myka now.  
  
"Please spare her the details, Ms. Wells,"  Ms. Calder says with a hand in the air as she meets Helena's eye roll with a smile.  
  
"I'll just say they won't be bothering Ms. Calder anymore."  And Helena is beaming in a way that Myka hasn't seen before, only _now_ she's doing so at Ms. Calder and the woman narrows her eyes at Helena but smirks and shakes her head.  
  
"How about _you_ , for once, do the job you are assigned to do and _assist_ me in my teaching of Ms. Bering by getting her a book for the class."  And Helena disappears wordlessly to a cabinet in the back of the classroom.  "So Myka, since I can see that you too have been steamrolled by Ms. Wells's _good deeds_ , let me ask you directly," and Ms. Calder removes her glasses and sets them on the desk, "if you are okay with transferring into my class."  
  
"It's an honors class.  I didn't think that I could."  
  
"From what I've seen of your grades and of your writing, you should be in this class anyway."  Ms. Calder smiles wide now.  "I'm pretty sure that you'll have no trouble catching up with some of the assignments.  Helena tells me you've already read every book I've assigned and more."  
  
"I love reading," Myka says softly.  "But there are only so many months left of school..."  
  
"If you don't mind doing a little extra work, we can see about getting you half the credit for next school year."  Ms. Calder nods.  "Then you can take my class next year through December and an elective after that."  
  
"She doesn't mind."  Helena has returned and with a book which she sets down on Ms. Calder's desk in front of Myka.  
  
"Helena, Honey." Ms. Calder eyes Helena and Myka cannot stop the smile that comes to her at the sight of Helena being so effectively and so repeatedly scolded.  
  
"She's a bit shy at times, I'm just helping her along."  Helena's hands are in the air in surrender and when she lowers them, she wraps one arm over Myka's shoulder.  "So Einstein, what do you think?  Can you put up with me for an extra hour every day?"  
  
"She says as if _she_ teaches the class," Ms. Calder says under her breath.  
  
Myka's smile grows and she arches her brow again, leans ever so slightly into Helena's grasp around her and turns back to Ms. Calder.  
  
"I would love to be in your class, Ms. Calder."  Myka nods.  "Thank you."  
  
"Well, I'm hardly the one you should be thanking."  Ms. Calder puts her glasses back on and collects a smaller stack of papers on her desk, inserts them into a folder with Myka's name on it, and hands them to her.  
  
"See, I'm rather persuasive."  Helena is beaming when she grabs the folder before Myka can and hands it to her.  
  
"Yes, that I do see.  Although I'm not so sure _persuasive_ is the right word.  Perhaps we should try my previous suggestion of _meddlesome_."  Ms. Calder gives Helena another _look_.  "Also, how about we give Ms. Bering room to breathe, Ms. Wells."  
  
Myka doesn't care about having room to breathe.  After last week, Myka has learned that Helena is the only way she knows _how_ to breathe.    
  
Ms. Calder gives Myka a knowing look, smiles, and says, "She means well, I'm almost sure of it."  
  
"Don't worry, Ms. Calder."  Myka turns to look at Helena and smiles when Helena smiles in that bashful way she tends to smile at Myka these days.  And Myka says, "I'm quite used to it."  
  
***  
  
When the bell rings Ms. Calder tells Myka to sit wherever she wants.  
  
Helena taps wordlessly on the corner desk closest to the desk where she sits and plays teacher's assistant for almost an hour, then takes her seat behind that desk.     
  
Myka is obedient and sits where directed.  
  
Two minutes later, Myka is greeted by a familiar smile, taking up space in the seat directly next to her.  Leaning closer to her.  Smiling even brighter at her.  
  
"Hello strange person,"  Abigail greets her.  "Are you following me again?"  
  
"I didn't follow you, I walked you to class,"  Myka says with a coy smile.    
  
"It was such a strange phenomenon that I had no idea what to call it,"  Abigail teases.  "And yet here you are completely unannounced again, sitting in a chair beside  _my_ chair in _my_ English class.  What do you suggest I call this, if you aren't following me?"    
  
"First off, it's _our_ English class now,"  Myka corrects.  "Secondly, you can call it the result of idle hands." Myka gestures with a head nod toward Helena.  
  
Abigail's eyes widen and she looks to Helena.  Myka follows her eyes until they meet the smug smile that has taken up residence on Helena's face.    
  
"You're both quite welcome," she says looking away from them and to some non-existent task on the desk before her.  
  
Myka looks back to Abigail and smiles.  
  
"She's starting to grow on me," Abigail says smiling in return.  
  
"Yeah," Myka nods, "me, too."


	11. Fourteen (And A Half) & Eighteen (And Three Quarters)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The rapid-fire conclusion to 14/18.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional warnings: My teenagers swear. (Probably a lot less than actual teenagers.) Most of my teenagers are also sexually active. (Again, probably a lot less than actual teenagers.) This section is totally unbeta'd, so forgive the spelling errors.
> 
> Also, feel free to let me know of any tags/trigger warnings might be useful for this story and I will add them.

Some would call this a nightmare.

The silence is palpable, building like a thick fog or haze through which all that can be seen are two small shadows with wide bright eyes, not just full of curiosity but hungry in their search for answers.  
  
Myka can almost see the gears working overtime behind those eyes, so she steels herself in preparation, steadies her breathing, and levels her gaze equally between the two pair.    
  
They are practically starved now, for more of what they do not know, and the tension that builds in the silence between where Myka sits and where they turn to near-statuettes, is so thick that Myka takes in a deep breath, the deepest breath, and holds it in.  
  
She stills, she prepares herself for the onslaught, she exhales.  
  
They pounce.  
  
"Why are you dressed like a boy?"  Leila asks and Myka looks down at her outfit and up at the small girl.  
  
"I'm dressed like me,"  Myka tells her.  
  
"Why aren't you wearing a dress?" Laila wonders.  "Aren't you going to a dance?"  
  
"I don't like wearing dresses."  Myka smiles.  
  
"Abs doesn't like dresses either."  Laila shrugs.  "Except for tonight, I think."  
  
"That's opposed to be a secret,"  Leila turns and says this directly into Laila's face.  
  
Laila shrugs again and pushes at her sister.  "I like your shoes."  
  
"Thanks."  
  
"Shouldn't you have fancy shoes on?"  Leila accuses.  "Not Converse."  
  
"Converse are fancy!"  Myka challenges.  
  
Leila shakes her head.  
  
"I like your hair, too, do you use a curling iron?"  Laila asks.  "Our sister uses a curling iron but she doesn't get _that_ many curls in her hair."  
  
"No, this is just my hair." Myka smiles.  
  
"It's pretty."  Laila grins.  
  
"Thank you, Laila."  
  
"So you always dress like a boy?"  Leila counters.  
  
"I always dress like myself,"  Myka responds.  
  
Leila is not impressed with that answer, judging by the intense brow arch.  
  
" _Okay,_ " is all she says before rolling her eyes.  
  
"How many sisters and brothers do you have?"  Laila tilts her head.  It's a tiny, adorable version of Mrs. Cho and Abigail when they do the same thing.  
  
"I have one sister,"  Myka answers.  
  
"No brothers?"  Leila follows up.  
  
"No brothers,"  Myka says.  "Unless you count my best friend, Pete."  
  
"You're lucky,"  Laila sighs.  
  
"Is he your friend or is he your brother?"  Leila questions.  
  
"He's my friend but he's _like_ my brother."  
  
"So he's _not_ your brother."  It isn't a question at all.  
  
Myka smirks.  "You're very right, Leila."  
  
"You're really pretty," Laila says shyly.  
  
"Thank you, Laila."  
  
"What's your sister's name?"  Leila asks.  
  
"Tracy."  
  
Laila elbows Leila.  "We already knew that."  
  
"Don't _do_ that."  Leila elbows Laila.  
  
"Leila always forgets everything."  Laila sounds exasperated.  
  
"I do not."  Leila glares back at Laila.  
  
Myka reaches to her mouth to hide her quickly widening smile.  
  
"Is it true that you don't forget things?"  Laila asks.  
  
"It is true."  Myka nods.  
  
"How do you not forget anything?"  Leila asks suspiciously.    
  
"Are you an elephant?" Laila adds.  
  
"I have an eidetic memory."  
  
"What is that?"  Laila questions.  
  
"If your mom reads you a story, do you remember what the story is about when she's done?"  
  
For the first time in minutes they just nod.   
  
Silently.  
  
"Well, it's kind of like that, except I can remember the story word-for-word."  
  
" _Every_ word?"  Laila sounds impressed.  
  
"That's _impossible_."  Leila does not.  
  
"It's okay if you don't believe me. "  Myka smiles.  "That's your choice."  
  
" _I_ believe you, Myka."  Laila grins.  
  
"Thanks for the support, Kiddo.  Hey!  Do you two know Claudia Donovan?"  
  
"We have a Claudia at school."  
  
"Does she have short red hair?"  Myka asks.  
  
They both nod.  
  
"She's Leila's friend,"  Laila says.  
  
"She's not your friend, too?"  
  
"She's mean to me,"  Laila adds.  
  
"Because Laila always wants to play dolls and me and Claudia don't like playing with dolls,"  Leila explains.  "We like playing with the blocks and other things that _aren't_ dolls."  She shoots an accusing glare to Laila.  
  
"So you like playing with _boy_ things?"  Myka asks.  "Kind of like how I enjoy wearing _boy_ clothes?"  
  
"Blocks aren't just for boys!"  Leila sounds offended.  
  
"Neither are my clothes."  Myka smiles.  Winks.  
  
Leila glares at her.  
  
"She's right, Leila,"  Laila says and turns to Myka.  "Ma always says that."  
  
"No, she doesn't." Leila argues.   "You're just on her side because you _like_ her."  
  
"No, she does."  Laila counter-argues.  "She's a vaginacologist.  She knows about boy and girl _things_."    
  
Myka can barely suppress the laugh that follows.  
  
"She's a _gy_ necologist."  Mrs. Cho corrects, stepping into the living room now and sitting on the couch between where the twins stand just in front of it.  "Why are the both of you pestering just-a-friend-Myka?"  
  
"Well, it certainly isn't a _learned_ behavior."    
  
Myka turns at the familiar sound of Abigail's sarcastic voice entering the living room and Myka stands to her feet before she can fully register the girl standing before her and Myka opens her mouth before she knows what she's going to say.  So when Myka's mouth says "oh" she hears herself saying it before she even realizes she's saying it.  And after that, she cannot say anything at all.  
  
Because Abigail in her Hawaiian-inspired floral-print dress with that flower on one side of her hair, that is curled and pulled in front of her shoulder and the lei around her neck and that gloss on those lips, looks unlike anything Myka has ever seen of her, of any girl before now.    
  
This vision of Abigail makes Myka's breath catch in her throat and pulls Myka into Abigail's orbit and drives Myka to want to pull Abigail into _her_ but the twins and Mrs. Cho and soon Mr. Cho and Kevin are there and Myka thinks that as much as she likes Abigail, like _really_ likes Abigail, she doesn't particularly like having Abigail's family as an audience to testify to exactly how much she likes her.  
  
"Hey." This is what her feeble brain manages to push out of her mouth on a puff of air through what she's sure is a goofy smile.  
  
"Hi,"  Abigail says, suddenly very shy.  
  
"You look," Myka has an endless supply of words trapped inside of her mind and yet she cannot find the right one to use in this very moment.  She's sure that if she did, she wouldn't be able to say it.  
  
"Thanks," Abigail answers prematurely, "to whatever you were going to say.  Or not say.  Unless you were going to say something bad, then never mind.  That you can keep to yourself.  Or you can just stare.  Why are you staring at me?"  
  
Myka arches a brow and turns her head to look away but her eyes do not look away.  Instead her eyes look down, to the flats on Abigail's feet and up, all the way up.  Up legs, the dress, and _Abigail has cleavage_?  Further up past her chest, bare neck, dark curls, the lips with the gloss, that _face_.  Until her eyes land back on Abigail's gaze, which is both curious and apprehensive.  
  
"I can't help it."  Myka finally manages a complete sentence.  
  
"Oh, my second born is all grown up and going dancing!"  Mrs. Cho's voice startles Myka out of her daze.    
  
"Ma."  Abigail gives her mother that look and shakes her head.  "Please?"  
  
"Oh, all right,"  Mrs. Cho says defeated.  "But I'm getting my picture and you better smile or so help me Abigail Mei Cho."  
  
"All three names,"  Myka says with raised brows.  "Sounds serious."    
  
"Oh, I _am_ serious.  Both of you outside. _Now_."  
  
Myka steps to Abigail and links her index finger with Abigail's ring and pinky fingers, tugs her toward her as the rest of the Cho family files out of the front door.  "Gorgeous," Myka says with a nod and kisses Abigail's cheek.  "That's the word I was looking for."  
  
***  
  
Myka isn't exactly sure when she reached this comfortable place or how she fell into this role that doesn't feel like a role at all but exactly like who she is meant to be.  
  
Suited up.  Wild curls.  Flat shoes.  Fourth smartest girl in the school.  
  
"Smile or we'll be here forever."  The height difference isn't so great that she has to but Abigail steps on the tips of her toes anyway.  Plants a kiss on Myka's cheek.  Balances herself by tugging on the blazer Myka wears.  
  
Myka smiles wide, steadying the smaller girl with hands on her sides, and kisses her in time with the sound of a shutter.  
  
"Oh, that was such a good one!"    
  
Mrs. Cho is absolutely beaming from behind the lens of a camera.  She seems to fancy herself a photographer when she's not busy working as a vaginacologist.  
  
***  
  
When Amanda and Pete pull up to the house, and when Abigail's mother has finished being a _mother_ (much to Myka's amusement), Myka opens the car door for Abigail.  Holds her hand while she gets in.  Closes the door for her, too.  
  
"Please have her home by 23:00 at the absolute latest,"  Mr. Cho says with only a hint of authority.  "She's not yet exempt from attending church in the morning."  
  
Directly behind him, Mrs. Cho rolls her eyes, shakes her head and mouths to Myka the word "midnight".  Holds up a thumb.  Winks with a nod.  
  
***  
  
She can't take her eyes off of Abigail.  She wants the car ride to last forever.  Tells Amanda to take the long way.  Pulls Abigail closer to her.  Kisses her temple.  
  
"Are you sniffing my hair?"  Abigail asks her in a whisper, not bothering to move away.  
  
"There's a giant flower in it," Myka responds.  Abigail turns to give her a look.  A hint of a smile cracking at her lips.  "I might be," Myka adds, looking away.  
  
***  
  
Ms. Calder is at the entrance to the dance, taking tickets and handing out table numbers for preassigned dinner seating.  When she sees Myka and Abigail she smiles.  Thumbs through her list of names.  Pulls out a numbered tag.  
  
"You two," she shakes her head, "look _absolutely_ adorable."  
  
"Thank you, Ms. Calder."  Abigail turns to Myka and smiles.  
  
"Oh, look," Ms. Calder smiles looking at the tag for their table before handing it to Myka, "you're at table thirteen with the enigmatic Helena Wells.  I'm sure _that's_ a coincidence."  
  
"She is rather persuasive," Myka jokes and Ms. Calder smiles with a nod.    
  
"That she is."  
  
***  
  
People stare when they walk in.  They whisper, too.  Myka can't decipher if that's good or bad but by the time they make it to their table, she no longer cares.    
  
She pulls Abigail's seat out for her because it's what she's seen in movies, on television, read in books.  She moves her own chair closer to Abigail's.  Sits beside her. Drapes her arm over the back of Abigail's chair.  Feels _oddly_ possessive beneath the occasional stare.  
  
"So there _is_ a dinner!"  Abigail is beaming and Myka smiles back at her.  
  
"This year's dance is making last year's dance look like a ho-down."  Amanda's examining the tableware as she and Pete join them.  
  
"Don't get too comfortable," Pete starts, "because I can't afford to take you anywhere this fancy until I'm at least twenty-two."  
  
"I hope you enjoy ordering from the kid's menu," Myka adds for Amanda's benefit.  
  
"Luckily my expectations were not much higher than that to begin with."  Amanda flashes Pete a coy smile and he leans forward.  Plants a quick kiss at the corner of her mouth.  Sighs with a shake of his head.  
  
"What can I say," he smirks, "I really like my chicken nuggets and fish fingers."

"He actually puts them on his fingers,"  Myka clarifies.  
  
***  
  
Myka only sees Helena when she drops by the table for a quick bite to eat.  She asks her where Giselle is and Helena offers her a weak smile and says, "Playing chaperone, like she's afraid to admit she bought tickets."    
  
Helena tells them to have fun.  She says she'll be back in a bit.  She disappears across the auditorium.  
  
Myka wants to be worried.  Myka _does_ worry.  But tonight, Myka had decided long ago, is for Abigail.  Because the too familiar guilt of her like for Helena has a habit of tugging at her gut whenever Abigail makes this face that Myka has internally labeled as her Helena Proximity Face.  
  
The face she makes when we she pretends to tease Myka about her and Helena's inevitability.  The face that Myka knows, has known since the second she saw it, is no longer just a tease.  
  
"Is she okay?"  Abigail leans into Myka's ear and whispers the question.    
  
Myka shrugs and says, "I have no idea," just as the music starts up.  Then she smiles.  Her smile is wide.    
  
She turns back to Abigail.  Stands to her feet.  Helps Abigail to _her_ feet.  
  
"Let's dance."  
  
***  
  
Myka has been waiting a year for this.    
  
She refuses to let the empty dance floor dissuade her from stepping onto it.  The Twizzlers that Abigail has hidden in her purse, that she's been slipping to Myka one by one since they'd began their wait for dinner, may have aided in her sudden boost of confidence.  
  
It doesn't take long after she and Abigail are there for Pete and Amanda to follow.  And soon after that, several more of their peers join in.  
  
In ten minutes, the dance floor is packed.  
  
"Jesus, Bering!"  Amanda yells at her over loud music.  "Where in the hell did you learn how to dance?"  
  
And if she means it positively or negatively, Myka doesn't know.  Doesn't care.  
  
She isn't exactly sure of her moves.  What they are called. How they look.  Where she picked them up from.  They just feel right and Abigail happily follows her lead with the hint of a smile on her face.  
  
And Abigail dancing with her feels right.  So Myka doesn't question it.  Doesn't stop dancing.  
  
***  
  
The music slows and Myka pulls Abigail as close as she can get away with.  Maybe just a little bit closer.    
  
"We're going to get in trouble," Abigail sighs.  
  
Myka wraps her arms around Abigail's waist.  Abigail rests her head against Myka's shoulder.  
  
"Until then," Myka starts but does not finish.  
  
Myka rests her cheek against Abigail's head.  Turns to press a quick kiss into her hair as they sway in time with the music.  Pulls her closer.  Holds on tight.  
  
They don't quite get in trouble but Ms. Calder shoots Myka a knowing look when their eyes do meet.  
  
The song has already ended by then.  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't see Helena again until an hour after the music starts.  Abigail points her out from across the auditorium when the dance floor clears during a short break in the music.  
  
She's standing very close to Ms. Calder.  She's shaking her head.  Her arms are telling a rather colorful story.  
  
"She looks upset."  Abigail touches Myka's arm.  
  
She doesn't just look upset, Myka thinks.  She looks _extremely_ upset.  Myka can't decide if she's crying or she's angry from the distance she's at and an angry Helena is such a rare occurrence, she's not sure she would know what that looked like on Helena anymore.  
  
"Maybe you should go check on her," Abigail adds and she sounds genuinely concerned.  
  
Myka _wants_ to check on Helena but the want, like most of her feelings for Helena, seems frivolous.  Even self-serving.    
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"I'm sure she'll be fine."  But Myka doesn't look away.    
  
She watches as Ms. Calder attempts to calm Helena down and she eventually does, Helena wrapping her arms around herself and nodding as Ms. Calder wipes the the tears that Myka cannot see from Helena's face.  
  
"Myka," Abigail's voice is soft, barely audible over the music that starts up again.  Myka turns back to see her smiling what Myka thinks is a sympathetic smile.  "I know what you're doing.  Avoiding her.  Spending time with me."  
  
"I'm not _avoiding_ her," Myka corrects. "Just putting space between us."  
  
"She's still your friend, Myka."  Abigail glances back to where Helena still stands, cradling herself.  "You might have to deal with that eventually."  
  
"Yes," Myka says quietly, also turning her gaze back to Helena.  "Eventually."  
  
***  
  
Myka turns away for two seconds to put a kiss on Abigail's forehead and Helena disappears.  Myka is on her feet and approaching Ms. Calder seconds after that and even the older woman looks a bit put off.  
  
"She just left,"  Ms. Calder tells Myka before she can even ask.  "Heading home, you can probably still catch her in the parking lot."  
  
"Thank you, Ms. Calder."  
  
Myka doesn't _get_ why Ms. Calder is upset but she touches her hand to the older woman's wrist in a comforting gesture before she heads for the exit.  
  
***  
  
Myka is stopped at the door by her pre-calculus teacher who tells her she can't leave without her ride being there first.  
  
Myka can see Helena from where she stands in the doorway and calls her name.  Helena stops and turns around but doesn't say anything.  
  
"Helena's my ride," Myka tells her teacher and the woman looks out at Helena who is standing with her arms crossed in wait, then back to Myka with the most disbelieving expression on her face.  "Please, Ms. St. Clair, she's upset, I just need to talk to her really quickly."  
  
The older teacher twists her lips to the side for a moment before she sighs and waves her hand, "Go."  Myka grins.    
  
"Thank you, Ms. St. Clair."  
  
"I'll be watching you.  Come _right_ back," she adds.  
  
"I will!"  Myka is halfway to Helena.  
  
***  
  
Myka stands two feet away from the older girl who looks for all the world like she is one stray move away from running in the opposite direction.    
  
Myka smiles softly.  
  
"H.G."  
  
That's all it takes.  
  
Helena propels herself forward and into Myka's arms, almost knocking both of them over.  She buries her face into curls over Myka's shoulder, wraps her arms around her.    
  
Myka holds her in return.  Rubs her back.  Regains her balance.  
  
Helena doesn't sob like Myka had expected. Instead she takes in a deep breath and exhales, "Einstein."  
  
"Hey."    
  
Helena pulls away from Myka then and smiles. Wipes at her own eyes.  Tugs at the blazer Myka wears.  
  
"I like this."  Her voice is barely above a whisper.  "Taking notes from Giselle?"  
  
Myka's smile is still just as soft and cautious when she nods.    
  
"We raided Pete's closet of forgotten formal wear."  
  
Helena lets out a small puff of a laugh, nods.  
  
"That's my Gigi."    
  
More tears slip from her eyes.    
  
"H.G."  
  
"I like when you call me Helena, Myka."  
  
Sometimes, Myka just feels nostalgic.  
  
"I know, Helena."  Myka's smile fades and she reaches to tuck stray hairs behind Helena's ear.  "Are you going home?"  
  
"Jeannie's actually.  I'm sorry, I'm just really tired and," Helena sighs, "Giselle..."  
  
Myka raises her brows.  
  
"She's busy _chaperoning_."  
  
There's a lingering silence between them before Myka gently grasps Helena's arm and tugs her in the direction of her car.  
  
"I'll walk with you."  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't stay too long with Helena but long enough to figure out what's wrong.  She wipes away more of Helena's tears just before the older girl gets into her car.  
  
Helena tells her to call if she needs a ride.  Myka tells her not to worry about her.  To go to bed.  
  
They say goodnight and Myka watches Helena drive off until she can no longer see her tail lights.  
  
***  
  
Ms. St. Clair gives Myka a knowing look when she returns, tells her, "You're a very good friend."  
  
Myka smiles and thanks the older woman as she slips past her through the doorway.  
  
But she's not so sure that she's right.  
  
***  
  
Myka finds Giselle in a stairwell, leaning against the railing, _chaperoning_ a pretty red-haired junior girl that Myka only vaguely recognizes. 

Myka can already feel her adrenaline rushing.  
  
" _Giselle_."  
  
"Don't even start with me, Bering."  
  
Myka turns her attention to the red-haired girl who is a second away from opening her mouth when Myka says, "I _wish_ you would."  
  
She must be the fifth smartest kid in the school because Myka sees her jaw tense but she says absolutely nothing.  Instead, she leans into Giselle. _Kisses_ Giselle. Turns her eyes on Myka for just a second and heads through the door.  
  
It slams closed behind her.  
  
" _Really_?"  
  
"Helena is your problem now,"  Giselle says standing straight and approaching Myka.  "It's what you've both always wanted, right?"  
  
"She's eighteen!  She can't _be_ my problem."  Myka clamps her lips together tightly as her words echo in the stairwell.  She lowers her voice.  "It has _nothing_ to do with you."  
  
" _That's_ comforting."  Giselle lets out a laugh. "So Abigail and I are just placeholders until you're no longer jail bait, is that how that works?  Because _fuck that_ , Myka Bering."  
  
Myka feels her fists clench.  She inhales deeply.   Exhales slowly.  
  
"Helena _loves_ you, Giselle," Myka says.  "She's confused.  _I'm_ confused.  We've been this way forever.  We'll figure it out in our own time.  But she loves you and she needs you right now.  I'm _nothing_ right now.  I can't be anything to her.  I can't even be a decent friend to her because of the way she makes me feel. She _needs_ you."  
  
Giselle shakes her head and rolls her eyes.  
  
"You are both so fucking dramatic."  Giselle turns to leave.  "You were _made_ for one another, honestly."  
  
"I'm so angry with you," Myka says as the too familiar sting of tears burns her eyes.  Giselle stops and turns to face Myka.  
  
"I can see that," she responds coolly.  
  
"Is my anger misdirected?"  Myka asks.  
  
Giselle eyes her silently for several seconds.  "Your anger isn't misdirected.  It's entirely uncalled for but I _get_ it.  You can hate me.  Whatever helps you wade through the bullshit."  
  
"I have always wanted to hate you because of your relationship with Helena," Myka keeps her voice steady, "now I want to hate you for throwing her away.  But I can't.  I still can't hate you, Giselle.  You're what she needs right now."  
  
"Right _now_ ,"  Giselle echoes.  "Do you even hear yourself?"  
  
"She needs you _especially_ now," Myka corrects.  
  
"Myka," Giselle's voice is different now.  Calm.  Understanding?  Sympathetic, Myka thinks.  "Helena has a lot more shit to work out than Leo and Junior.  More than even _I_ know about.  It's not just your questionable-as-fuck relationship, it's a whole lot more than that.  And I'm not going to sit here and hold your hand while you work through your anger because someone broke your precious girlfriend's fragile heart for reasons you cannot fully comprehend.  Reasons that have absolutely _nothing_ to do with _you_."  
  
"You need to fix this,"  Myka cries.  
  
"Listen to what I'm telling you, Kid."  Giselle steps closer to Myka, lingers over her, leans into her until their faces are inches apart.  She whispers, "She is broken beyond repair.  There's no fixing it.  Or her.  I've tried.  I'm done."  
  
Giselle stands straight. Takes a step back.  Holds her hands in the air in surrender.  
  
"Goodnight, _Einstein_."  
  
Myka shuts her eyes tight when the stairwell door slams closed.  
  
***  
  
Abigail is _more_ worried now.  
  
 _Pete_ is worried.    
  
"What the hell happened?"  
  
He's using his body-count voice.  
  
Myka moves to Abigail who is instantly wiping her tears away.    
  
"That bad, huh?"  Abigail asks softly.  Myka is sure all she manages in response is a pout because what words does she have for the girl who has put up with her through all of this?  
  
Giselle is right that she's a placeholder.  That Abigail is a placeholder.    
  
But it doesn't feel that way because Helena is an impossibility.  Something that will never happen.    
  
Maybe Myka is holding on to the sliver of hope that one day she might not be an impossibility.   That Myka will be able to handle that enigma of a girl who she both loves dearly as a friend and fears intimately, as anything more.  
  
Maybe Myka is holding onto Abigail unfairly in wait of that day.  
  
The guilt isn't just tugging now.  It's nauseating.  
  
"Mykes."  Pete is by her side putting a hand on her arm.  "Did I not see Giselle leaving the same hallway that you just left?"  
  
"She broke up with Helena."  
  
"What?"  Pete and Amanda and Abigail echo each other just milliseconds apart.  
  
"Why?"  Abigail asks.  
  
"When?"  Amanda questions.  
  
"What?"  Pete repeats.  
  
"I'm ready to go."  Myka sighs.  "Is that okay?"  
  
Amanda and Pete exchange looks and shrug, "Yeah Mykes, that's okay.  It sounds like a good idea."    
  
"The dancing kind of died down without you anyway."  Amanda smiles, settling her arm over Myka's shoulder and planting a kiss on her cheek.  
  
Myka reaches out for Abigail's hand and Abigail takes Myka's in hers.  Holds tight.  
  
They don't let go.  
  
***  
  
"You see," Abigail tells her on the Cho's front porch, dimly lit by a dying, flickering bulb.  "It was never Giselle, keeping you two apart.  Giselle never mattered.  You two are inevitable."  
  
Myka hears the tinge of sadness beneath all the false bravado and reasoning that Abigail tries so hard to muster.  
  
"That's the problem," Myka says. "She did matter.  _Does_ matter."  Myka touches a hand to Abigail's cheek.  "You matter, too, Abigail."  
  
The smaller girl quirks her lip to the side and looks away from Myka.    
  
"It's okay that you have feelings for her," Abigail says softly.  
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"It's not okay," Myka says and she leans into Abigail, sets her lips to those sad lips for the longest time before leaving a kiss there.  "I shouldn't be this way with you just because I feel this way about Helena.  It's not fair."  
  
Abigail says nothing but tears slip down her cheeks and the sight makes Myka catch her breath.  That this so-lighthearted girl is crying.  Is broken-hearted.  
  
"I'm sorry, Abi."  Myka kisses her again, quickly this time.   "I just can't do this to you anymore."  
  
Abigail remains quiet.  She nods.  Sniffles.  Wipes her own tears.    
  
Myka cups her cheek, then moves her hand below Abigail's chin and tilts her face up toward hers.  She kisses her once, twice, the corner of her mouth.  The bridge of her nose.  Just over her eyelid.  Those lips again.    
  
"Goodnight, Abi Mei Cho."  
  
Myka closes her eyes and turns away.  Opens them when she's no longer facing Abigail.  Forces her feet to move her back to Amanda's car.  Away from the soft cries of that gorgeous talkative Hawaiian girl she's left broken on her own porch.   
  
Away from the guilt that has been tugging at her for way too long.  
  
Further away from Abigail Cho.  
  
***  
  
It isn't Giselle standing between them.  It isn't Abigail, either.  Because Myka still isn't ready.  She isn't ready for _her_ but she'll do what she can _for_ her.    
  
***  
  
Pete and Amanda stay outside in Amanda's car.  Myka doesn't pretend to not know what they're doing anymore.    
  
Myka tells Pete to keep the peel on his banana.    
  
He tells her it's too late for that, his banana was peeled when he was a baby.  
  
Amanda tells Myka that she may want to brush up on her banana metaphors.  
  
Myka doesn't care enough about bananas to respond with anything more than an amused smile.  
  
***  
  
Jeannie is still awake in the living room, reading a magazine.  Her hearing aid must be down because she jumps when she sees Myka.    
  
Myka signs Jeannie's sign for Helena and Jeannie vocalizes that they talked for as long as Helena could stand to talk before she disappeared into the guest bedroom.  
  
Myka thanks Jeannie and warns her that Pete is still outside.  Should he try to startle her upon his entry into the house.    
  
She thanks Myka and turns herself so that she's facing the front entry.  Returns to her reading.  
  
***  
  
Myka readies herself for bed before she finds Helena in the guest bedroom curled into a ball, buried entirely beneath the covers.    
  
Myka is merciless in her retrieval of the older girl.  She turns on the lights, moves to the side of the bed where she lays and pulls back the covers.    
  
Helena is still in her dress.  Still wearing her makeup.  Still with a face full of tears.  
  
"Myka."  Her voice sounds so brittle.  So broken.  So _sad_.    
  
Myka sits beside her and Helena pulls her arm over her face.    
  
"Please, don't," she says.  "Whatever you're going to say or do."  
  
"Helena," Myka's voice is soft, cautious again.  "I just want you to actually get ready for bed."  
  
Helena shakes her head.    
  
"Helena," Myka smiles, "you can't sleep in your dress.  Let's go."  Myka tugs at her arm, pulling it from over her face.  Helena almost glares at her but her face softens so quickly at the sight of Myka sitting beside her that Myka's smile grows.  "C'mon."  
  
Helena sits up, her hair falling all over her face.    
  
That kissable pout appears.  
  
Myka _has_ to walk away.  
  
"Pajamas," is all Myka says before she stands up and leaves the room, shutting the door behind her.  
  
***  
  
Helena wanders into the bathroom in a tank and shorts not too long after that.  Myka hands her a wash cloth, already wet and soapy.  She pats the counter top and Helena pulls herself up onto it, eyes Myka for a moment.    
  
"What?"  Myka only looks at her briefly before she turns her attention to Helena's toothbrush as she lines the bristles with toothpaste and sets it carefully back onto the counter.  She does the same with her own toothbrush.  
  
"Nothing." Helena's voice is barely a voice anymore.  She sets the towel over her face and begins scrubbing away her makeup.    
  
Myka moves to the space in front of her, stands with her legs against Helena's knees, holds out her hand.  
  
Helena hands her the wash cloth.    
  
Myka moves the cloth to Helena's face, against her cheeks, over her eyes.  All the places she's missed.  All the places still hidden behind the mask of makeup that Myka is determined to wash entirely away.  
  
Because Helena, beneath all the product and the color and that mask, is beautiful.  Helena with heavy eyelids, exhausted from the so many tears she has lost, is beautiful. With warm red blood moving beneath cool pale cheeks and brown eyes that don't know where to look.  Sans eye liner and lipstick and foundation.    
  
Helena is beautiful.  
  
When the mask is gone, Myka sets the cloth on the counter and steps away from Helena.  The older girl moves off of the counter to wash her face in warm running water.    
  
As Helena stands straight, Myka sets a dry cloth over her face.  Helena pulls it off.  Glares at Myka.  Successfully this time.  
  
Myka smiles.  
  
Helena tries very hard not to smile back.  
  
Myka hands Helena her toothbrush.  
  
***  
  
Helena wastes no time burying herself beneath bed covers again.  Myka sits beside her only long enough to push her hair back, say goodnight, kiss her temple.  
  
Myka's on her feet, at the door, about to turn off the light when Helena says, "My dress."  
  
Myka turns back to her.  "I hung it up."  
  
"No," Helena turns over onto her back to face Myka and adds, "my prom dress."    
  
Myka steps back to the bed and sits as Helena sits up facing her.    
  
"What about your prom dress?"  Myka questions.  
  
Helena runs her hand through her hair.  "I bought Giselle something, bought myself a matching dress.  They're wasted now."  
  
Myka watches Helena for several seconds before her eyes fall to the patterned bed spread, entirely lost in thought.    
  
Helena's fingers wrap gently around Myka's wrist and pull her from her thoughts.  
  
"Maybe you and Abigail can have them?"    
  
Myka shakes her head and looks back at Helena.  "There is no me and Abigail," Myka says softly then lowers her gaze to Helena's hand on her wrist.  Helena's grip tightens then and she tugs gently at Myka's arm.    
  
It doesn't take much more than that.  
  
***  
  
How many times have they found themselves this way?  Helena curling into Myka.  Myka wrapping herself around Helena.    
  
How many times have they found themselves this way in the shadows of Helena's relationship with Giselle?  In the shadows of Myka's non-relationship with Abigail?  
  
And now that the shadows are gone, it should feel _right_.  It should feel _better_ , Myka thinks.  This shouldn't feel like a thing that she needs to be cautious about or a thing that is fragile, like tip toeing across a glass bridge.    
  
Helena shouldn't feel so far away.  
  
It should feel okay now.  
  
But Myka is still waiting.  
  
She's still waiting for that elation in the wake of Helena's broken relationship.  She's still waiting to feel like Helena isn't impossible.  Like that sliver of hope that she'll one day be able to handle Helena has now grown into an ever-widening chasm.    
  
She's still waiting to be relieved of that jealousy.  And the guilt borne from that jealousy.  Still waiting to feel like Helena could be hers.  One day.  Because now there is no one there, no two people there, getting in the way.  
  
Abigail's words are echoing in her thought-clouded mind, "Giselle never mattered." Because really what Abigail was telling Myka is that _she_ herself didn't matter.  Abigail knows that, or thought that, and has probably thought that all along.  And still wastes her time on Myka.  
  
And Myka has let her.  Dragged her right along.  Allowed her to go on thinking she is nothing.  Like she doesn't matter.  Until the very last minute.    
  
Even now, Abigail probably thinks she doesn't matter.  More now than even before because at least Myka was with her before.  At least Myka would hold her before and kiss her and spend afternoons in that rickety old tree house on thick blankets surrounded by forgotten snacks being devoured by ants.    
  
At least they had that much before and now?  Now they had nothing because Myka.  Myka's _feelings_ and Myka's confusion and her inability to commit to something she knows nothing about.  Something she would probably be bad at from the start.  Something she would likely fail miserably at.    
  
Because how could Myka be in a relationship or know how to be in a relationship, when the only relationships she's ever known are hardly relationships at all?  
  
How can she ever expect to be ready for Helena when she doesn't even know what being ready means?  
  
***  
  
Myka pulls Helena closer to her.  Loses a hand in Helena's hair.  Runs her fingers along Helena's scalp.    
  
It's almost ritual now.  
  
The older girl relaxes into Myka.  Her breath softens against Myka's neck.  Her hand on Myka's wrist falls gently away.  
  
The elation still does not come.  
  
***  
   
Pete and Jeannie are seated at the table when Myka comes wandering in the next morning.  They both look at her at the same time and they look so much alike in their facial expressions that Myka can't help the smile that pulls at her lips.  
  
"What?"  She questions.  
  
"What happened to your face?" Pete asks and Jeannie points to her own forehead to point out the spot on Myka's forehead that Myka doesn't realize actually hurts until she reaches her hand up to touch it.  
  
She winces.  
  
"Do I have to murder H.G. now, too?"  Pete asks in a voice that tells Myka he doesn't know whether he's joking or serious.  
  
"No," Myka touches at the sore spot again, walking further into the kitchen and sitting beside Pete at the table.  "I kind of fell out of the bed last night.  My own fault."  
  
"Hm," Pete hums suspiciously, studying her carefully.  "Mykes, only you would also be clumsy in your sleep."  He immediately braces himself for an assault but Myka just smiles and nods.  
  
"That's me," she says.  
  
Pete narrows his eyes at her for a moment longer until Ms. Jane is beside them at the table with a bowl of eggs and a plate full of bacon.  
  
"Pancakes coming up," she announces.  "And good morning, Myka."  She pauses and arches a brow at Myka then points to her own head.  "What's that?"  
  
"She fell out of bed," Pete tells his mother, already with a mouth full of bacon.  
  
"Chew. Your food," she responds.  
  
"It's fine, Ms. Jane."  Myka reaches across the table to spoon eggs onto her plate.  "I'll put ice on it later."  And Ms. Jane gives her the same suspicious look that Pete had given her but then also looks to Pete and back to Myka.  
  
"Okay," is all she says before heading back to the stove.  
  
"It's cool, Mom, I was with her when we got home and she didn't have it then,"  Pete says.  "So, she either bumped her head walking in the door, bumped her head walking down the hall, or bumped her head while she was sleeping."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes.  
  
"Or all three."  
  
This time Myka _does_ hit Pete.  
  
***  
  
It's close to noon and Pete, Jeannie, and Myka are in the living room watching a movie when Helena finally emerges from the guest room to join them.  She falls into the couch just beside Myka then reaches her hand to the bruise that has formed over the knot on Myka's forehead.  She pouts.  It's pitiful.  
  
"Did you ice that?"  she asks softly.    
  
Myka just nods wordlessly and Helena sighs and leans into her.    
  
"Sorry," Helena adds in a whisper.  "I have become a bit of a bed hog.  Didn't realize you were so close to the edge."  
  
Myka shakes her head, "It's fine."    
  
She turns to Helena and smiles, reaches over to pat the back of Helena's hand before wrapping her fingers around Helena's wrist.  
  
Helena rests her head on Myka's shoulder.  
  
In ten minutes, she is asleep again.  
  
***  
  
By the afternoon, Helena hardly a functional human being because she's been excusing herself throughout the day, disappearing into the guest room, crying herself to sleep.    
  
Ms. Jane sends Pete and Myka to Helena's house, by way of a visiting Amanda, to pack her another bag of clothes and retrieve her book bag for school.  
  
***  
  
"I'm not touching her underwear," Pete says looking directly at Myka.  
  
Myka arches a brow, "Why are you looking at me? I'm not touching her underwear either."  
  
"She's _your_ girlfriend, you've probably touched them already,"  Pete accuses.  Myka groans in response.  Pete turns and opens the fridge in the kitchenette with a triumphant smile.  Buries his head inside of it.  "Your girlfriend who has no real food in her fridge."  
  
"Shut _up_."  Myka swats Pete in the back and he stands straight, turns to her, sticks his tongue out.  
  
"Calm down, dweebs," Amanda interrupts.  " _I'll_ get her clothes.  Helena doesn't need _either_ of you dressing her."  
  
At once Pete and Myka look at each other, look down at their clothes, look back up at Amanda, insulted.  
  
"What's wrong with my clothes?"  Myka asks.  
  
"I can dress a girl," Pete asserts.  
  
"Just because I don't dress _like_ her, I can't _dress_ her?"  Myka's tugging at her own T-shirt.  One she's had for years.  
  
"Flowery top, frilly skirt, those weird girly shoes she's always wearing."  Pete shuts the refrigerator door.  
  
Amanda watches them both with an arched brow and crossed arms until they simultaneously conclude their arguments and cross their arms, too.  
  
"Myka can get her book bag," Amanda directs. "Pete, _you_ try not to eat everything in the cabinets."  
  
"Ooh, I didn't even think to _look_ in the cabinets."  Pete wags his brows turning back into the kitchenette.  
  
***  
  
Amanda drops Pete off at home with all of Helena's things then turns to Myka who takes his place in the passenger seat as they idle in the driveway.  
  
"You sure you don't want to stay?"  
  
Myka turns to Amanda and shakes her head.    
  
"Helena is in a weird space," Myka says looking down at her hands in her lap. "And I feel really weird being in that space with her right now.  Kind of like," and Myka takes in a deep breath, recollects the conversation she and Helena had had just a few weeks ago in her room in the pool house about Helena's confusion and Helena's feelings.  Myka exhales.  "Like I'm taking advantage?"  
  
Myka looks back to Amanda who nods and looks back at her with understanding in her expression.  
  
"I think you need a milkshake."  
  
***  
  
When Myka walks into the packed diner, a very excitable twelve-year-old Leena practically pounces on her.  Chastises her for not having been there since her birthday.  Tells her approximately one million new things about her as she shows Myka and Amanda to a booth and drops two menus on the table in front of them.    
  
"Just two milkshakes, Leena honey," Amanda says in a voice more sweet than Myka has ever heard from the other girl.  
  
"Of course, 'Manda."  Leena is grinning.  "Be right back."  
  
Leena takes off.  
  
"So, Bering."  Amanda smiles.  
  
Myka arches a brow.  "Amanda," she says suspiciously.  
  
"Can I ask you something not entirely crucial to our budding friendship but kinda crucial?"  
  
"Uh, I guess?"  Myka braces herself for the absolute worst even though she hasn't a clue what that would sound like.  
  
"Is it weird that I'm dating Pete now? I mean, officially."  Amanda looks genuinely worried and Myka's panic gives way to amusement.  She cracks a smile.  "Honestly because I feel like we didn't really talk before because I thought you were kind of a geek and I thought Pete was a creep.  But you're a killer ball player and we're becoming good friends and maybe I should have asked you just in case you guys had ever..."  
  
"Amanda.  Stop talking."  Myka is already holding back her gag, masks it behind laughter.  "First of all, I love that you're dating Pete because that's one less responsibility for me.  Secondly, we _are_ becoming good friends.  I think you dating Pete has a lot to do with that."  Myka nods enthusiastically.  "I thank you for that."  
  
Amanda has a knowing expression on her face.  Says, "He's kind of a handful."  
  
"He is a _lot_ of a handful."  Myka smiles.  "But he's your handful now, I wipe my own non-full hands clean."    
  
And Myka pretends to wipe her hands.    
  
"But third and most importantly and please do not ever forget this, _Manda_ ," Myka teases and the other girl rolls her eyes, "Pete has been my best friend, brother, and partner in crime since the beginning.  Literally, he would get into the teething cookies when he was a year old, eat five of them at a time, and point at _me_."  
  
Amanda is already laughing.    
  
"I couldn't even crawl yet, let alone consume that many calories on my own."    
  
"Sounds like Pete."  
  
"You're damn right that sounds like Pete,"  Myka says.  "So yeah, he's your problem n..."  
  
Myka pauses.  Her vision blurs as her mind slips back to the previous night.  To the echoing stairwell. To her conversation with Giselle.  To Giselle's voice echoing in that stairwell.  And she hears it loud and clear, the words Giselle had said.  
  
"Helena is your problem now," were her exact words.  Before any other explanation, before any other reason.  
  
"Hey."  Amanda is waving her hand in front of Myka's face with an arched brow.  
  
"Hmm?"  Myka blinks as her eyes refocus on Amanda.  
  
"You went somewhere," Amanda says.  "I would ask if you're okay but I'm pretty sure the answer is no."  
  
Myka opens her mouth to speak but Leena returns with their milkshakes and sets them down in front of them with a big smile on her face.  
  
"On the house."  Leena beams.  
  
"Leena,"  Myka starts to protest.  
  
"Dad said."  She shrugs and walks off with a grin.  
  
"You're like some kind of hero in this town aren't you?"  Amanda asks.  
  
"What?"  Myka laughs.  "God, no."  
  
"Everybody _loves_ you."  Amanda takes a sip of her shake.  Myka wants to roll her eyes.  "Fuck, even I love you and like I said, I used to think you were a geek.  I mean, you are a geek but you get the point."  
  
"This becoming friends thing is starting to feel _really_ good right now."  Myka puffs out a small laugh and takes a long sip from her milkshake.  
  
"Seriously though, I just don't know a lot of people who are so universally well-liked."  Amanda shrugs.  "A lot of my friends are like me, kind of brutal and honest, I guess?"  
  
"I hadn't picked up on that," Myka says sarcastically, scrunching her nose up.  She laughs softly when Amanda narrows her eyes on her just before taking another sip.  
  
"My friends are just, ya know, hard pills to swallow."  Amanda nods.  "Like Giselle."  
  
Myka's smile fades instantly and Amanda is watching her expectantly.  Expecting her to say something, she thinks, but Myka says nothing.  Myka sits back in the booth and crosses her arms in front of her.  Steels her expression.  
  
Amanda tilts her head back, "Don't worry, I'm not like trying to start anything.  I just feel like I need to explain her away sometimes.  _All_ the time."  
  
"And what explanation do you have for Giselle?"  Myka asks, her face unchanging as Amanda looks to her again.  
  
"She's been through a lot.  She has trust issues and she has a hard time trusting Helena."  Myka hopes her face looks as unimpressed as she feels.  "Myka this isn't the first time they've broken up and it probably won't be the last time either.  I just don't want you to turn it into something more than it really is."  
  
"I saw her kissing some other girl from school," Myka says flatly.  "Is that not already more?"  
  
Amanda rolls her eyes, "I'm sure your darling Helena has not kissed other kids at school _at all_.  _Especially_ not you."  
  
"Helena hasn't _kissed_ me."  It's technically true, kind of but not really if Myka isn't just counting 'on the lips'.  And failed attempts.  "Not like _that_."  
  
"Girl, Helena kisses _everyone_."  
  
"Cheek kisses."  Myka laughs.  "So she's hyper-affectionate?  So what?"  
  
Amanda's look is incredulous.  "You know, Pete told me you were a bit more _innocent_ than most but this _has_ to be an act."  
  
Myka glares at Amanda, shakes her head.    
  
Amanda sighs.    
  
"Do you think you're the only other person Helena is like that with?"    
  
"Like what with?"  
  
"You're killing me, Bering."  Amanda groans. " _Close_ to.  Intimate with.  Cuddly?  Do you know these words?"  Amanda lowers her voice, "Giselle might be the only one she's _sleeping_ with but she's not the only one she enjoys sharing a bed with.  _You're_ not the only one, Myka."  
  
Myka stares at Amanda.  Uncomprehending but refrains from asking further questions.  Afraid of her own naivety.  
  
"She's been that way with Claire, she's been that way with Jeannie, she's tried cuddling up to me a time or two but I just can't deal with needy," Amanda says.  "I love the girl, I do, but she has some major intimacy issues."  
  
"I thought we were here to talk about Giselle's issues?"  Myka strains to keep her face straight.  
  
"That is Giselle's issue," Amanda says shaking her head.  "It's an issue every year.  It's just a different person every year, Myka. You just happened to draw the wild card this year."  Amanda sips from her milkshake then looks back to Myka and smiles, holds her hands in the air and says, "Surprise?"  
  
"I don't believe you," Myka says, her voice threatening to give her lie away.  "I've never seen Helena like," she pauses, thinks, "I mean, I don't think she would," Myka loses her words again.  If she ever had them in the first place.    
  
"Look, Babe, I'm not saying this to talk shit," Amanda begins, doing exactly that, "because she can be however she wants to be with whoever she wants to be that way with.  I just don't want you to think that this is all Giselle.  It's _both_ of them.  Every year the same thing.  They'll get over it, spend a couple weeks having angsty makeup sex, and back to normal before graduation."  
  
"Oh god," Myka's groaning again with her hands on her temples.  "Please spare me the thought of either of them doing _that_."  
  
Amanda laughs softly, shaking her head.    
  
Myka whines.  She's not even sure why.  But she wants to cry and she feels nauseous all at once.  Lowers her forehead to the table.  Groans again.    
  
"Am I stupid?"  Myka asks.  She sits up.  "Helena is my friend.  I don't believe for one second that our friendship, the way it is, isn't real."  Myka can feel the tears coming.  "I've known Helena for half of my life.  She wouldn't just use people like that.  She's just alone so often, she just needs _someone_..."  
  
"Myka, I'm not saying she's using anyone.  I'm not even saying your friendship isn't genuine,"  Amanda clarifies with a shake of her head.  
  
Myka turns away to look out of the diner window.    
  
"What I _am_ saying is that there's so much more history with those two and they'll work their shit out because they always do.  And I don't want you to do anything _drastic_ in the mean time."  Amanda sighs.  "Giselle will tell Helena she understands.  Helena will block everyone except Giselle out for a while.  By next month they'll be impossible to be around without wanting to hang yourself."  
  
Myka is quiet.  Confused.  Lost.  Not even entirely sure what she's being told.  Or who it's being told about because it sounds nothing like Helena but hadn't Giselle just said things about Helena?  And now Amanda was saying more things about Helena?  
  
"Did I just kill your innocence?"  
  
Myka looks back to Amanda.    
  
"Yeah, you kind of did."  
  
"Sorry."  
  
Myka gulps down the rest of her milkshake.    
  
"Maybe I should take you home now?"  
  
Myka shakes her head and stands to her feet.    
  
"It's okay."  She offers Amanda a half smile.  "I'll walk."  
  
***  
  
School is not the same.  
  
The year is winding down.  Myka is emotionally and mentally drained.  She tries not to avoid Abigail but Abigail avoids her.  Disappears during lunch.  Sits in the back of Ms. Calder's class during fifth period.  
  
Myka decides by Wednesday that Abigail can have her space.  
  
When Myka walks with Helena from fifth period to sixth period, Myka stays quiet.  Reserved.  
  
It mostly goes unnoticed by Helena who is also quiet and also reserved.  Clearly still reeling from her lost relationship because when they happen to walk past the red-haired junior girl, Myka can practically feel a drop in the outside temperature.  
  
The red-haired girl is smiling at them, whispering to her friend.    
  
Helena's stare is _cold_.  
  
Myka puts her hand on Helena's wrist and says, "Ignore her." And the older girl's glare immediately melts into sadness.  
  
They continue walking on in silence.  
  
***  
  
A week after the dance, the break up, Myka's talk with Amanda, things start to feel back to normal.  Or as normal as they can get with only two weeks left in the school year.  With only four awkward weeks left of Helena's time before she leaves to London, immediately followed by her leaving for college.  
  
It's Friday after school and Helena is offering Myka a ride home as they walk across the student parking lot.  
  
"It's fine, I can walk."  Myka does not turn around to face Helena.  
  
"Do you want to come over later and watch a movie?"  
  
"I think I have chores," Myka says quietly, still steps ahead of Helena.  
  
"Oh, right."  Helena's voice is dripping with sadness.  Myka only stops when the questions stop and when she turns around, Helena is several steps behind her.  
  
"Helena?"  Myka questions and points in the direction of her car.  "I can at least walk you to your..."  
  
"Is it weird because of Giselle?"  
  
"What?"  Myka lets her hand fall to her side.  
  
"You haven't been talking to me," Helena says.  "Is it because of my mood?  I apologize, Myka, I'm really trying to just be over it.  I know it's pathetic..."  
  
"It's not Giselle,"  Myka says walking back to Helena.  "It's not your mood.  You're _not_ pathetic."  
  
"Are you mad?  Are we going to fight again?"  Myka sighs, turning away to look across the parking lot for a moment.  "I just don't think that I could deal with that right now."  
  
"I'm not mad."  Myka's voice is quiet and she turns to look back at Helena.  "I am not mad at all.  I'm just confused and lost and I'm not really sure how to interpret our friendship right now."  
  
"Do we still _have_ a friendship?  Because it doesn't feel like it right now.  I just want to be sure."  Helena steps closer to Myka and reaches for the strap of her book bag, tugs at it gently.  "Everyone keeps disappearing from my life.  I don't want to lose you, too, Myka."  
  
"You still have Jeannie."  Myka says, with maybe a bit more than a hint of resentment.  "Claire, too."  
  
Helena narrows her eyes at Myka, "And now you sound mad."  She drops her hand from Myka's bag and starts to walk past her.    
  
Myka catches Helena by her arm, tugs and urges Helena to turn back to her.  Helena stares and Myka takes in a deep breath, holds it in, lets it go.  "I'm not mad. I just need to think.  I'm not mad, Helena."  
  
Helena twists her lips to the side and forces a reluctant sort of smile, nods.  
  
"Okay."  
  
"Can I ask you something?"  Myka moves her hand down to Helena's and holds it tight.  Helena nods, her eyes lowered to where their hands meet.  "And please don't think I'm taking advantage of this situation, I just want to know if," Myka clears her throat, "if you'll let me steal you next Saturday.  Since you're not going to prom.  Since you might need a distraction?"  
  
Helena's eyes meet Myka's again and they are wide and curious, one brow arching slightly as the hint of a genuine smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.  
  
"You wouldn't be stealing me from anyone," Helena says softly and nods.  "I'm all yours."  
  
***  
  
"Remember when I said _don't_ do anything drastic?"  
  
"I do, Amanda."  Myka is nodding her head and bites down on her bottom lip.  "It's just that..."  
  
"Pete does this sound drastic?"  Amanda turns to Pete where he sits on the floor playing video games with Amanda's little brother.    
  
Pete nods, "It does sound pretty drastic, Mykes.  What do you think, Jacob?"    
  
The eight-year-old nods.  "I agree with Pete."  
  
"Of course you agree with Pete," Pete says.  "It's three against one in drastic's favor."  
  
"You see?"  
  
"Do any of you even know the definition of drastic?"  Myka falls back into the couch.  "I just want to distract her for the night.  She needs to be around her friends.  _We_ are her friends."  
  
"I believe the word _desperate_ is synonymous with the word drastic." Amanda leans into Myka now and lowers her voice.  "I know you like her but..."  
  
"I don't just _like_ her, Amanda."  Myka interrupts the blonde.   "She is my friend.  Your friend.  And it isn't like all those other times you were talking about because she hadn't been assaulted then.  She hadn't been attacked by her brother then.  She hadn't immediately lost her girlfriend then.  So please, Amanda, it's one night.  Just one night and you don't even have to pay for anything, I have everything saved up.  _All_ you have to do is go out and pretend to have fun."  
  
"And drive," Pete concludes.    
  
Myka throws a loose cushion from the couch at the back of Pete's head and he doesn't see it coming.  
  
"Dude, Mykes!  You're going to make me lose to a kid!"  He protests, his fingers suddenly moving frantically over the buttons of the video game controller.  
  
"You _are_ a kid!"  Myka and Amanda say this at the exact same time then look to each other with amused stares for a solid three seconds before they start laughing.  
  
"Fine!"  Amanda sounds annoyed that she's caving when she finally caves.  "I'll be your stupid chauffeur!  But you owe me Bering, my God, do you ever owe me because when Giselle finds out she's going to kill _both_ of us."  
  
Myka is feeling especially confident when she responds with, "Let her try."  
  
***  
  
Myka isn't calling it a double date because Myka isn't calling it a date at all.  In fact, Myka is calling it everything but a date because it's Helena and they're friends, just friends.  That's all.  
  
Because Helena is still impossible.  She's even more impossible now that she's single, unattached, available, and all at once not.  
  
"Why do we have to be formal?"  Pete complains as Myka combs his hair into something resembling decency.    
  
"You're complaining now but you'll be thanking me when you see Amanda."  Myka is grinning.  
  
"Amanda doesn't own dresses."    
  
Myka rolls her eyes.  
  
"That's part of the reason I like her so much. She's tough as nails."  
  
"What did she wear to the Spring dance?"  Myka asks as the comb in her hand conveniently snags and she _pulls_.  
  
"Ow!  Gentle!  Premature balding is a thing in my family."  Pete touches his hair protectively.  "I think."  
  
Myka smirks.  "Sorry."  
  
***  
  
"She's crying."  
  
It's the first thing Amanda says when Ms. Jane drops Myka and Pete off at Helena's house where Amanda has been helping her get ready.  
  
And despite the news, Pete grabs Myka's face and kisses her cheek then whispers, "Thank you, you amazing person," in her ear after gaping at Amanda in her borrowed Helena dress for a solid twenty seconds as she walked toward them.  
  
"I told you," Myka whispers back to him with a smile.    
  
Amanda gives them both a strange look.    
  
"Is this one of those weird Pyka moments I keep hearing about from your sister?"  Amanda asks still looking confused.  
  
"Something like that," Pete smiles reaching for her, wrapping his arm around her, pulling her into a kiss.  
  
Myka sighs.  Turns way.  Tries really hard not to miss that closeness she had with Abigail.  
  
She's still counting down the days until school ends and four is the magic number.    
  
"I'll go," Myka points toward the pool house, "get Helena.  If she isn't up for it, we can just go see a movie, I guess."  She turns back to Amanda and Pete just as Ms. Jane is heading back to her car.  
  
"I'll leave you kids to it then," Ms. Jane smiles opening her car door.  "Do not stay out too late.  If I get a three o'clock call from the police about curfews, so help me."  She holds her finger up.  Points at Pete.  
  
"No worries, Ms. Jane."  Amanda grins.  "I'm sure Myka will be ready for bed by eleven."  
  
"Ha-ha!"    
  
Myka is already backpedaling her way up the drive when Ms. Jane gets into her car saying, rather jovially, "And that's why, of all my kids, Myka is my favorite."  
  
"That hurts, Mom!"  Pete yells with a hand over his heart as she closes the car door with a grin on her face.  
  
***  
  
"Helena?"  
  
The pool house is mostly dim with the exception of a light from the bathroom.    
  
Myka finds Helena there, seated on a bench at her vanity in her typical pajama wear, staring straight ahead, seemingly at herself, in the mirror.  But her eyes are so distant that Myka's sure she doesn't see anything at all.  
  
"Helena?"  Myka whispers.    
  
Red eyes move then.  Look up to Myka's reflection in the mirror.  Her mouth falling slightly open.  Her brows leveling in that sad way that they do.  
  
"Myka?"  She turns to Myka as Myka stands beside her, sits next to her on the too-small bench that she barely fits on.    
  
Helena's hands are on the blazer she's wearing, the purple tie, the button-up beneath that, Myka's cheeks.    
  
"Giselle's suit for prom?"    
  
"I'm sorry, I should have asked you first," Myka sighs. "I didn't know if it would upset you."  
  
Helena's smile is gentle. "I'm not upset," she says softly, lowering her hands back to the blazer.  "Not anymore.  I was a little suspicious when Amanda asked for it but," Helena shakes her head, "I'm glad she did."  
  
Her tears are telling Myka another story.  Myka wipes them away.  
  
"My makeup is a mess."  Helena pouts.  
  
Myka stands and moves to her linen closet to retrieve a face cloth, wets it, soaps it, and returns to Helena's side.    
  
"Here," Myka says handing her the cloth, "you don't need the makeup."  
  
"Myka," Helena takes the cloth but hesitates.  
  
"If you want it, I will wait for you to re-apply it.  But you don't need it."  Myka shakes her head.  
  
Helena sighs heavily and turns back to her reflection, cleans the makeup from her face while Myka retrieves a dry towel for her.  
  
***  
  
Myka waits outside for Helena to finish getting ready.  Amanda goes back inside to help her with her dress.  
  
When they both finally emerge, Myka definitely stops breathing.  Pete moves close to Myka's side, whispers in Myka's ear, "Are you dead yet?"  
  
Because the dress that Helena's wearing with its strapless top and matching purple at the waist, is beautiful.  And Helena's hair, curled and pulled to the side is beautiful.  Even that sad face that tries so hard not to be sad, to light up as she tries just as hard not to move faster to where Myka stands, is beautiful.  
  
Helena stops just in front of Myka, and Pete elbows Myka in her arm.  
  
"Corsage," he whispers.  
  
"Oh," Myka fumbles with the flower that is in her hand and Helena holds her arm out to Myka.  "This is for you."  
  
Myka doesn't know why she's shaking as she puts the thing on Helena's wrist and when Helena's other hand falls over hers once the corsage is in place, the shaking only gets worse.    
  
She hasn't looked up at Helena since she came within two feet of her.  
  
Myka steps back and bites down hard on her bottom lip.  Looks at the ground, looks away from Helena, looks anywhere at all that isn't forward.  And that's when she sees the limo coming down the street and the window on that limo rolling down and red hair surrounding a smug smile as the vehicle moves slowly past Helena's house.  
  
Helena brings her hand to Myka's shoulder.  Myka instinctively wraps her arm around Helena's waist and pulls her closer.  She's glaring at the red head.  Daring her to say one thing.    
  
Praying to all the toasters in the world that she opens her mouth and allows words to come out.    
  
But the girl is still fairly smart.  She says nothing.  Not to them.  She rolls up the window on the sound of several girls laughing and the limousine takes off.  
  
"That girl is a little four-letter-word," Amanda says walking to the car.  "I'll let you guys fill in the blanks."  And she turns back to everyone.  "Are we ready?"  
  
Helena turns to Myka, squeezes her arm lightly.  "Breathe, Myka."  
  
Myka inhales deeply, exhales slowly.  She turns to Helena, suddenly so much closer than she had been.  The older girl doesn't smile but she gives her a look that she knows.  A look that says she's okay.  That _this_ is okay.    
  
"Shot gun!"  Pete's voice breaks through the silence and Myka rolls her eyes.  Helena smiles.  
  
"No one was trying to sit shot gun except for you anyway," Amanda jokes, once again saving Myka the time of chastising Pete herself.  
  
"Amanda, I love you."  Myka grins at her.  "Pete, I love your girlfriend."    
  
"As long as you don't love her too much," Pete warns getting into the car.  
  
"I have to agree with Peter's sentiments,"  Helena says softly to Myka.  
  
Myka turns back to Helena with wide eyes and raised brows.  Helena watches her silently and moves her arm to link with Myka's arm.    
  
Moments pass before Myka eventually smiles and gestures her head toward the car.    
  
"Are you ready to not go to prom?"  Myka asks of the older girl.  Helena arches a brow, smiles coyly and nods.      
  
***  
  
It isn't a date, Myka thinks, because it's meant to be fun.  Everything she's planned is just meant to be fun for Helena, to pull her out of her bed, make her feel better.  
  
***  
  
At the skating rink, Helena spends approximately five minutes protesting before Myka breaks out her best puppy-dog face.    
  
"I look ridiculous," Helena says as Myka pulls her carefully out onto the rink, "on top of not knowing how to skate."  
  
"You don't," Myka responds with a smile.  "To both of those things."  Helena moves her hands around Myka's neck as she rolls forward, Myka skating backward in front of her.  
  
"How are you even doing that?"  Helena's brow furrows and Myka laughs softly, shaking her head.  "You're going to fall."  
  
"Helena, calm down."  Myka moves her hands to Helena's waist and holds her steady.  
  
"Hmm," Helena's hum is playfully disapproving and she rolls her eyes and looks away.  
  
The lights go down.  The music turns on.  Neither of these things are a coincidence so much as they are the work of two meddlers named Amanda and Pete, Myka will later find out.  
  
But by the time later actually comes, Myka will still be reeling from the dance she shares with Helena.  From the way Helena pulls herself closer to Myka and tightens her arms around Myka's shoulders, even if just out of fear, and rests her head with her cheek pressed to Myka's.  
  
And they last this way through two songs or maybe three, with Myka slowly skating backward and Helena not really skating at all, before Pete and Amanda are skating circles around them, reminding them of where they are (in public), and what time it is (dinner).  
  
"Food is next," Pete reminds Myka. " _Fooooood_."  
  
"Peter," Helena sighs, with her head resting against Myka's shoulder.  "Go away."  
  
***  
  
Dinner is not the least bit fancy because Myka doesn't want it to be and they're at some chain restaurant downtown sitting in a booth and it's loud and crowded and the over-21 crowd is mostly intoxicated even though it's only 20:00 and the sun has just barely gone down.  
  
Pete is practically shoving cheese fries down his throat and Amanda is playing clean up beside him with a napkin to his face while her own expression is only moderately disgusted.  
  
Helena pecks away at a salad before her fork finds its way to Myka's plate to steal a bite of fish.  Myka glares at her.  Helena smiles as she chews.  
  
"If you wanted fish and chips, you could have just ordered fish and chips,"  Myka teases.  
  
"But I don't want fish and chips," Helena says after swallowing the stolen bite.  "I want _your_ fish and chips."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes, spearing another bite from her plate onto her fork and hands it to Helena.  
  
"Ms. Calder was right," Myka smiles. "You are meddlesome."  
  
"Says the one who secretly plotted an entire night of not-prom activities to distract me from actual prom.  And no, that isn't a complaint," Helena says with a shake of her head.  "I'm very grateful, Myka."  
  
"I just didn't want your precious prom dress to go to waste," Myka shrugs and smirks.  
  
Helena reaches a hand to tug at the blazer Myka wears.  
  
"It hasn't."  
  
***  
  
Their plan to see a movie turns into Amanda and Pete's plan to go to the lake because they're already late for it anyway and since Amanda is driving and Helena doesn't exactly protest, Myka just goes with it.    
  
Although what fun she could possibly have sitting in the dark at a beach, she has no idea.  
  
***  
  
"Here you go," Pete says handing bunched up blankets to Myka who stands beside Helena just outside of the car.  
  
"What is this?" Myka laughs.  
  
"The beach is empty, enjoy yourselves."  Pete waves his hand as if to show off the wonders of the dark and the rocks and sand and emptiness that runs into a too-quiet shore before them.  "Don't come back for at _least_ thirty minutes."  
  
"Are you serious?"  Helena asks with an arched brow.  
  
"I know for a fact that you two have a lot of crap to work out," Pete says opening the door to the back seat of Amanda's car.  "Go work it out.  Don't worry, we won't leave you here."  He disappears into the car.

"Did that really just happen?"  Myka asks turning to Helena.  
  
"C'mon."  Helena pulls a blanket from Myka's arms, grabs her by the elbow and pulls her toward the beach.  
  
***  
  
Helena spreads the blanket out over the sand, kicks her shoes off and sits with her legs pulled up into her, wraps her arms around her knees.  She looks back up at Myka then down to the empty space beside her.  
  
Myka sits with her legs crossed and drops the other blanket beside her.  
  
"Did you plan this, too?"  Helena asks.  
  
"No."    
  
"I didn't think so."  Helena smiles and bumps her shoulder into Myka's shoulder.  "It's okay.  Pete's right, I think.  Maybe we have crap to work out."  
  
"I don't want to work it out right now."  Myka turns to Helena.  Helena crosses her legs then, too, and nods, adjusting her dress over the exposed skin.  
  
"You don't want to talk about why you kind of stopped talking to me last week?"  
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Not really."  
  
Helena nods slowly then asks with a hint of caution, "Why not?"  
  
"Because," and that's all Myka _wants_ to say but she knows she owes Helena more than that.  At least she feels like she does.  "I realized that my reasons were stupid and petty and," Myka pauses to inhale, "not worth losing you sooner than planned."  
  
"Hmm."  Helena watches Myka for a moment before turning back to the water before them.  "Should I even ask?"  
  
Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Okay."    
  
They're quiet for a long time.  Myka thinks the tension is too heavy.  Too much for her to stand for too long.  
  
Eventually she says, "Someone was trying to stick up for Giselle."  Helena only turns slightly back to Myka, not enough to look at her, just enough to train her ear on her words.  "They said you and Giselle always break up because you're always _close_ to someone else.  Like how you have been with me this year."  
  
Helena turns to look at Myka now and Myka thinks her expression is something between expectant and guilty.  
  
"It made me feel kind of unimportant to you, I guess."  Myka looks away from Helena.  "It didn't make sense at first and then then I let it get to me but the more I thought about it the less sense it made.  Also, the less I care because you've been through a lot and," Myka shrugs, "it's none of my business if you were this close to Jeannie or Claire or whoever else."  
  
"Is that why you said what you did about them last Friday?"  
  
Myka lowers her head into her hands.  "I'm sorry."  
  
"Myka."    
  
"People think I'm an idiot, that's nothing new.  Like I'm really gullible for liking you.  For having liked you for so long because you're Giselle's, even when you're not Giselle's."  Myka sits up again.  "And anyway, I'm too young for you, miles behind, and I don't think I will ever catch up."  
  
More silence.  Myka dares to look at Helena and the older girl is turned to her but looking down.  And soon Helena's hand is reaching for the blazer Myka wears and tugging at it gently.    
  
"You look very handsome tonight, Myka."  Helena says softly.  
  
"In Giselle's suit."  Myka adds just as softly.    
  
"It's yours now."  Helena looks up at Myka as a smile doesn't quite form on her lips.  Myka lowers her head again.  "Amanda told you about Jeannie and Claire?"  
  
Myka looks up at Helena, tries to gauge her mood.  Determines she doesn't necessarily look murderous and nods.  
  
"I've noticed you two are becoming close."  
  
Helena sighs and turns back to the water.  
  
"Giselle isn't the only person I've been with, she  _definitely_ won't be the last and no, that isn't necessarily your business," Helena looks back to her, "not until I _want_ you to know, Myka.  And I haven't wanted you to know because you're _Myka_ and I'm not talking to you about my sex life.  I love you, Myka, but I know you well enough to know you aren't ready for _that_.  Not even joking around."  
  
Myka remains quiet.    
  
"I'm only telling you anything now because I care about you and you're special to me and I don't want you to think that you aren't."  
  
Helena sits with her legs pulled back into her chest and leans forward.    
  
"I wasn't that close with Jeannie or Claire at all, I mean it wasn't sexual, if that's what Amanda is saying.  I guess I have just always craved body heat and they've always been there for me."   Helena shrugs.  "I made the mistake once of trying to be that close to Amanda last year and she's, ya know, _Amanda_.  I think I misread our friendship.  I apologized.  I just have a hard time sleeping," Helena pauses, "without someone next to me.  And Giselle hasn't been an option since her mother sort of... walked in on us..."  
  
Myka groans and buries her head back into her hands. 

"You see what I mean."  Helena smiles.

"No, no, Helena, it's not _that_ ," Myka tilts her head back for a second and then straightens up again.  "It's me and believing gossip."  
  
It makes sense, really, that Myka wants to kick herself right now for having spent even one hour worrying about anything that had to do with Helena and Helena's "intimacy issues" and how Helena is with her compared to anyone else.  Because what a waste of the so few weeks they have left together.  
  
"I'm sorry, Helena."  
  
"I guess I just never thought it was that big of a deal before Amanda.  I'm not even sure what I was thinking.  I think it was shortly after one of Charles' early rampages."  
  
" _One_ of his early rampages?"  
  
"It's not like you would think, Myka.  It's only once or twice a year.  Father cuts him off, he takes it out on me.  Father gives him all his privileges back.  Just once or twice."  
  
"That's already too often."  Myka shakes her head.  
  
"It's one less thing we need to worry about now."  
  
Myka hasn't talked to Helena about Charles since he recovered.  Since he was remanded to jail.  Since Helena's father refused to pay his bail.    
  
It's one of those topics that Helena thinks Myka is too young for.  One that, even if Myka weren't too young, she's not sure Helena would talk about it anyway.  So she's only learned about it through overhearing her parents or whatever Pete has learned through Jeannie.  
  
"Aside from all of _that_ you should know, Myka, that you are by far the best cuddle giver."  
  
"I will take that title." Myka shrugs, slightly nauseous from the level of guilt that is currently pumping through her veins.  
  
"It's also different with you for reasons I can't really organize into thoughts," Helena adds.  "And hopefully you won't hold it against me that I'm not even going to try right now."  
  
Myka shakes her head when Helena looks at her.    
  
"Next time you're feeling at odds about our friendship, will you just ask me about it?"  
  
"Yes, I know. I _am_ an idiot."  Myka leans into Helena now and brushes aside Helena's hair to rest her chin over the older girl's shoulder.  
  
"You're _not_ an idiot."  Helena shrugs.  "You're just in high school."  
  
***  
  
It has probably definitely been thirty minutes when Myka, still resting against Helena, whispers, "Do you think it's safe to go back yet?"  And Helena responds just as softly with, "If it's all the same to you, I'm quite enjoying it out here."  
  
Myka falls back onto the blanket to stare up at the sky.  It takes approximately twenty seconds for Helena to lay down beside her.  
  
"Can I ask you a question that's been bugging me for months?"  Myka asks turning her head to Helena.  
  
Helena turns to her and nods.    
  
"What did you talk about with Mrs. Frederic that day, when you went in her office with Giselle and Mrs. King?"    
  
Helena has already turned completely away. Looking in the other direction.    
  
Myka sits up on one elbow, leans over the older girl and adds in a whisper, "You don't have to tell me, I have just always wondered what happened that made them let Pete back onto campus."  
  
Helena turns back to Myka then and forces a smile, watches her quietly.  And Helena reaches a hand up to tug gently on the tie that Myka wears, folds it between her fingers before letting go again.  
  
"I told her what actually happened."  
  
Myka is quiet.  So quiet she can hear her blood beginning to pulse in her ears.  Feel her heart beating faster against her ribcage.  
  
"What _actually_ happened?" she echoes.    
  
Helena gives Myka a weak smile and looks away when she says, "Apparently the physical contact made my complaint more valid."  
  
"You said he didn't touch you."  
  
"I know," Helena says softly.  "What else would I say in front of a large crowd of people, Myka?"  She looks back to Myka then.  
  
Myka can already feel her fists clenching.  Her breathing becoming more shallow.  Her eyes burn.  
  
"Pete got there in time."  Myka's voice breaks but she tries to say it as self-assured as she can.  To convince herself, if no one else.    
  
"He did, Myka."  Helena smiles touching her hand to Myka's cheek.  "Just in time."  
  
"I don't understand," Myka says softly and Helena shakes her head.    
  
"It's okay, I'll tell you another time."  
  
"If he _touched_ you," Myka starts.  
  
"What are you going to do, Myka?"  Helena's voice is challenging but her face is still soft and understanding.  She moves her hands to the buttons on Myka's blazer, buttons them and then unbuttons them idly.  "You're fourteen and aside from that it's been taken care of.  Leo will be right beside my brother in jail by the time his trial is over."  
  
"Trial?"    
  
"Don't worry about it, Myka."  
  
"You have to testify?"  Myka questions.    
  
"Don't _worry_ about it."  
  
"And all those other girls that went into Mrs. Frederic's office?  The same stories?"  
  
"I don't know their stories, Love," Helena says shaking her head, "but I doubt they are the same.  I doubt they all had Pete around to get there just in time."  
  
"Helena."  
  
Tears fall from Myka's eyes down her cheeks, over the blanket just beside Helena, into Helena's hair.  She smiles at Myka and wipes her cheeks.  
  
"It's okay," Helena says softly.  "I'm taking self-defense classes this summer in London.  I'm already signed up."  
  
"In preparation for college?"  Myka _feels_ exasperated.  
  
Helena doesn't answer that question.  Instead she tugs at Myka's tie again, pulls Myka close enough to set a kiss on her forehead before she rolls onto her side.  Helena reaches back for Myka's arm and pulls that arm over her waist, laces her fingers with Myka's and holds tight.  
  
Myka kisses Helena's shoulder.  It's meant to be comforting.  Helena's hand squeezes tight around hers.  So Myka pushes hair from the back of Helena's neck and sets her lips there, kisses the nape of Helena's neck, too.  
  
She can feel the older girl's body shudder in her arms.  
  
"Myka," Helena's voice is a warning, that much she can tell.    
  
But it's too easy this way.  Not quite as impossible.  To imagine Helena as Abigail as she would imagine Abigail as Helena, to make it easier.  And Myka has missed that closeness with Abigail.  Has missed the ease of things.  
  
Myka kisses Helena's bare shoulder and Helena turns over until they are face to face, until they are almost as close as before.  The nausea sets in and the twisting in Myka's belly becomes overwhelming and her breathing erratic while her breath mostly escapes her and does not think to re-enter.  
  
Helena closes her eyes and shakes her head. 

"You're not ready."  She opens her eyes again and Myka shakes her head.    
  
Helena smiles and sighs, kissing the bridge of Myka's nose.    
  
"Then I need you to not kiss me like that."  
  
Myka nods just as silently.  Just as wide-eyed.  
  
"Thank you," Helena whispers just before resting her head against Myka's shoulder and curling into her.    
  
"I'm sorry, Helena."  
  
"Don't be sorry, Myka," Helena says softly, nuzzling closer to her.  "Just," Helena sighs, "be warm."  
  
Myka reaches down by her side for the other blanket and pulls it mostly over Helena.  Covers her bare shoulders, tucks it in around her neck, and pulls the older girl closer. 

Kisses her cheek.

Runs her fingers through Helena's hair.  
  
***  
  
"I said _thirty_ minutes."  Pete is hovering over Myka who has one eye open.  "Mom is going to kill us."  
  
"What?"  Myka's voice is groggy and Helena stirs beside her.    
  
"It's one in the morning and you're just sleeping out here like a homeless person on the street!  We gotta go, Mykes.  Like an hour ago and it's still twenty minutes back to town."  
  
"Peter," Helena grumbles, "go _away_."  
  
"I didn't realize I was supposed to be your alarm clock," Myka groans sitting up and forcing Helena to sit up beside her.  
  
"You're the responsible one aren't you?"  Pete is already halfway back to the car.  
  
"Jesus Christ, Peter." Helena's face is annoyed but she smiles when her eyes meet Myka's and she tilts her forehead into Myka's shoulder.  "Forgive me but I'm so ready for bed."  
  
"Come on, let's go before Pete decides he needs to stress-eat his way through the entire Taco Bell menu." Myka is on her feet and helps Helena to hers.  And the older girl leans into Myka's arms, wraps her arms around Myka's back, for just a moment longer before she pulls away to help gather the blankets.  
  
***  
  
They are miles apart in the back seat of Amanda's car, Myka behind Pete, Helena behind Amanda, as they head back to town.  
  
"I can't believe we were there for three hours," Amanda says.  "I totally fell asleep."  
  
"And she talks about _my_ bedtime."  Myka rolls her eyes and Helena smiles at her from across the seat.  
  
"Thirty minutes, Myka, that's all."  Pete reiterates.  "I'm not a goddamn superstar."  
  
"I don't want to know anything about what you _are_ , Pete,"  Myka interrupts.  "Please."  
  
"We can't all be Quickie Queens," he adds.

Helena covers her face.  
  
"Pete!"  Myka groans.    
  
"Stop," Amanda chastises.  
  
"She doesn't even know what that means."  Pete tells Amanda to calm down.  "Mykes is such a perfect angel that she's saving herself for her _second_ marriage.  Right, Mykes?"  
  
Myka kicks the back of his seat.  
  
"Hey, don't take it out on my car,"  Amanda protests.  "Take it out on _him_."  
  
"I didn't say it was a _bad_ thing."  Pete argues.  "Just full disclosure for any future lady-killer girlfriends that she might happen upon."  
  
Myka's sure he means for it to sound protective toward Helena.    
  
"Leave her alone," Amanda slaps Pete's leg, "leave them _both_ alone."  
  
Somehow Amanda and Pete lose themselves in a devolving conversation that revolves around Myka's lack of a future sex life, which Myka tries her best not to hear.  That Myka definitely doesn't hear any more of when Helena reaches her hand across the seat to Myka's hand, and tangles their fingers together to get her attention.  
  
Helena unbuckles herself, moves into the middle seat beside Myka and buckles herself in there with something akin to urgency.    
  
"Jesus Christ. Myka, you know that I don't want that from you, right?"  Helena asks in a whisper.  Myka's brows arch and her eyes widen.  "I mean, I don't expect it and I don't want for it.  When I ask if you're ready, that's not what I mean."    
  
Helena tangles their fingers further together.    
  
"I don't mean ready like _that_ because I would never expect you," Helena pauses and lowers her head for a moment before making eye contact again.  "I just don't think that's something you should worry about being ready for this soon, Myka.  Nor should you listen to anything anyone else has to say on the matter.  I'm sure Pete means well but..." Helena just shakes her head.  Rolls her eyes.  
  
Myka smiles and nods.    
  
"I know, Helena."  
  
Helena links her arm with Myka's and rejoins their hands before leaning her head against Myka's shoulder.  
  
"Good."  
  
***  
  
Myka helps Helena out of the car, walks her up the drive, through the gate, to the pool house door.  Helena unlocks the door, grabs a very confused Myka by the hand and pulls her inside.    
  
"Just two minutes," Helena says softly.  "While I turn some lights on?"  
  
Myka smiles, tells Helena to stay put and walks the entire pool house.  Checks behind every door, under the bed, in the shower, the closets, turns on almost every single light.  The television, too.  Then Myka reappears by Helena's side.    
  
The older girl is almost red in the face when she thanks her.  
  
"It's okay, you know?"  Myka says softly.  "That you need to check.  That the lights stay on."    
  
"It wasn't that long ago that you were leaving all the lights on in the house, you know."  Helena reaches for Myka's hand again.  "I think I'm devolving."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and shakes her head.  
  
Silence fills the space in-between them.  
  
"Thank you for distracting me tonight."  Helena lowers her eyes to the ground.  "It helped.  More than I care to admit."  
  
"I'm glad."    
  
More silence.  Helena looks up at Myka again, a shy smile moving into place on her lips.    
  
Myka opens her mouth to say something.  Says nothing.  Takes in a deep breath and pushes away this feeling inside her that tells her to flee, to run.  Also pushes away this feeling inside her that tells her to stay, to pull Helena into her, to kiss her goodnight.    
  
And it's close to that moment, upon that moment, _the_ moment, passing that moment, and just as quickly so far past that moment that Helena tugs at Myka's tie to get her attention.  
  
"Myka?"    
  
"Huh?"    
  
She's shaking.  Trembling.    
  
Helena pushes her gently toward the door with a mischievous grin on her face.    
  
"Go.  To bed."  
  
 _Yes. Right. Of course._  
  
Myka thinks all these things because she can't really think at all.  
  
"Goodnight, Helena."    
  
Myka opens the door, backs out of it.    
  
"Night, my love."  Helena smiles.  
  
Myka's belly is in knots.  Her heart actually skips as a shy grin forces its way onto her face and blood rushes to her cheeks.  
  
How long has it been since she's felt this inadequate in the presence of Helena?  
  
The only words Myka has left as she watches Helena are, "Lock your door."  
  
Helena just nods as she smiles at Myka, as Myka slips out the door.  And Myka waits on the other side.    
  
Two seconds, three seconds, five seconds, ten.  
  
"I said lock your door."  Myka calls through the heavy wood.    
  
The series of quick clicks comes one second later.  
  
***  
  
Myka feels incomplete.    
  
"I should have kissed her," she tells Pete who laughs through his half sleep state.  
  
"A little late for that."  His voice is groggy.  
  
"It felt right."  Myka twists around to face Pete.  "I chickened out but it felt _right_."  
  
"Maybe not right as you think."  
  
"Are you really caveman tired?  I'm wide awake.  I can't sleep."  
  
"Keep it up.  Kick you out.  Guest bed's right there."  
  
"Hey, Pete?"  
  
"Hmm?"  
  
"Did you know about Leo?"    
  
Pete opens his eyes now and turns to Myka.    
  
"That he actually touched H.G.?"  
  
Pete sighs and closes his eyes again.  
  
"You _did_ know."  
  
"Told you, got there just in time."  
  
Myka is quiet now.  Pete opens one sleepy eye to her.  
  
"Talk about it later, Mykes?"  
  
"I want to know,"  Myka says sitting up on her elbow.  
  
"No."  
  
"Please, Pete?"  
  
" _No_ , Mykes."  
  
Myka falls back on the bed.  Rolls onto her other side.    
  
"Don't need you crying on my pillows."  
  
Myka reaches behind her and hits Pete's arm.  A solid two minutes of silence follows before Pete turns over to face Myka's back.  
  
"Now I can't sleep."  
  
Myka turns to face him and waits.  
  
"He had her arms pinned against the stall," Pete says closing his eyes.  "He was kissing her when I got there."  Pete swallows.  "He didn't get much further than that but..."  
  
Pete shakes his head, his pout is so pitiful that Myka wraps her arms around him.  Pulls him closer to her.  
  
"I'm not telling you anymore."  
  
"I'm sorry, Pete," Myka sighs, "I shouldn't have asked."  
  
Pete remains quiet.    
  
"You never said anything when Helena said he hadn't touched her."  Myka squeezes him.  "You could have been expelled and you never said how bad it was?"  
  
"It was bad enough even if he hadn't pinned her there.  It was bad enough that he followed her in there."  Pete's voice is angry and sad.  "Fuck them if they needed it to be worse to actually do something about it.  I talked to H.G. and she was a mess, Mykes.  She didn't want to talk about it or think about it and I didn't want to force that on her, so _fuck them_."  
  
"It's okay, Pete."    
  
Myka sighs and hugs Pete closer.    
  
"It's okay."  
  
***  
  
Graduation night feels weird and final.  
  
At some point during the school day, Myka had realized that Helena wouldn't be around after fifth period because she'd be at graduation practice.  And the fact that Myka had overlooked the previous day as their final day walking across campus together has put Myka into a mood.  
  
Not a bad mood like so many of her preceding moods, but this mood of finality and the feeling that something is wrong or missing or changed.    
  
Myka does see Helena after school and the older girl already looks so liberated that it accelerates Myka's propulsion into this mood that she can't quite describe and can't quite duck away from.    
  
Helena is all smiles when she asks Myka if she'll be at her graduation and Myka thinks she probably looks like a lovesick deer caught in headlights when she responds with a nod and barely audible mumbling of some sort of confirmation.    
  
It doesn't seem too perplexing to Helena, who actually giggles and then kisses Myka's cheek before offering her a ride home.  But Myka has finally managed to get Abigail to say something to her, so Myka says she's walking Abigail home so they can talk.  Be friends.  At the least.  
  
They talk and Myka struggles to stay focused only because it's the last day of school and maybe she should have saved this talk for another day of school, like one that would take place _after_ summer.  _After_ Helena has graduated.  _After_ Helena has gone to college.    
  
But whatever she's said must have been all right, she can't really remember the second she leaves Abigail's door because the smaller girl pulls her into a kiss and it's been a while, Myka thinks.    
  
Or maybe not that long at all, a month?  Three weeks?  But it has seemed like forever and the kiss that Abigail gives her only makes her think of the time she _should_ have kissed Helena at her door, in her prom dress, Myka in her acquired matching blazer and tie and button up.    
  
Myka shouldn't be thinking this way, she thinks.  She shouldn't want to kiss another person when she's kissing a person other than that person.  So her guilt returns along with all these thoughts that she can't stop thinking, about Helena and finalities and kissable moments that she'll never ever get back again.  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother is too excited today.  Myka's dad, her mother says, is out of town on some matter of literature that Myka doesn't think is an actual thing but doesn't care enough beyond "your dad will be gone for a few days" to dwell on it.  
  
Tracy is staying home because she wants to and she gets what she wants all the time anyway but even more so when the venue for watching the graduation is the football stadium which requires walking over concrete.  Up stairs.  Across bleachers.  
  
It's far less stressful for all three Bering girls if Tracy just doesn't go.  Myka's mother tells Tracy she'll bring her back a program.  Myka doesn't have the heart to tell her that Tracy probably doesn't care about having a program for a graduation she isn't participating in.  Tracy, apparently, does not have the heart to tell her either.  
  
***  
  
Ms. Jane and Pete save their seats as they arrive just in time for the graduation to start.  Amanda joins them sometime after that.    
  
The graduation, like most graduations, is long and mostly boring until someone either does something really hilarious while walking the line or someone you know finally gets their diploma.    
  
They cheer for Claire and spot Mr. and Mrs. Donovan and Claudia and their oldest son Josh sitting not very far from where they sit.  And Claudia is practically clawing at her mother to let her go so she can sit with Myka.  And Myka only feels the tiniest bit of guilt when the little girl is made to stay where she is.  
  
Because Myka is not in a babysitting mood.  Doesn't think she would have the stamina to entertain a four year old.  Knows she can't pretend to be interested in more tales about Bishop and all the things he's been fed.  Not at a time like this.    
  
***  
  
Giselle probably gets the loudest applause out of everyone up to the Ks which is not a surprise to Myka so much as it is a jarring reminder that she's here.  
  
And she hugs her mother who is sitting in the teacher's section as she passes by and Mrs. King is wiping tears from her own face. Amanda tells Ms. Jane that Giselle is her youngest and her older siblings are one in their thirties and the other just about to turn thirty, so it's been a terrifying revelation for her all year, that Giselle is going to college.  
  
Myka is annoyed by how much she actually misses the girl.  Adds to her applause.  
  
***  
  
When Jeannie gets her diploma, it is a thing of beauty because most of the people present do not clap.  Instead they put their hands in the air and wave them to sign "applause".  And Myka knows Jeannie has her hearing turned up because it startles her before she realizes what's happening and then she's grinning from ear to ear.    
  
Ms. Jane is actually crying.  Myka's mother is tearing up.  Even Pete is clearing his throat in that way he does when he doesn't want to, tries very hard not to, be too outwardly emotional.    
  
***  
  
Pete is ready to go "collect Jeannie" and leave before the graduation even reaches the Ns but Ms. Jane tells him they can't leave before his _other_ sister walks the line.  That being Helena whose last name is Wells, who will have them there til the very end, much to Pete's dismay.    
  
But they stick it out and when they announce Helena, her applause, Myka thinks, is so much louder than Giselle's.  And it's not that it really matters but it does, in a way, because Helena is also grinning from ear to ear at the support.    
  
And where is her father even at?    
  
It's now, as Myka is watching her walk in her robe, with that smile on her face, and that cap on her head, collecting her diploma, shaking hands with everyone, giving her biggest and longest hug to a very proud Vanessa Calder, that something clicks in Myka.  Something so subtle and yet so clear that all she wants to do is go to her.  
  
And she would, right this moment, if she didn't have any sense.  She would just fly out of her seat and onto that field and the rest of the ceremony, the Ws the Xs, the Ys, and the Zs, would just have to walk around them.    
  
Myka has sense.  Enough, at least, to stay seated until Helena's graduating class is announced in it's entirety and the ceremony ends with a mass exodus of bodies from the stadium out into the field.    
  
***  
  
Myka loses everyone.  She leaves them all behind.  Because they're looking for Jeannie, mostly, and Myka is looking only for one person.    
  
So she propels herself through the crowd with only her height and her good sense to guide her to the spot where Helena had been seated or anywhere remotely near there, assuming Helena had not moved at all.    
  
People she knows, she congratulates.  She stops for one or two hugs from girls she knows from sports.  When she bumps into Ms. Calder, she apologizes but she knows she's on the right track.  And Ms. Calder smiles and points wordlessly in another direction.  
  
Myka thanks her and excuses herself past people, through clouds of too-strong cologne and people hugging and posing for photos until finally /finally...  
  
"Helena."  Myka smiles and Helena is focused on unzipping her robe, preparing to take the thing off when she looks up at Myka and her smile is so wide and bright and beautiful and gorgeous that all Myka can do is _move_ to her when Helena says her name.    
  
Myka moves and she doesn't think necessarily about what she's doing, she doesn't question the feelings of mostly nostalgia that are pushing her toward the older girl, she doesn't listen to the voice in her mind that tells her, yells, _screams_ at her to be scared, to be inadequate, to not be ready for this.    
  
So Myka still moves to Helena and she comes so close to the older girl that Helena leans back with wide eyes and a curious smile.  Myka moves her hands to Helena's waist around her dress, beneath her now-open robe, slowly, cautiously, gently, and barely tugs the older girl closer which only makes her eyes widen even more.  Because it isn't a hug, the way she's positioned herself in front of Helena, the way she's _looking_ at Helena, the way she says Helena's name the second time she says it.    
  
Myka leans close to the older girl, whose hands, one still clutching tight to her diploma, seem to bring themselves on instinct to Myka's shoulders as Helena steadies herself against the pull.  And Myka stops short, opens her mouth just slightly and whispers over her own trembling, "I'm going to kiss you now."    
  
This in turn causes Helena's smile to slip away, her brows to rise much higher on her forehead, her hands on Myka's shoulders to tighten their grasp.    
  
"Is that okay?"  Myka asks.  
  
A smile pulls at the corner of Helena's mouth. It is so faint that Myka almost second guesses herself, almost turns, almost runs away.  But then Helena nods.  And that too is barely noticeable until the soft whisper of a "yes" escapes the older girl's lips.  
  
Myka smiles.  Her crooked smile.    
  
It happens.  Not unlike Myka had imagined it happening.  Where she moves closer to Helena and Helena's arms move further over her shoulders, and their noses just barely touch before their lips just barely touch.    
  
Myka feels faint, like she's going to black out, before she even realizes she's kissing Helena.    
  
Except she isn't actually _kissing_ Helena.    
  
Her lips are pressed to Helena's lips and they are that way for several seconds, unmoving, completely frozen in place by Myka's own apprehension and not-quite-abandoned thoughts of inadequacy.    
  
After several more seconds, Helena smiles against Myka's lips and presses her lips further into Myka's and _Helena_ kisses _Myka_.  It is the lightest, most gentle kiss that Myka has ever felt against her lips but all at once it is almost too much, it is almost entirely too much.  And it's not because of _how_ _much_ of a kiss it is, it's about _whose lips_ are on the other end of it.  
  
Helena moves her hands down over Myka's shoulders to Myka's collar bone, leaves one more light kiss against her lips and gently pulls away to gaze at Myka.  And Myka is losing herself in the way Helena watches her, in Helena's eyes, the unsteady way she breathes.  Her own unsteady breath, the fact that she's breathing at all, even if she is just barely breathing.  
  
The breathlessness of this entire situation.  
  
Myka exhales a soft laugh, blinks several times as tears cascade down her cheeks.  Helena smiles warmly at her, brings her hands to Myka's cheeks.  
  
"Not so scary anymore, am I?"  Helena asks softly.  
  
Myka shakes her head and slowly pulls her hands away from Helena's waist and takes a step back, causing Helena's hands to slide from her shoulders.  And there is space between them now that only grows as Myka takes another step back, followed by another.

All Myka can focus on is air.  Oxygen.  More of it.  How much she lacks.  And space.  She needs space because there are so many people here that she can't see properly.  Her vision is blurring, tunneling.  Dizzying.  
  
"Myka?"  She almost can't see as Helena's smile fades away.  Helena's brows rising high on her forehead again.  And Myka steps back again and she does see Helena's hands reaching for her, but she doesn't think to go  _to_ those hands.  Not before she hits a wall or what she thinks is a wall until she turns around and finds herself face-to-face with a six-foot-tall Giselle King.  
  
Giselle King whose expression turns from curious to suspicious before falling into something like disappointment or upset or anger.  And where had she even come from?  Myka is sure she wasn't there a minute ago.  Or even ten seconds ago when she was...

 _Kissing_ Helena.  
  
"Bering."  
  
Myka gulps.    
  
"I told you I would know the second you kissed my girlfriend."  
  
Myka turns quietly back to Helena whose face has fallen completely into sadness.  
  
 "Your girlfriend?" Myka questions.  
  
"Myka, we're talking, that's..."  
  
"It's okay."  Myka shakes her head and takes in a deep breath, exhales smoothly, bites her bottom lip.  "I have to go."  
  
"Myka, please don't run away from me right now,"  Helena says softly.  Carefully.  
  
Myka shakes her head and whispers again, "It's okay."  
  
Myka turns.  Myka walks fast.  Myka pushes her way through the crowd.  She doesn't look back.  She doesn't stop.   
  
***  
  
"My darling Myka, if you truly do not wish to be found then you should probably pick a new hiding spot."

Myka doesn't turn at the sound of Helena's voice or as the older girl enters the dugout or even when she seats herself directly beside Myka.  She can see Helena watching her, studying her, from the corner of her eye.    
  
"Myka."  
  
Her name.  On that voice.  From those lips.  That she's kissed.  It unnerves Myka.    
  
She turns slightly further away from the older girl.  Lowers her head into her hand, her forehead against her palm.    
  
She groans. Suddenly mad at herself.  Internally admonishing herself as her eyes burn.  As more tears come.  As more tears fall.  
  
It isn't until Helena sits back and sighs that Myka says anything.    
  
"I'm sorry, I didn't know you were back together.  Otherwise, I wouldn't have..."  
  
Myka sits up.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
Helena is quiet for a long time before her hand is on Myka's wrist.  
  
"We aren't, Myka."  Helena sits up again.  "You've nothing to be sorry about."  
  
"But Gisellle..."  
  
"Giselle thinks buying me flowers and apologizing and setting a future date to talk means I'm hers," Helena interrupts.  "I'm not.    It's not that easy.  I'm sorry if she scared you.  _You_ , on the other hand, have nothing to be sorry about."  
  
Myka finally turns to Helena and takes in a long, unsteady breath, "I don't know what to say."  
  
"It's okay, Myka," Helena slides her hand into Myka's, speaks softly to her.  "If you weren't really ready.  That's okay.  You're my friend.  I will always love you."  
  
Myka arches a brow, looks away from Helena for a moment before biting down on her lip.  
  
"Just tell me you're okay," Helena whispers, leaning closer to Myka, kissing her temple.  "You don't have to say anything else after that.  Nothing needs to be said."  
  
Myka nods, returning her gaze to Helena's.  "I'm okay."  
  
***  
  
It's Saturday morning, a week after school has ended, and Helena is flying to New York City to meet her dad, then on to London for the summer.  
  
Myka sits in thoughtful silence beside Helena, whose head is resting against her shoulder, in the seats just outside of her gate, in wait for her flight to board.    
  
Helena sits up suddenly and digs around in the pockets of her backpack, says, "I almost forgot."  She smiles at Myka when she pulls out a set of keys and puts her hand over the back of Myka's, waits for Myka to turn her palm up, then places those keys into Myka's hand.  
  
Helena lets her hand linger against Myka's.  Lacing their fingers around they keys in their palms.    
  
"What are these?"  
  
"To the back gate, and the pool house," Helena says softly, her smile falls when she pulls her hand away from Myka's to run it through her hair.  "In case you need to get away from home for a while."  She shrugs.  "Just no naked girl parties, Father has someone watching the house."  
  
"Of course," Myka smiles, her eyes mostly following Helena's hand as it snakes through her hair again.  "I wouldn't want my naked girl party being interrupted by some house sitter?"  Helena laughs softly, shakes her head.  Myka puts the keys in her bag just beside her and turns back to Helena to tug on her shirt sleeve.  "I'm going to miss you, H.G."  Helena arches a brow and smirks.  " _Helena_."  
  
Helena smiles, sets her forehead to Myka's and closes her eyes.  "It's only a couple months."  She opens her eyes again and sighs.  "I'll be back for a week or two before school.  And even then, I'll be _here_ in the city, just an hour away from home."  
  
Helena sits up, catches Myka's gaze.  
  
"If you need me," she adds with a whisper.  
  
"An hour and a half," Myka corrects.    
  
Helena rolls her eyes. "Closer than London."  
  
Myka smiles, concedes, "Much closer than London."    
  
***  
  
Helena's flight is boarding and Myka helps her collect her things, takes her carry-on to the gate.  They stand by and wait for everyone else to board.  
  
"Here," Helena hands Myka her mobile phone.  "It's useless overseas."  
  
"Helena..."  
  
"Now you don't have an excuse to not talk to Abigail."  Helena's grin is mischievous.  "And you had better talk to her."  
  
"Meddler," Myka says taking the phone.  Helena's grin widens.  "I will miss your meddling."  
  
"Stop pouting, you're going to make me cry," Helena says softly, pouting now, too.  
  
"Because that's so hard to do?"  Myka teases.  
  
"Shut your adorable face." 

Myka smiles at how pitiful Helena's face looks now.    
  
They're quiet as people move past them, show their tickets, walk through the gate.    
  
Myka reaches into her bag.  Freezes.  Thinks.  Argues with herself internally, like she has been doing for the past week, over the relevance of the box her hand is now clasped around.  Over whether she should give it to Helena.  Whether it's too much.  Too cheesy?  Not enough?  What it's even for.  Why it's for anything at all.  
  
It's almost time for Helena to board and she's looking at Myka expectantly, trying to smile.  Trying _not_ to cry.  
  
Myka pulls the small box out and doesn't exactly look at Helena when she holds it out to her and says, "This is for you."  
  
Helena's eyes widen and she smiles, taking it from Myka.  "You bought me something?"  
  
"It's nothing really, I just wanted to get you something for graduation and..." Helena is already opening the box.  Myka hadn't expected her to do that until she'd gotten on the plane but the wrapping paper is already balled up in Helena's eager hands, and something like anxiety drains all the blood from Myka.  She imagines it evaporating into thin air.  
  
Myka's teeth clamp down on her bottom lip and she lowers her head but still watches Helena.  
  
Helena smiles looking at the box.  At what's _in_ the box.  Looks back up at Myka.  
  
"It's a ring," Helena says.  
  
Myka exhales, lowers her head.  "I know it's kind of cheesy, I mean..."  
  
"Are you proposing to me again?"  Helena asks, her smile growing wider.  "Einstein?"  
  
Myka's cheeks burn beneath the blush.  
  
"No, just..."  Myka has zero words.  
  
"I'm teasing," Helena laughs softly.  She leans into Myka, kisses her cheek.  "It's beautiful," she adds.  
  
"Helena," Myka's voice is a whisper.  " _You're_ beautiful."    
  
When Myka looks back to Helena then, the older girl is watching her thoughtfully.  Myka sighs, tugs at her own hair.  Bites back down on her lip.  
  
Helena reaches to tuck Myka's curls behind her ear before pulling her into a hug. Holding her tight.  Whispering in her ear.  
  
"I love you, Einstein."  Helena kisses her cheek again and when she pulls away, she's crying.    
  
"I told you it wasn't that hard to do," Myka teases softly.    
  
"Hush."  Helena reaches to wipe her tears and laughs, tries not to cry herself.  
  
"Miss, final boarding call if this is your flight."  Helena turns to the flight attendant behind her and nods.    
  
"I'm sorry, I'm coming."    
  
She turns back to Myka and smiles.    
  
"Amanda and Pete are picking you up, right?"  Myka nods.  "You have my keys, my phone?"  Myka is still nodding.  "Email me?  And don't forget to talk to Abigail, if you haven't worked things out with that creature by the end of summer, so help me, Myka Bering." Myka's nod is more exaggerated now.    
  
"Yes, I know!  I would call you my mother but she is not even close to _that_ thorough."  Myka smiles and rolls her eyes.  
  
" _You_ ," Helena says and points her finger at Myka with playful warning.  "I'll be back for you."  
  
"I'll be here," Myka smirks.  
  
Helena glares, lets her glare soften, then tugs Myka closer by the strap of her bag.    
  
She presses her lips gently against the bridge of Myka's nose before leaving a kiss there and pulling only slightly away, "I don't even know what to do with you."  
  
Helena smiles then turns away to hand the flight attendant her ticket.     
  
"Fly safe."  Myka says quietly.    
  
Helena turns back, nods and smiles at Myka as she adjusts her backpack, picks up her carry-on bag, makes her way through the gate.  
  
Myka sighs.  Wipes at the tears on her face.  Tries to steady her breathing.

She's fairly certain it's going to be another very long summer.  
  
***  
  
"Why are you watching this?"  
  
It's Sunday afternoon.    
  
"Why not?"  
  
Myka has spent her entire day helping her mother clean the house.  Organizing books in the book store.  Catering to Tracy who is already in summer mode.

Avoiding her father who only recently returned the rest of her things to her room, all thrown into a large pile on the floor.  
  
"Because it's not right."  
  
Tracy has been banished to the couch.  Their mother too nervous after another seizure to allow her anywhere near hard surfaces, sharp corners, flights of stairs, asphalt.  
  
"You've been watching TV all day, Trace.  You can share for one hour."  
  
She's been asleep for forty-five minutes.  Out cold.  Myka has wedged herself between her sister's feet and the opposite end of the couch.  Turned the channel.  Awaken the beast.  
  
"That's not what I mean."  
  
Tracy at least has the decency to keep her voice lower than usual.  
  
"Then what _do_ you mean?"  
  
Tracy sighs.  Leans her head into her hand as she turns back to the TV. 

The documentary that plays is about gay rights, the presence of queer people in history.  Ever since Ellen came out on her show, it's been a _thing_.  
  
"I know Dad told you it's not okay and that you need to stop.  Watching _this_ isn't going to help you stop.  It's like you _want_ him to be mad at you."  
  
Myka understands what Tracy is trying to say despite all of her vague language but she challenges her.  
  
"Stop _what_ , Tracy?"  
  
Tracy is quiet, reaches down to fix the blanket where it has fallen off of her feet.    
  
"Well?"  
  
Tracy looks up at Myka annoyed.  
  
"Being the way you are.  Being a _lesbian_."  
  
Myka sighs.  Shakes her head.  
  
"You and Abigail on your birthday.  That's all Kevin and I ever hear about at school."  
  
Myka turns down the volume on the TV without ever turning to her sister.  
  
"Why do kids at your school care?  That was three months ago."  
  
Tracy shakes her head.  
  
"I like Abigail because she's amazing and she's beautiful and she's nice.  Not because of some crappy documentary."  
  
"You can like her without _kissing_ her.  Without pissing dad off."  
  
"Do you like Kevin without kissing Kevin?"  
  
"Kevin's a _guy_."  
  
"Kevin's a person.  _Abigail's_ a person."  
  
"Yes, a _girl_ person."  
  
Myka turns to her sister now.  Her sister who mostly just looks annoyed.  Not pained, not hurt, not abused, not even bullied.    
  
Just annoyed by this minor hurtle in her social life that is her older sister's precarious interactions with the older sister of someone else.  
  
Interactions that Myka doesn't even have the pleasure of enjoying anymore.  
  
"I'll make you a deal, Trace."  
  
Myka turns back to face the TV.  
  
"What deal?"  
  
Tracy's expression is suspicious.  
  
"Here's the deal."  
  
Myka turns back to her.  
  
"I'll try to stop being _this way_ when you try to stop yourself from having a seizure."  
  
Myka watches as Tracy narrows her eyes at her, as her forehead wrinkles and that look of annoyance transforms into what Myka thinks is utter confusion.  
  
"Myka, I can't stop myself from having seizures."  
  
Myka shrugs.  
  
"Well, I can't stop myself from being _this way_ , so I guess we're both screwed."  
  
Tracy is quiet.  
  
Myka turns back to the TV and raises the volume once again.  
  
  
  
It is definitely going to be a long summer.


	12. Fifteen & Nineteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Also titled: Tracy Almost Dies Again And Other Strange Happenings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is two simultaneous story lines. The italicized bit takes place two months after the previous chapter, when they're still 14/18, all the way until Myka's 15th birthday. I basically cheated because I wanted to add background story for 15/19 without adding another 14/18 chapter. Hopefully it isn't too confusing!

  
Myka is fifteen years old the summer that Tracy almost dies for a second time.  
  
***  
  
Tracy's been sick for about a week and now her eyes are swollen, her temperature is above average, and the only thing Myka's mother can think is that the youngest Bering came into contact with something to which she is highly allergic.  
  
"My eyes itch so bad." Tracy is whining in that pitiful way that she tends to do but Myka actually feels sorry for her now because her eyes look so bad and Myka's mother is constantly swatting at Tracy's hands, telling her not to touch.  
  
"Do _not_ rub your eyes," Myka's mother says to Tracy before turning to Myka and adding, "Go get your sister a face cloth soaked in warm water, please."  
  
Myka does just that and when she returns to Tracy's room, Myka's mother has her laying down on the bed.  
  
"I need to run to the store for some things."  Myka's mother stands.  "I'll bring back some Benadryl."  
  
Myka nods.  Her mother's hand falls gently over her shoulder for a second just before she heads out of Tracy's room.  
  
"Do not touch your eyes, Tracy Emmanuelle!"  
  
Myka swats at Tracy's hands now and says, "You heard the woman.  No touching."  
  
"It _itches_ ," Tracy whines again.  Myka rolls her eyes and sits next to Tracy, pulls her hands away from her face and sets the warm cloth over Tracy's swollen eyelids.  "Oh, thank the gods for you Ophelia."  
  
Myka smirks as Tracy's arms finally fall to rest at her sides.  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother concludes that strawberries are to blame.  It's the only thing she's come in contact with in recent weeks that she had not previously been in contact with.  
  
Myka's father's only contribution to the growing issue of Tracy's still-swelling eyes and rising body temperature is to chastise both Tracy and Myka for eating food at the home of foreigners.  
  
The so-called foreigners being the very much American-born Chinese and Hawaiian parents of Abigail Cho.  The food in question, a simple fruit salad. One that Myka herself had helped Mrs. Cho prepare because Myka handled a knife better than any of her own children ever had.    
  
As the older woman had joked, "You'd think that with two straight kids, at least one of them could actually cut straight, too.  No dice."  She had then laughed, quite heartily, at her own pun.  
  
(Mrs. Cho had also mentioned something about Abigail being surprisingly awful with a pair of scissors but Myka didn't understand what that was supposed to mean or why Mr. Cho had looked at his wife in the bewildered way that he had when she erupted into more laughter.)  
  
Apparently none of the three older Cho kids could really wield a cutting utensil without the potential for causing great bodily harm to another member of the family.  
  
"It's the boys," the shadow Leila had reasoned shortly afterward.  
  
" _I'm_ only joking."  Mrs. Cho was quick to remedy her youngest daughter's faulty logic.  "Genitalia and sexual orientation have nothing to do with it, Leila Grace."  
  
Leila had turned to Myka then and rolled her eyes.  
  
***  
  
The swelling hasn't gone down for two days but it hasn't gotten any worse.  Tracy's fever has teetered at around 101 degrees Fahrenheit and Myka's mother tells her to take a cool bath as she is leaving the apartment on a Sunday morning with plans to be out with Ms. Jane for most of the day.  
  
It is the worst possible timing that Myka's mother has ever had.  
  
***  
  
"Do you know how weird it is," Abigail begins and slightly pauses (long enough for Myka to gather a thought together and open her mouth, but not long enough for Myka to speak) and then says, "to see the name Helena G. Wells pop up on the caller I.D. whenever you call me from your mobile phone?"  
  
Myka drops herself onto her bed and sprawls out with a smile on her face.    
  
"I know but it's still technically her phone and she pays the bill so," Myka lets her voice trail off.  
  
"So, it sounds like you have yourself a sugar mama," Abigail says, filling in the quiet.  "Hey, I just finished your sentence.  I think that means something."  
  
"Yes, it means you spend way too much time watching tele..."  
  
Myka is cut off by a loud crash coming from the bathroom and she is immediately on her feet, heading into the hallway.  
  
"Myka?"  Abigail is calling through the phone.  "What was that noise?"  
  
"Hang on," Myka says as she comes to stand outside of the bathroom door.  She knocks hard, "Tracy?  Are you okay in there?"  
  
No answer.  
  
Myka tries the knob.    
  
Locked.  
  
She stares at the door for only a second more while she debates the consequences of both knocking the thing down and not knocking the thing down.    
  
"Sorry, Abigail, I have to go."  
  
She doesn't wait for the goodbye before she clicks off the phone, tosses it to the ground.  And knocking the bathroom door down proves to be a more difficult, and much more painful task than her small repertoire of films has led her to believe it would be.  
  
Myka manages to put enough force into the door, between kicking with her foot and ramming into it with her shoulder, to splinter the wood framing and knock it wide open.    
  
The shower rod and curtain are no longer suspended between the walls above the tub.  Myka pulls them away from where they have fallen, half on the floor and half into the shower, only to find Tracy seizing in a tub full of water.  
  
Myka is a mixture of two very grotesque feelings as she springs into action, tosses the curtain aside, pulls a still-seizing Tracy's head above the surface level of the water, and pulls the drain on the tub.  
  
Horrified because her little sister is literally drowning.  
  
And relieved because finding her this way will make it worth destroying the door frame, even if her father does discipline her for it.  
  
***  
  
Myka leaves her mother three messages on the answering machine:  
  
The first as she is locking up the store, to explain what happened with Tracy, that she had expelled most of the water she'd taken in, and to say that they are en route to the hospital by ambulance.  
  
The second when they arrive to say Tracy has had another seizure, that they are preparing to give her an intravenous treatment to try and stop the seizing as the dosage of her medication is apparently not working.  They also give her eye drops for her swollen eyes.  
  
The third an hour later to say the doctors are having Tracy re-routed to the children's hospital in the city, an hour and a half away, because her swelling is suddenly worsening and they have no idea what is happening to her.  Nor do they have the resources to find out what is happening while also keeping her stable in the process.  
  
***  
  
Two and a half hours, that's how long it takes for Myka's mother to show up at the hospital.  
  
By the time Myka's mother makes it home, decompresses, listens to the answering machine, panics, dials the phone number that Myka has provided her with and confirms that both Myka and Tracy are still at the children's hospital, one hour has already passed.    
  
And by the time Myka's mother gathers clothes for Tracy, finally puts away the most perishable of the groceries she's purchased, gets into the car and drives to the city, another hour and a half has passed.  
  
Two and a half hours.  
  
That's also how long it takes before Myka has any idea as to what else is going on with her sister because the doctors won't talk to her outside of saying, "Please try to get a hold of your parents."  
  
And when Myka's mother arrives, she is already frantic.  Myka tells her everything she knows including her own interpretation of the way Tracy had looked while they transported her to the children's hospital.    
  
"Not great," is the best she can come up with.  
  
Because Tracy's eyes are swollen shut now.  Her lips and cheeks have started swelling, too.  The skin around her face and neck and upper body is turning bright red. It is insanely warm to the touch but the nurses tell Myka's mother they are giving her something to help break the fever, to calm the swell, to circumvent any complications that might arise from her near-drowning, to reduce the heat rash and also ease her discomfort.  
  
They sound hopeful but they smile in that same way Helena smiles when she's trying to be reassuring.    
  
When she fails miserably at actually reassuring anyone of anything.  
  
***  
  
"Mom, you didn't have to call her.  I'm sure she has better things to do."  Myka's mother is ushering her into an elevator and repeatedly pushing at the button marked with an "L" to get to the lobby.  Myka leans forward and hits the button to make the elevator doors close and they do.  
  
Her mother thanks her with a look and a nod before she turns and sighs.  
  
"We ran into her when we were up here earlier today, she said she was headed home for the week.  She might as well take you back home, too."  Myka is rolling her eyes, following her mother out of the elevator and into the lobby of the children's hospital.  
  
"I don't mind staying up here," Myka begins to argue but her mother cuts her off, holding up a hand.  
  
"You wanted to take extra classes over summer, you are not missing one single day if you don't have to," her mother counters.  
  
"I don't really want to bother Helena..." Myka starts again.  
  
"It's no bother."    
  
Myka turns toward the voice that cuts her off.     
  
"Really," Helena insists, moving her gaze from Myka to Myka's mother and back to Myka again.  She smiles, "Hi."  
  
Myka smiles wide in return, "Hey."  
  
"Thank you _so_ very much, Helena.  I can give you some gas money,"  and Myka's mother is reaching into her purse to pull out money when Helena stops her with a wave of her hand.  
  
"It's quite all right, Mrs. Bering."  Helena smiles.  "I don't mind taking Myka home.  As long as Myka doesn't mind keeping me company."    
  
Helena turns to Myka suddenly, expectantly.  
  
Myka shakes her head but says nothing.  
  
"Oh, that I am sure she does not mind."  Myka's mother is already turning back to the elevators.  "I'm going to go back up to be with Tracy."  She turns back to Myka, still back pedaling toward the elevator, and adds, "Please clean the kitchen before your dad gets home tomorrow.  Dishes, counters, table, trash.  Myka, spotless.  I don't need him to have any reason..."  
  
Myka nods and sighs, "I've got it, Mom.  Go, I'll be fine."  
  
"Okay."  The older Bering woman turns on her heels.  "Drive safe, girls."  
  
Myka's mother disappears into an awaiting elevator and Helena turns to Myka, her smile much softer than before.  
  
"Ready?"  Helena asks.  
  
Myka squints and then nods at the older girl.   But no, she thinks, because she will never really be ready for anything that has to do with this girl.  This woman.    
  
Even after everything they have already shared.  
  
***  
  
 _A just-turned sixteen-years-old Pete says, "Adventures In Babysitting approaching at your left flank," and a rush of déjà vu causes Myka to dizzy, to grab her head, to catch her breath._  
  
 _"Pete," is all she manages to say before long, slender fingers find their way into her curls. "No. Way."_  
  
 _Helena's smile is bright and just a little bit mischievous when Myka turns in the booth where she sits, eating dinner with Pete.  Turns to face the eighteen-year-old she has not seen in almost two months._  
  
 _The eighteen year old she isn't expecting to see for four more weeks._  
  
 _"Helena."_  
  
 _"Hey, Einstein."_  
  
 _Myka gives her no chance to speak before she is on her feet and embracing the older girl in a tight hug._  
  
 _"How are you back so soon?"  Myka asks in her ear before stepping away, giving her space to breathe._  
  
 _"Trial summons, unfortunately.  It seems the American government has demanded my presence," Helena says, her smile is small._  
  
 _"And so it begins," Pete adds with just as much enthusiasm, having received his own summons to trial._  
  
 _"Sit with us?"  Myka tugs gently on Helena's arm as she moves into the booth.  Helena slides in beside her and pushes her further in with her hip against Myka's._  
  
 _"I can only stay long enough to steal a few chips and also the spare key that I loaned you to the pool house.  I seem to have misplaced mine."  Helena snatches a fry from the basket and devours it faster than Myka has ever seen her eat anything.  Helena covers her mouth, apologizes.  "I haven't eaten anything substantial since Heathrow."_  
  
 _"Here," Myka reaches into her bag beside her, pulls out the keys and hands them to Helena._  
  
 _"Thank you, Love."_  
  
***  
  
"I'm sorry."    
  
Helena's voice, Myka thinks, is definitely filled with sorrow and she glances at the older girl just as Helena looks away from the road to catch Myka's gaze.    
  
"I'm sorry that I haven't been home," Helena clarifies before adding, "since Spring break."  
  
Myka laughs softly at the admission before turning away from Helena's now periodic and expectant glances.  She stares out of her own window at the endlessness of empty fields lining the freeway.  
  
"Are you moving back home for summer?"  Myka asks this before returning her gaze to the older girl.  Before catching those sad eyes again.    
  
Helena presses her lips together tightly when she shakes her head and now Myka sees the guilt, too.  
  
"I found a house with some friends near campus."  Helena says this softly, as if she doesn't actually want Myka to hear it.  
  
But Myka does hear.  Myka nods and then sighs before she turns to look back out of that window at all that nothing between them and that setting sun.  
  
"You don't have to apologize," Myka says softly, still turned away.  
  
Helena is quiet for several seconds before Myka feels the older girl's hand grasping gently onto her wrist.  Myka returns her gaze to Helena's and the older girl immediately averts her eyes.  Looks back to the road.  
  
Myka moves her arm so that Helena's hand slips slowly into her hand and she's quiet when Helena's gaze falls back on her, as they instinctively lace their fingers together.  
  
Several more seconds of silence follow before Helena asks, "How is Tracy?"  
  
Myka leans back in her seat.  Turns her gaze away again.  
  
"She's not good."  
  
***  
  
 _"You're still wearing my ring."_  
  
 _"Of course I am."_ _Helena smiles, and she squeezes her hand around Myka's before fully retrieving her keys and tossing them into her purse._  
  
 _"I have to be off now but you two should pop by later," Helena nods and turns to Pete. "I heard you're driving now, Peter?"_  
  
 _"Yeah well, someone has to pick up your slack," he teases._  
  
 _Helena rolls her eyes and turns back to Myka. Watches her quietly for a while and smirks._  
  
 _"Maybe we can have dinner?  Watch a movie?"_  
  
 _"Or not watch a movie?"  Pete interjects wagging his eyebrows._  
  
 _Both girls turn to him at once and Myka is sure Helena is also glaring at him all the same when he throws his hands in the air in surrender.  "_

 _My bad, my bad."_  
  
 _Helena turns her smile back on Myka and kisses her cheek.  Sneaks another fry._  
  
 _"I'll see you later."_  
  
***  
  
"Are you okay?"  
  
Helena is inside the apartment for the first time since the last time she babysat and she is watching Myka quietly from the entryway as Myka hangs her house key on a hook on the wall and turns back to Helena while rolling up her sleeves.  
  
Helena nods quietly, her eyes dancing around the apartment as they appear to take everything in as quickly as possible.    
  
"He's not here," Myka adds.  
  
"I know."  Helena is nodding now, finally looking back to Myka.  
  
"You don't have to stay," Myka adds stepping toward the older girl, still idling near the door.  "I don't necessarily need any help."  
  
"No, it's all right."  Helena finally steps further inside the apartment, sets her keys in her purse and her purse on the dining table.  "I'll wash, you dry?"  
  
Myka nods. "Sure."  
  
***  
  
 _Helena cooks and Myka cannot look away because something about Helena concentrating on such a domestic task moves waves of feelings through her.  Feelings she cannot really describe but feelings that make her think of Helena doing these things in a home they share when they're older and age differences as small as four and a half years are hardly differences at all._  
  
 _Pete stays long enough to devour every hint of food on his plate.  Tells Helena he entrusts her with Myka's care and any further chauffeuring. Narrowly misses being slapped in the back of the head by Myka._  
  
 _When he's gone, Myka collects all of their dishes and moves to the sink.  She washes them quickly while Helena digs through her luggage._  
  
 _"Aha!"  She hears the older girl say._  
  
 _"Aha?"  Myka questions._  
  
 _Helena holds up a DVD of the movie My Girl.  Her expression quite accomplished and proud._  
  
 _"That's what you want to watch?"  Myka asks moving to join her in the living room._  
  
 _"Peter told me this was a favorite of yours and his as children." Helena is almost pouting.  Myka is feeling the tinge of guilt for stealing her joy._  
  
 _"Yeah, when we were nine.  Before Pete could sit still long enough for us to get to the end."  Myka smiles and sits on the couch as Helena moves to the DVD player._  
  
 _"Well, I haven't seen it, will you watch it with me?"_  
  
 _Myka's smile is wide as Helena inserts the movie and then moves back to the couch to sit beside Myka.  In her usual way.  With her usual closeness._ _Where Helena's arm falls over Myka's arm and Helena's hand just happens to fall over Myka's, too.  And fingers touch, hesitantly at first, just the slightest bit estranged by so much time having passed without them touching, before the estrangement passes and the familiarity returns and those same fingers no longer hesitate to touch._  
  
 _With her free hand, Helena hits play on the remote control._  
  
 _"You might want to grab a box of tissues."_  
  
***  
  
Helena proves to be an efficient dishwasher.  
  
Myka teases her about where she could have possibly learned to wash dishes, having had both a house keeper and a dish washing machine for most of her life.  
  
"I _do_ dishes," is all she says while tilting her head to the side to glare at Myka disapprovingly.  And Myka smiles back at her, feigning innocence.  
  
Myka's phone rings on the counter just beside her and Helena leans into her, then across her, in a playful attempt to see who is calling.    
  
She asks Myka, "Girlfriend keeping tabs on you?"  
  
Myka playfully pushes Helena back to her side of the sink and swoops up her mobile phone to eye the display.  
  
"It's just Abigail," Myka says setting her phone back down.  "I'll call her later."  
  
Helena's brows rise suspiciously.  
  
"What?"  
  
"I said nothing." Helena smiles and looks away, returning her attention to the few dishes left soaking in dishwater.  She washes out a glass and hands it to Myka.  
  
Myka says, "She called you my sugar mama," and takes the dish to dry it.  
  
The look that takes over Helena's face, a combination of annoyance and insult, makes Myka laugh.    
  
Helena rolls her eyes, "Because of the phone?"  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"I'm quite offended by that," Helena's voice is just above a whine but she clears her throat and shakes her head.  "Aside from how preposterous that idea is, those types of relationships are manipulative and loveless."  
  
"And our relationship," Myka smirks, "is not loveless?"  She looks at Helena who turns slightly away from Myka, whose cheeks give away the smile she hides.  
  
Myka bumps her shoulder into Helena's to get the older girl's attention and Helena finally smiles up at Myka and shakes her head.    
  
"It is not."  Helena looks away again.  
  
Myka bumps the older girl with her hip now and Helena bumps back harder, hands Myka another dish for drying.  
  
"Oh, you think you pack some punch now that you're becoming a ninja?"  Myka teases.  "With all of those karate lessons."  
  
Helena rolls her eyes up to Myka's and corrects, "Kenpō."  
  
"I know, I'm just teasing." Myka lets her smile fall as she leans into Helena then and kisses the older girl's temple.  "Please don't look so annoyed with me."  
  
"I'm not." Helena sighs, and she's not quite pulling away from Myka, she may even be leaning _into_ Myka, when she hands her a handful of freshly washed silverware and says, "That's the last of it."  
  
Myka catches Helena's hand in hers.  Relieves Helena of the silverware as she places them on the drying rack with her other hand but does not let go of Helena.  And Myka thumbs at the ring Helena wears on her right ring finger, examines it for nothing in particular.  
  
"It helps,"  Helena says softly, interrupting Myka's thoughts.  She wiggles her fingers in Myka's hand and lets her eyes meet Myka's.  
  
"Helps with what?"  
  
"It's not as okay over there, on campus," Helena adds looking away.  "I've heard what people say about some of the couples.  The names they call them.  Seen the signs that have been posted."  Helena sighs and leans into Myka, "Everyone is so bloody conservative."  
  
Myka remains quiet.  
  
"So, it helps."  Helena looks back up at Myka.  Because Myka is most definitely taller than Helena now, though not by a tremendous amount.  "As a reminder that I'm happy with who I am.  With who I have loved."  Helena looks away again and says quietly, "With who I love."  
  
Myka smirks.  
  
"Think how much more it would help if you actually came home every weekend," Myka squeezes her grasp on Helena's hand.  "Like you used to."  
  
"Myka, we have had this talk," Helena starts softly with a shake of her head, pulling her hand from Myka's grasp.  
  
"I know, Helena."  Myka nods, drying her hands and tossing the dish towel on the rack.  "It's just that I miss you.  A lot."  
  
"We can't be together, Myka.  It's not an option."  
  
"I _know_."  
  
Helena turns back to Myka who is watching her very intently.  Myka who smiles a rather weak attempt of a smile at Helena.  Myka who sets a soft kiss against the tip of Helena's nose.  
  
"I know."  
  
Helena sighs and turns away again, pulling the plug in the sink to let the sound of the water draining fill the silence between them.  She dries her hands on another towel and sets it on the counter before she grips the edge of the sink and lowers her head.  
  
"How _is_ Abigail?"  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and turns around to lean back into the counter.  
  
"She's fine."  Myka pushes her own curly hair back behind her ears.  "We are pretty much back to where we were a year ago.  Just friends.  Just friends who kiss on occasion.  On a lot of occasions."  Myka shrugs and turns to Helena who is still looking down at the floor.    
  
"Sounds vaguely familiar," the older girl says under her breath and only slightly turns her head toward Myka.  
  
Myka pauses to watch Helena as she turns away from her again.    
  
"I've been thinking about making it official.  With Abigail," Myka says crossing her arms.  Helena stands up straight at that and turns to face Myka, still quiet.  "But she's kind of into this other girl and I don't want to waste her time again."  Myka bites down on her lower lip, casts her eyes to the ground.  "I mean, I don't think I really deserve her all that much anywa..."  
  
"You deserve her," Helena interrupts and Myka turns her eyes back on the older girl and shakes her head.    
  
"I really don't."  
  
"Myka," Helena says coming to stand directly in front of her.  "You really do."  
  
"But Abigail is," Myka looks up in thought and shakes her head again, "she's amazing and beautiful and funny and patient.  She is  _so_ very patient."  
  
"Myka," Helena's voice is soft, incredulous.  
  
"Especially with me," Myka adds and she laughs now, too.  "I test her nerves a lot.  I mean, on purpose because it's easy to do but I shouldn't.  I think in a way she likes it but I also know it drives her crazy because the faces that she makes when she gets flustered are just so," Myka sighs, "so incredibly..."  
  
Helena's lips over Myka's bring a swift end to her external monologue about Abigail and Helena's hands tugging Myka closer by the collar of her shirt almost brings a swift end to Myka entirely.  
  
She has to catch her breath in the middle of this kiss, has to balance herself before she falls completely into Helena, still tugging her forward.  So Myka inhales deeply, even as Helena's lips part from and then kiss hers all over again, and Myka's hands find purchase against Helena's waist in the very moment that Helena chooses to release her grasp on Myka.    
  
Helena steps back with parted lips and wide eyes, watching Myka until she gazes for so long and with such focus that Myka is sure either she or Helena are going to spontaneously combust.  
  
"Helena."    
  
The older girl startles, blinks several times, closes her mouth and licks her lips.  Then she's shaking her head and pushing her hair behind her ears as she moves to the table to gather her bag.  
  
"Helena."  Myka calls to her again.  "Please, don't go."  
  
"I'm sorry Myka."  She continues shaking her head.  "I shouldn't have done that.  I shouldn't even be here right now."    
  
She's shaking when she moves to the door.  Myka follows her quickly.  
  
"I have to leave."  
  
"But you don't, Helena."  Myka is reaching out to Helena cautiously and she means to stop Helena from opening the door before the door ever opens and when the older girl's fingers are on the locks, but the door is already open, and Helena's right hand already through it, when Myka's weight meets the wood and the thing slams back closed but not quite closing.  
  
Helena's loud cry startles Myka before she even knows what has happened.  Before the door swings slowly back open.  
  
"Oh god, Helena."    
  
The older girl is pulling her right hand back into her as she doubles over, head to her knees.  Her purse falls to the floor and Myka is almost certain that Helena will soon follow.  
  
" _Fuck_ , Myka."  
  
"I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry."  Myka is reaching to her but not touching. Not wanting to touch.  Not wanting to hurt her again, or make it worse than it already looks.  
  
"Jesus fucking Christ."  Helena's voice is breaking and when she finally stands straight again, her cheeks are wet, eyes red.  Helena takes in a deep breath and licks her lips.  Clenches them tightly together.  And Myka is still hesitant to touch her, apologizes many more times.    
  
Helena takes in several more breaths.    
  
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to," Myka starts, still reaching and not touching.  
  
"It's okay, it just... this really hurts."    
  
More tears slide down Helena's cheeks.  
  
"Come on."  Myka has her hand on Helena's arm now, gently tugs the older girl forward.  
  
"I should probably just go,"  Helena says softly, still crying, still cradling her injured hand.  
  
"Helena, please?  Let me ice it."    
  
The older girl watches Myka for a moment before she looks away and shakes her head.    
  
"Myka."  It's a weak protest because Helena doesn't say anything more than that before she let's Myka lead her to the dining table.  Myka pulls a chair out for her and asks her to sit and she does.  
  
Myka grabs a clean cloth from the hall closet and sets it under the kitchen faucet.  She moves to the freezer and collects a handful of ice to put inside the cloth before returning to the table, pulling a chair out next to Helena, and sitting down facing her.  
  
"Here," Myka holds her hand out and waits for a still pained Helena to place her injured hand into Myka's.  "I'm going to take your ring off, okay?  Before your hand swells."  
  
Helena nods but lowers her head in anticipation of the pain.  Myka removes the ring as gently as she can as Helena's fingers have already begun to swell at her knuckles.  The older girl only winces once and Myka sets the ring onto the table.    
  
Myka turns Helena's hand, palm down, in hers and sets the ice over her knuckles and holds it there for several very silent minutes before she turns Helena's hand back over to ice her palm.    
  
Helena wipes at her tears with her free hand, sniffles but keeps her head lowered.  
  
"Helena," Myka's voice is soft and Helena finally sits up to look at her, tears still slipping from her eyes.  "I'm really sorry.  I didn't mean to hurt you."  
  
"I know you didn't, Myka.  I'm sorry, too.  I shouldn't have... after so long..."  Helena sighs.  "I should probably go."  
  
But Helena doesn't move.  
  
Myka removes the ice from Helena's hand and sets the cloth on the table to examine Helena's hand in hers.  Her fingers are red and warm to the touch, even after being iced, and the knuckles already twice their normal size.  
  
"If it didn't hurt so much, you could really get me back with these over-sized knuckles," Myka puffs out a small laugh.  
  
"Are you really suggesting that I should _hit_ you, Myka?"  
  
Helena's expression is disbelieving.  Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Forget I said it," she sighs.  Myka sits straight now and runs her thumb lightly over Helena's knuckles.  
  
"Can you move your fingers?"  
  
Helena moves them all.  Slowly and probably quite painfully.  
  
"Nothing seems broken at least."  
  
"I'm sure it'll be fine," Helena sighs.  "I have to go."  
  
"Well, don't forget your ring."    
  
Myka takes Helena's uninjured left hand and places Helena's ring on that ring finger and this prompts them to look up at each other almost at once, Myka with a smirk and Helena's eyes already rolling upward.    
  
"Stop,"  Helena demands.    
  
"What did I do?"  Myka smiles, feigning innocence.  
  
"Just stop."  
  
Myka grins and Helena finally smiles too, laughs softly through her tears.  
  
"I love you, Helena."  
  
Helena's smile fades and she takes in a deep breath.  
  
"I have to go."  Helena moves to stand and Myka tugs on her arm.  
  
"Helena."  
  
Almost immediately the older girl sits back in her seat and side-eyes Myka for just a moment before leaning in closer to leave a chaste kiss against Myka's lips.  
  
"I love you, too."  
  
Myka smiles.    
  
***  
  
 _The tissues come in handy, occasionally, but mostly Helena's tears end up on Myka's shirt._  
  
 _Myka is far from complaining._  
  
 _But when Helena is still shedding tears, even after Myka excuses herself to use the restroom and returns, she knows it's about more than just the movie._  
  
 _"I'm scared," Helena admits to Myka.  "About going to court.  About seeing him."_  
  
 _Myka turns to Helena but does not speak.  Only listens._  
  
 _"What if I don't say the right things?"  Helena asks.  "What if it isn't enough?  What if he tries to do something?  What if he gets away with everything that he's done, to all those girls?"_  
  
 _"So many what ifs," Myka says with a gentle voice and shakes her head.  "I don't think you can say the wrong things, Helena.  Everything you need to say is the truth.  Everything that needs to be said is what you've experienced. And it's not all on you."_  
  
 _"I know you're right.  I know that's the logical way of thinking about it but I'm still scared."_  
  
 _"And that's okay."_  
  
 _Helena leans into Myka, rests her head on her shoulder._  
  
 _"This is going to sound really needy and stupid of me, after all the ranting I did to you in my emails, but I wish Giselle would be there."_  
  
 _Another tinge of something sparks in Myka.  It borders on both envy and annoyance._  
  
 _"Isn't she going?"_  
  
 _"I highly doubt it, considering."_  
  
 _"I can go with you..."_  
  
 _"No." And Helena sits up when she says this.  Sits up and faces Myka and, with a very serious tone to match the very serious look on her face, says, "You cannot be there, Myka.  I don't even know if you_ can _be there but please, Love, promise me you will not be there."_  
  
 _"Not even for support?"_  
  
 _"Myka."  Helena's eyes are watering.  "That morning, that_ day _, up to the moment I get to the courthouse, you can be with me every step of the way.  But not inside that courtroom."_  
  
 _"Okay?"  Myka isn't sure if the feeling of rejection is more prominent than her worry._  
  
 _"Please promise me you won't."_  
  
 _"I promise, Helena."_  
  
 _Helena takes in a deep breath and exhales slowly before resting her head against Myka's shoulder again.  She reaches for and squeezes Myka's hand tight, sighs._  
  
 _"How long can I keep you tonight?"_  
  
 _Myka sighs too, wraps an arm loosely around Helena's back._  
  
 _"For as long as you want."_  
  
***  
  
Myka is ambushed at school by Abigail Cho.    
  
The girl just appears out of nowhere and pulls Myka into the restroom, pushes her against the wall and glares at her angrily.  And Myka is more shocked by Abigail's strength than she is by what she's doing or what has driven Abigail to do whatever it is she's doing in the first place.  So Myka offers Abigail an amused laugh and that crooked smile that has worked too often in her favor these days.  
  
"Hello."  Myka says it in a way that's meant to be seductive but she doesn't have very much experience in or knowledge of seduction, so she's not entirely sure that it's working or what she intends for the end result to be.  
  
"Don't you _hello_ me."  Abigail narrows her eyes at Myka but it looks a little funny with the height difference, with this tiny albeit gorgeous Chinese Hawaiian girl glaring up at her.  "I have been worried _sick_ about you and you haven't been answering my phone calls, _Helena G. Wells_.  I even had my mom drive me by the bookstore and _nothing_.  Every single light was out."  
  
"I'm sorry," Myka pushes herself away from the wall but Abigail pushes back into her and stands on the tips of her toes, kisses Myka with enough intensity that her worry radiates through the kiss.  Myka lets the smaller girl push her back against the wall and accepts Abigail's affections with a smile.    
  
Abigail moves back, completely away this time and with an annoyed huff while simultaneously whispering some words in Mandarin that are no doubt _bad_ words.  Myka cannot help the soft laugh that escapes her.  
  
"Yes, it's so funny," Abigail says.  "Some drunk guy across the street from your place said he saw you get into an ambulance and I was..."  
  
"My sister," Myka interrupts Abigail and the smaller girl turns back to Myka, the anger in her face suddenly melting into something else.  "She was having a seizure in a bathtub filled with water.  I had to break the door down."  Myka pauses and sighs.  "She's in the hospital now."  
  
"Oh."  
  
"I'm sorry, Abigail.  I saw your missed calls."  Myka bites on her bottom lip for a moment.  "I meant to call you back but I guess I just got distracted before I went to bed."

It's a slight understatement.  
  
"No," Abigail shakes her head.  "I'm sorry, I was worried.  I overreacted.  Is Tracy okay?"  
  
Myka shrugs.  "I have no idea.  Mom stayed with her and I haven't heard anything else since leaving the hospital.  Don't exactly know how to get a hold of her."  
  
"Myka."  Abigail huffs out another sigh and shakes her head again.  "I'm sorry."  Abigail moves closer to Myka and kisses her, gently this time, and when they part, Myka's smile has transformed into a grin.  "What?"  
  
"I just don't think your girlfriend would like you kissing on me, that's all," Myka teases.  
  
Abigail glares at Myka again.  "If you're referring to the person I _think_ you're referring to, you can just stop referring to that person right now because _no_ and _straight_ and also _stop_."  
  
"No! Straight! Stop!" Myka recites Abigail's emphasized words while pretending to claw her way out of the bathroom and when she turns back to Abigail, the smaller girl is trying so very hard not to laugh, not to appear amused.  "You can pretend not to find me funny all you'd like but it's just going to make us both late for class."  
  
Abigail does laugh, just a little before making her face straight again and saying very sternly, "I dislike you."  
  
"Be that as it may," Myka says leaning down to kiss Abigail's cheek and taking Abigail's hand in hers, "we have some place to be."    
  
Abigail shakes her head but smiles and squeezes Myka's hand.  
  
***  
  
Abigail asks Myka out that night but Myka, who is hoping to meet up with Helena, says she has plans.  Does not say what those plans are.  
  
Helena, when Myka calls her, says she's probably going to head back to the city that evening, settle into her room at the new house.   She's just grabbing some extra things from the pool house that she hadn't taken to school because they wouldn't fit in her dorm room.  
  
Next, Myka calls Pete but he and Amanda have plans to see a movie and while Myka is more than welcome to tag along, Myka should understand that she might have to sit by herself in the theater because, as Pete says, he doesn't plan on actually watching much of the movie anyway.  
  
"Maybe if it wasn't a scary movie."  
  
"But scary movies are always dark, so it's the perfect make out flick," is Pete's response to that.  Followed by, "Plus, when the ladies get scared, who are they gonna turn to?"    
  
Myka can practically see Pete holding his hands up as if to put himself on display.  
  
"Take notes, Mykes.  You might one day convince H.G. to see a scary movie if she doesn't actually have to _watch_ it," he teases before she abruptly says goodbye to him and hangs up the phone.  
  
Myka can only imagine Helena trying to watch a scary movie.  Trying to watch a scary movie for the sole purpose of making out with Myka in a movie theater.  And then again no, Myka cannot even imagine it.    
  
***  
  
Myka's dad comes home and he's walking in with a brown bag, setting it on the table, pulling out a brand new bottle of scotch.  And when Myka notices that he's stopped moving, stopped digging through that bag, stopped doing anything at all, she also eventually notices that his eyes are on her. 

He squints at her.  
  
"Don't you have some sports thing to do somewhere?" is how he greets her after being gone for several days.    
  
"I don't have sports during the summer," is what she responds with.  She wants to add "you dumb shit" to the end but she's certain she wouldn't survive that, so she keeps her mouth shut.  Very tight.  
  
"School ends and all of a sudden you want to be home every night?"    
  
Myka doesn't respond.  Her dad turns back to his paper bag, pulls out another bottle of scotch and sets that on the table, too.    
  
"Go use up someone else's resources for a while."  Her dad gestures to the door.    
  
"All my friends are busy," Myka says softly.  "I can go in my room..."  
  
"I do not," he pauses, "give a shit what your friends are doing.  Sometimes I just want to come home to an empty space.  A  _quiet_ space.  So grab your shit and go find somewhere else to be."  
  
"Okay."  
  
Myka sighs because it's a godsend really.  That he wants space.  That he wants her gone.  
  
Her bag is already together. Had been in the off chance that anyone wanted to actually do anything that evening.  She'd abandoned the thing in the living room after realizing no one would be around.  
  
She grabs her bag, her keys, her cell phone that she hides beneath her mattress, and she is gone in less than three minutes.  
  
Where to, she doesn't know.  
  
***  
  
 _Helena is leaning into Vanessa Calder in a way that makes Myka's heart want to be jealous and she's not sure why or what that is even about.  More so when Ms. Calder kisses Helena's temple and smiles when Helena moves away to smile back at her._  
  
 _But then Helena's father is there and he moves closer to Vanessa in a_ familiar _sort of way, rubs her back with his hand, and whispers something into her ear that makes her smile._  
  
 _Myka turns and walks to the edge of the drive, compelled by a sudden feeling of intrusion, like she is the intruder, and Helena appears by her side in seconds._  
  
 _"Your dad and Ms. Calder?"  Myka questions._  
  
 _"She's sort of an old family friend.  Kind of."  Helena says softly.  "Not that my dad has time for that sort of thing."_  
  
 _"He hardly has time for you," Myka says turning to Helena and the older girl just shrugs._  
  
 _"I think we are ready to head out."_  
  
***  
  
Her phone rings and it's Helena.  
  
"Do you want to explain to me why your mother doesn't know you have my old phone?  And why she doesn't know your number?"  
  
Not even a hello.  
  
"Are you scolding me right now?"  But Myka has a smile on her face.  She's sure Helena can hear her smiling through the phone.    
  
"I am serious, Myka," Helena sighs.  "I understand not telling your dad but your mother would benefit greatly from being able to call you whenever she can't find you.  _I_ would benefit greatly from that, too."  
  
"Well, I apologize, Helena, for burdening you."

Myka isn't smiling anymore.  
  
"Where are you?"  
  
***  
  
Helena's car pulls into the parking lot at the park just twelve minutes later and the older girl spots her immediately, seated atop the jungle gym with her legs hanging out over an open side.  Helena approaches her, tilts her head back to look up at her for a second before she decides to join her.  
  
"What's wrong?"  Helena sits beside Myka, close enough for their arms to touch.  
  
"Nothing."  Myka shakes her head and turns to Helena.  "What's wrong with you?"  
  
Helena arches a brow.  "Nothing," she says and there is a long pause that follows.  "I didn't mean to imply that you were a burden, Myka."

"I know," Myka shrugs.

"No," Helena shakes her head.  "You don't know, obviously, or you wouldn't have said that.  It's just an unnecessary hoop for your mother to jump through.  And when she worries about not being able to find you, then I worry about not being able to find you.  That's all."

"I'm sorry," Myka sighs now and looks to Helena. "She called you?"  
  
"Your sister's condition hasn't improved, so she's going to be there for a while.  Your mom wants you to pack her a bag of clothes," Helena explains. "She said your dad is on his way up but she forgot to ask him.  Or she's sure he won't do it right, or he's an asshole."  Helena feigns thought, "Yes, I believe the latter of those was accurate."  
  
"My dad just bought two new bottles of Scotch, I doubt he's going anywhere."  
  
Helena shrugs.  "I don't know, Myka.  I'm just a messenger."  
  
Myka sighs, her eyes falling on Helena's right hand, not as swollen but bruising now.  Myka takes that hand in hers, pulls it into her lap.    
  
"I can't believe I did this," Myka sighs again. "I'm an idiot."  
  
"Maybe," Helena says and she has a smile on her face when Myka looks up at her.  "Maybe not."  
  
Myka squints at Helena, lets the older girl's hand fall against her lap before turning away.  And Helena laughs softly, squeezes Myka's leg where her hand now rests.    
  
"It's getting dark," Helena says, turning away from Myka.  "We should go.  I'm sure your mom could use the support.  And the clean clothes."  
  
Myka turns back to Helena.  
  
"Are you still sorry?"  
  
"For what?"  Helena asks turning to Myka abruptly.  
  
"For kissing me," Myka clarifies.  "Last night.  Because I don't want you to be.  I miss the way things were after Christmas," Myka pauses, "after New Years."  
  
Helena is quiet for several seconds watching Myka, then leans into Myka to set a gentle kiss over her lips.    
  
Myka closes her eyes and focuses on the feel of Helena's lips pressed softly into hers and leans further into Helena for a second kiss when their lips begin to part.    
  
She sighs when they are eventually no longer together.  
  
Several seconds of quiet follow.  
  
"Does that answer your question?"  Helena's whisper brings Myka to open her eyes to the older girl, to those brown eyes, to the smile on those perfect lips.  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"Good," Helena adds softly.  "Let's go."  
  
***  
  
 _Myka walks Helena to the courthouse, into the courthouse, and to the hallway just outside of the courtroom.  It isn't until Helena is saying she will see her later that they part and Helena's eyes grow wide at something just over Myka's shoulder, her mouth falls open._  
  
 _"Is that Giselle?"_  
  
 _Myka turns, smiles.  It_ is _Giselle.  Helena goes to her, standing outside of the doors to where her trial is to take place._  
  
 _"Hey."  Giselle smiles down at Helena who is shaking her head up at Giselle._  
  
 _"Hi."  Helena's smile is as soft as her voice._  
  
 _"Thought you might be in need of a little extra support today."  Giselle averts her eyes for a second and says, "You know, just as a friend."_  
  
 _"How did you..." Helena doesn't finish that thought or the next, "What are you even..."_  
  
 _"The kid called me," Giselle says gesturing toward Myka.  "Well, called my mom, actually, who then gave me an ultimatum despite my already agreeing to come."_  
  
 _Helena turns to Myka just as Myka is turning to leave._  
  
 _"Stop right there, young lady."_  
  
 _Myka turns on her heels back toward Helena who steps to her slowly and  watches her for several seconds before wrapping her arms over Myka's shoulders, around her neck._  
  
 _"Thank you, Love."_  
  
 _Myka whispers, "I wish it could be me in there.  With you."_  
  
 _"I know."  Helena stands straight and nods while pushing back Myka's hair.  "I'll see you in a while." Helena kisses Myka's cheek and turns away to enter the court room behind her father and Ms. Calder._  
  
 _Giselle by her side._  
  
***  
  
They say more to each other on the ride back to the hospital than they have in the past four months.  It's not as though much has happened in that short of time but enough has happened that Helena doesn't know about.  
  
Pete and Amanda had gotten back together after a break up in the fall.  
  
"The level of PDA that I have to deal with is off the charts," Myka says trying very hard not to groan out her annoyance afterward.    
  
Helena laughs softly from the driver's seat.  
  
"I'm almost not sorry to be graduating a year earlier than Pete," she adds with a sigh.  
  
"I'm sorry, you're what?"  
  
"Oh," Myka says because that was another thing she had not yet told Helena.    
  
Ms. Calder had suggested Myka for a program that would allow her to take college courses alongside her high school classes, so that she'd graduate with both a diploma and an associates degree. And this, Helena knew because Myka had spent her last school year juggling both sports and college classes.  Her weekends, mostly reserved for spending time with Pete or Abigail, and Helena if she had thought to visit.  
  
"I'm taking three classes this summer," Myka explains.  "So when school starts, I'll only be on campus before lunch.  After lunch I'll take classes at the community college."  
  
Helena arches an impressive brow at Myka and smirks but doesn't say anything.  
  
"They say they don't have anymore classes for me but I think Principal Nielsen is just trying to get rid of me as soon as possible."  Myka grins at Helena.  
  
"Better for you."  Helena smiles.  
  
"Hey, we might be in college together, too."  Myka tilts her head toward Helena and the older girl's smile softens.  Helena shrugs.  
  
"Maybe, Myka."  Helena says.  "Maybe not."  
  
"Maybe not?"  
  
"I might be considering going elsewhere to finish my studies."  Helena looks guilty again.  
  
"Elsewhere like New York?"  
  
"Elsewhere," Helena clears her throat, "like London."  
  
Myka isn't sure what her expression is right now but Helena is looking at her in a very curious way.  
  
"Myka?"  Helena's voice pulls her from her thoughts and she's sits straight.  
  
"That's," Myka already starts to say and turns away, "good.  For you."  
  
"Myka, we can't always be together, you know?  Eventually we go our separate ways.  Live our lives apart."  Myka glances back at Helena whose face is filled with sorrow again.  "At least for a little while."  
  
"Yeah, of course."  Myka nods and turns away again.    
  
The rest of the drive is quiet.  
  
***  
  
 _The trial ends the week before Helena is to start school in the city._  
  
 _Guilty.  On all counts.  And there are too many that Myka does not want to remember.  That she doesn't want embedded in her memory for the next eternity, so Myka does not read or listen to what they are._  
  
 _The sentencing will be held at a later date and Helena has already sworn she will not be attending._  
  
 _Again, nobody blames her._  
  
***  
  
Myka can't help herself when they're on the hospital elevator, or most anywhere else for that matter, since this had become a thing between them.  Helena is standing in the back corner, opposite of Myka, so Myka slides along the hand rail at the back of the elevator until she is directly beside Helena.  
  
Helena arches a brow at her and offers her a weak smile.    
  
Myka _kisses_ her.  Helena's brow arches higher, her smile grows only slightly.  
  
"Feeling better now?"  Helena teases.  
  
"London would be good for you," Myka says finally. The first thing she's said since she stopped saying things in the car.  "You love it there.  You have friends there.  They have great schools."  
  
Helena smirks.  "Well, thank you for your approval."  
  
"Although, you will no longer be _that one super hot girl with the accent_."  Myka smirks.  "Just _that one super hot girl that sounds like everyone else_."  
  
"Sacrifices."  Helena's smile is so bright, so playful, so beautiful, that Myka actually feels her cheeks flush.  She slides back to the other side of the elevator just as they reach the appropriate floor.  Helena, whether purposely or not, bats her eyelashes at Myka, still smiling.  The elevator doors slowly open.  
  
Myka reaches for Helena's hand as they exit the elevator and Helena holds tight to hers as Myka leads her through the halls, to the room Tracy had been admitted to.  Though they don't quite make it that far because as they round one corner, Myka hears her mother's voice in it's exasperated tone.  And then she hears her dad's voice, quickly followed by another woman's voice that is threatening to call security if _everyone_ doesn't lower their voices.  
  
They round another corner and there is her father, in her mother's face, and her mother, teary-eyed and flustered, and red-cheeked.  And Myka feels oddly protective of her, like she should run to her, stand between her and her father.  But her mother, Myka knows, will fair better than Myka will in such close proximity to her father.  
  
She keeps her distance.    
  
"She _cannot_ be removed, do you understand?  She cannot be discharged because she _requires_ medical attention," Myka's mother is saying.  "This is not optional Warren. It's not even up for discussion."  
  
Myka's father actually lowers his voice.  His arguments starts with, "I don't give two shits..." and the rest is inaudible.  
  
The nurse says, "I guarantee you that if you make any attempt to discharge or remove her from this hospital, law enforcement and child services will be called in to intervene."  
  
"How about you do what my hard-earned money pays for you to do," Myka definitely hears her dad now, "and go attend to my kid's needs?  Butt out of my conversation with my wife."  
  
The nurse leaves in a huff.  
  
Myka feels Helena's grip tighten on her hand and the older girl steps closer to her, touches her shoulder to Myka's and adjusts her hold so that their fingers are intertwined.  
  
"You've been drinking," Myka's mother accuses on a hushed voice.  "Did you drive here like this?  Warren?"  
  
"Spare me, Jeannie, I don't need your shit right now."  
  
It's then that Myka's mother's eyes find Myka and Helena, stopped at the end of the hallway.  Myka's dad turns his attentions to where Myka's mother looks and his face, at the sight of both Myka and Helena, bears that same awful, menacing expression he had given to Helena the last time he had even seen her, back in the bookstore.  
  
"Warren," Myka's mother is already warning as he turns to face Myka and Helena, takes several slow steps toward them.  
  
"And what do you want?"  
  
"Don't come near her," Myka is sure she's snarling as she steps in front of Helena to glare at her dad.  
  
"Excuse me?  Are you talking back to me?"  
  
"Ophelia," Myka's mother warns.  "Please, take Helena back downstairs."  
  
"Yes, why don't you and your _girlfriend_ go back downstairs," this from Myka's dad, whose eye on Helena has transformed from menacing to something so _familiar_.  Something Myka has seen before.  Something that Myka refuses to believe actually _means_ anything in this particular context.  With these particular people.  
  
Because the way her dad is looking at Helena right now, the way he had looked at her then, in the bookstore, only reminds her of Leo.  That look that was on his face after Pete had knocked his teeth out.  As he was being detained by one of the softball coaches.  
  
Glaring and smiling and _laughing_ in that way he had, at Pete, at Helena, at what he had done, at what he had been getting away with.  
  
"You think I'm going to hurt you?"  Myka's dad is talking directly to Helena.  He laughs and it's the stupidest thing Myka has heard in the world.  "Well?"  
  
"I don't find you the least bit intimidating, Mr. Bering."  Helena says this with convincing stoicism but her grip on Myka's hand is telling a different story.  
  
"Please, Helena,"  His voice travels through the hall but no one else appears to tell them to quiet down, "call me _Uncle_ Warren."  
  
His tone is patronizing.  
  
Helena's grip tightens, if it even can, and Myka turns to say something to Helena but is interrupted when Ms. Jane appears around the corner opposite them.  
  
"Warren Bering, if you so much as think about touching any one of these women," and Ms. Jane doesn't stop moving until she is in his face.    
  
Myka's dad actually recoils.  
  
Ms. Jane, without removing her glare or changing her stone stance in front of Warren Bering, points to Myka and Helena and says, "Girls, go into Tracy's room."  
  
Myka doesn't hesitate, she leads Helena.  Ms. Jane plants herself firmly between Myka's dad and the path they walk around him and into Tracy's room.  
  
"I think it's time for you to leave," Ms. Jane says.  
  
Myka shuts the door before they hear anything else.  She tugs Helena to the far wall, near the window, and puts her hands on Helena's arms.  
  
"Do not.  Do that."  
  
"Myka," Helena starts but Myka shakes her head, moves her hands further up Helena's arm.  
  
"You're shaking," Myka says and Helena is, she is trembling under Myka's touch.  "Please, don't play that game with him.  I don't know what's going on with him or with you but you obviously think he won't hurt you."  Myka shakes her head and Helena averts her eyes, looks to the door as a nurse enters Tracy's room.  "You think he won't but he will, Helena, he-"  
  
"Myka," Helena gasps as the nurse draws back the curtain.  "Myka."  Helena's eyes are wide, her lips falling open, her hands gripping onto Myka.  She's turning Myka around, and when Myka sees what Helena sees, she moves instantly to Tracy's bed.  Helena comes to stand beside her.  
  
Myka looks to Helena, her hands over her mouth, her eyes already watering, and when Helena's eyes meet Myka's, Myka can tell she is trying very hard to hold everything back.  
  
Myka turns Helena into her so that she's facing away from Tracy, looking toward the opposite wall, while Myka trains her eyes back down on her sister.  
  
Tracy's fever has steadily risen, her mother eventually walks in to explain, Ms. Jane is right by her side.  Her fever is rising and her internal body temperature is so high that her skin is burning, turning red.  Tracy is red from her head to her feet, and the top half of Tracy's body, from what Myka can see, is covered in fever blisters while the bottom half of her body is being spared so far.  
  
"Do they know what it is yet?"  Ms. Jane asks this questions.  Myka cannot bring herself to ask anything.  Despite the one million questions she has, none of them come to fruition.  Because she's staring down at her annoying little sister who is always whining about how miserable her ordinary life can be sometimes.  And now that she is actually miserable, now that she is actually experiencing what Myka is sure is unbearable discomfort, Tracy doesn't whine.  Tracy cannot whine.  Tracy is barely conscious.  
  
"It's definitely an allergic reaction," Myka's mother explains to Ms. Jane and her voice is low, still shaking from the confrontation with Myka's father.  "Possibly to the sulfa in her seizure medication.  They've pulled her off of it already.  She's on a morphine drip for the pain but all they can do right now is try to make her as comfortable as possible." Ms. Jane puts a comforting hand over Myka's mother's shoulder and nods.  
  
"Sulfa?"  Myka asks, suddenly finding her voice.    
  
"Yes," Myka's mother turns to her.  
  
Myka bites down on her lip and thinks because it's so familiar, this medication.  She hears Abigail's voice saying the word, explaining the allergy.  She sees the medical bracelets that the twins only wear sometimes, that they're supposed to wear all the time, for their seizures.  Also for their allergies.  They have so many of them.  
  
"The twins are allergic to sulfa," Myka says this out loud only for her own benefit and then it clicks.  "The eye drops."  
  
"Myka?" Ms. Jane steps around the bed to her.  "What is it?"  
  
"At the hospital in town, they gave Tracy eye drops for the swelling," Myka says thoughtfully, her eyes reaching her mothers eyes, "they had sulfa.  I read the label, they were sulfa-based."  
  
"I should," Myka's mother starts, "get the doctor."  
  
Ms. Jane turns back to Myka's mother and nods, they both move to leave but Ms. Jane turns back to Myka before she is through the door.  She points to Helena, still turned away, and says, "Wait here a few minutes to give your dad time to leave and then walk her to her car."  
  
Myka looks to Helena, her eyebrows giving away the sadness she has yet to let go.  And Myka nods, tightens her grasp around Helena, and looks back to Ms. Jane.  
  
"Okay."  
  
Ms. Jane slips out of the door.  
  
Myka let's her eyes fall back on her sister.  She wonders if she's asleep or if she's just out of it from the morphine they've given her.   She doesn't move and Myka can only imagine how much it would hurt her to do so, even the slightest bit.    
  
"Myka," Helena's voice is quiet and when Myka turns back to her, Helena is turned only slightly toward Tracy, glancing occasionally then pressing her lips together tightly.  "Myka I can't..."  
  
"Come on," Myka steps away from Tracy's bed, draws the curtain back around her sister and leads Helena out of the room.  
  
Prays her dad has already gone.  
  
***  
  
 _What's meant to be a small celebratory get together that weekend with close friends, transforms into a post-high school party for, what Myka is almost certain is, half of Helena's graduating class.  Plus a scattering of people from the lower classes, including Pete and Amanda, and a very reluctant Myka._  
  
 _"Ah ah, no." Pete takes a freshly poured cup of punch from Myka's hand just as she's about to sip it._  
  
 _"Pete?"_  
  
 _"I saw Kurt pass this way half an hour ago with Everclear."  Pete tells her._  
  
 _"Why would Everclear be here?"  Myka questions._  
  
 _"Liquor, Mykes.  Not the band."  It would be one of the only things Pete can outsmart Myka on.  He dumps Myka's punch into the grass.  "Grab a water."  He points to an ice bucket just off of the porch._  
  
 _Myka sighs, "Thanks.  Where's Amanda?"_

_Pete looks annoyed when he shakes his head and points somewhere across the yard to where Amanda is talking to an older boy that Myka does not recognize.  The way she moves gives away her intoxication._

_"Pete?"  Myka arches her brow, not knowing who she should worry about more.  
_

_"It's okay, I'm keeping an eye on her. And uh, Mykes."  Myka turns to him curiously while opening her bottle of water.  "You might want to grab an extra bottle for H.G."_  
  
 _Myka knows that she knows better than to turn around but she does it anyway._  
  
 _And maybe it's a good thing she does, despite the way it makes her feel, to catch Giselle and Helena making out just in the doorway to the pool house.  To see them just in time for that door to go flying open, them to go stumbling in together, the door to slam shut._  
  
 _Myka hands Pete her water bottle and says, "I'll be right back."_  
  
***  
  
By her car, Helena finally gasps out a cry and Myka does not hesitate to pull her into her arms, to hold her close, to tighten her embrace on the older girl as she cries.  
  
"I'm sorry, Myka." Helena's voice is muffled by Myka's shoulder.  "I wasn't expecting that, I..."  
  
Myka sighs, clears her throat. Can't find the words.  Stays quiet.  
  
Helena stands straight in Myka's hold, her hands on Myka's shoulders, the look on her face is almost too sad for Myka's heart to handle.  
  
"Your sister, she must be in so much pain."    
  
Helena shakes her head and leans back into Myka.  Rests her head on Myka's shoulder.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
Myka kisses Helena's hair.    
  
"Tracy is stubborn," Myka finally speaks, "she'll be okay."  
  
"Myka," Helena pulls away to look at Myka again and her expression now is disbelieving.  Like Myka is telling her the worlds most ridiculous lie but Myka smiles and pushes Helena's hair from in front of her face, where strands stick to her cheeks against the moisture of her tears.  Myka tucks those errant hairs behind Helena's ears. Pulls the older girl back into her.  
  
"I mean it, Helena, she'll be okay."  Myka doesn't quite believe it herself but she can't exactly imagine her life without Tracy either, so she's certain it's an impossibility.  
  
Helena is shaking her head against Myka's shoulder but she doesn't say anything.  Not for several minutes.  Not until Myka pulls her away and kisses her cheek and says, "You should go to bed."  
  
Even then, Helena only nods.    
  
Myka opens the car door for her and Helena steps between the door and Myka, turns to Myka and pouts.  That ridiculously sad, pitiful pout.    
  
"If you need me."  Helena doesn't need to say anymore than that.  Myka nods and Helena kisses her quickly before turning to get into her car.  
  
"Helena," Myka calls, tugging gently at the other girl's arm.  Helena turns back to Myka expectantly.  "Will you come back?"  
  
"Tomorrow?  I can try, Myka, I'm..."  
  
"From London, I mean."  
  
"Of course I would come back from London."  Helena reaches out to Myka, resting her hand between them, against Myka's abdomen.  
  
"You understand," Myka says, looking to the ground before bringing her eyes to Helena's, "why I want to be closer to you?  Until then at least?"  
  
"Myka," Helena begins to smile but it fades away softly when Myka lifts a solo brow.  "Myka?"  Helena says a bit more seriously.  
  
"Just this summer, Helena," Myka pulls the older girl into her, wraps her arms around Helena's back.  "Could you ignore our ages?  Could you be mine?"  
  
Helena's eyes are wide and disbelieving.  
  
"No, Myka."  Helena pulls herself from Myka's grasp and turns slightly away.  "I'm not anybody's.  You can't think like that.  Of _me_ like that."  
  
"Like what?"  Myka asks and Helena turns to her quickly, brows furrowed.  She almost looks angry.  Maybe she is angry.  
  
"Like Giselle, Myka."  And Helena's voice is angry, "Like you own me because you have feelings for me.  Like we have to be something because I have feelings for you.  That's not what a relationship is.  That's not how that works."  
  
"I've never been in a relationship before," Myka takes a step back from Helena and wraps her arms around herself.  "I didn't mean it like that, I just thought..."  
  
"Like a child,"  Helena says softly.  
  
They are quiet for a long time.  

"Okay." Myka takes in a deep breath and turns to leave but Helena pulls her back.  
  
"You shouldn't want me to be your first anyway," Helena says glancing away and then back.  "Relationship, I mean.  You think I'm some enigma or something and I'm not. I'm just a regular person who is just as faulty as and maybe even more broken than everyone else."  
  
"What?"  Myka knows her face is incredulous. She wants to laugh.  "Those are _Giselle's_ words.  Why are you..."  
  
"You shouldn't want me at all.  You keep building up this idea of me in your head that I will never be able to live up to.  It isn't me, Myka.  I can't live up to everything that you want."  
  
"Helena," Myka sighs.  "There's nothing for you to live up to.  You're you, you don't have to _do_ anything except be you."  
  
"I am not worth you missing out on Abigail, Myka."  Helena is shaking her head now.  "There are so many girls at that school who adore you, I am not worth you missing out on that.  I am not worth you _waiting_ three years."  
  
"Don't you think I'm competent enough to know what you're worth to me?"  Myka challenges.    
  
"No, Myka," Helena says this softly, almost sympathetically.  "I think you're too young to think competently about this.  I think you're being foolish.  I think I'm to blame because I perpetuate it.  I tell myself you're too young and then I think about you, despite your age, and the way I feel about you I just..." Helena exhales and shakes her head.  "It doesn't make sense, it starts to not feel right, and then I don't know what to think about any of it.  You.  Me.  Us?  I don't know what to do with any of this."  
  
"I don't know what to think about us either." Myka casts her eyes to the ground. "I didn't mean to upset you, Helena."  Myka looks back to the other girl and sighs, "I just meant..."  
  
"Don't worry about what you meant, Myka."  Helena crosses her arms in front of her.  "You should go be with your family.  Don't worry about us right now. _Us_ is not a thing you should be worried about because _us_ is not a _thing_.  Your sister, in there," Helena points back to the hospital, "that's what you should be worried about right now.  You should worry about your family."  
  
Myka looks away from Helena.  Looks back to the hospital.  Thinks about her family there.  Her abusive dad, intoxicated, belligerent, and being run off by Ms. Jane, a mother who isn't her mother but is more a mother to her than her own mother.  Her own mother, more lost and scared and alone than Myka herself has ever been.  Her sister, near comatose and suffering a sickness with no name.  
  
She turns back to Helena, who could have been like an older sister to her had Myka not been _this_ way.  The older girl who has spent half of Myka's life looking after her in one way or another, small or big.  Helena, who barely has a family of her own.  
  
The older girl takes in a deep breath when she sees that Myka is crying.    
  
"You're my family too, Helena," Myka says softly.  "I will always be worried about us.  About _you_.  The same way you've always been worried about me."    
  
Helena lowers her eyes then and Myka steps back into her space, leans into Helena, kisses Helena's cheek.  
  
Helena closes her eyes and turns slightly into the touch of Myka's lips on her cheek.  And Myka feels the brush of Helena's nose, Helena's lips as she moves away.  
  
"What does it feel like?"  Myka asks in a whisper, just inches from Helena.  "The age difference between us right now.  Is it a million years or is it nothing at all?"  
  
Helena leans in closer and Myka feels the brush of her lips again.  
  
"Nothing at all," Helena whispers.  She kisses Myka's cheek.  
  
Myka steps backward, several steps more than before, and Helena looks back up at her with teary eyes.  
  
"Drive safe, Helena."    
  
"Myka," Helena chokes out quietly, wiping away more tears, taking in another deep breath, "try to have a good night."  
  
Myka offers Helena a smile, then turns entirely around and heads back to the hospital.    
  
She does not look back.  
  
***  
  
 _Myka doesn't care that she is interrupting, or what she is interrupting, as she is knocking on the door.  And she hears muffled laughter on the other side followed by Helena's scolding voice saying, "Gigi, stop it."_  
  
 _Something falls over.  Myka rolls her eyes up to the ceiling and prays it isn't Helena._  
  
 _Helena opens the door and her face is flushed, perspiration dotting her forehead.  She is without a shirt and her bra appears to have not been too far from its own haphazard departure._  
  
 _"Myka," Helena breathes out.  Her eyes are instantly guilty.  She looks away._  
  
 _"You're drunk?"_  
  
 _"You, of all people, know very well that I am not drunk, Myka Bering."_  
  
 _"You're intoxicated."_  
  
 _"Yes, well I didn't know," Helena pouts.  "About the punch."_  
  
 _Myka is studying Helena carefully.  The way she leans into the door frame.  How her eyes never quite land on hers.  Her hand finding its way through the length of her hair.  The way her bra strap has fallen from her shoulder.  Or been pulled off of her shoulder.  Whichever may be the case._  
  
 _"Are you okay?"_  
  
 _Helena shakes her head.  Myka doesn't know if she means to or if the action is involuntary because she then says, "I'm okay, Myka."_  
  
 _Myka watches her for a while longer before she speaks again._  
  
 _"Do you remember what you told me this summer?"  Myka asks her.  Helena's thoughtfulness, when she thinks of this thing, is highly exaggerated._  
  
 _"Aside from how much I love and miss you?"  Helena leans her head against the door frame now, smiles and blinks slowly at Myka._  

 _It's difficult for Myka not to blush, standing in front of Helena with so much of her skin on display.  It's difficult to not want to look down and take in the form that is Helena's exposed upper body.  But Myka keeps her eyes on Helena's eyes and clears her throat as she continues to talk._  
  
 _"Aside from that."  Myka sighs.  "Specifically about Giselle.  About how you sometimes feel like you need her but that you know you don't need her.  About how much you miss being with her but how you don't want to fall into that cycle with her again.  The cycle of breaking up and getting back together and breaking up. Do you remember that?"_  
  
 _Helena is quiet as she stands straight and bites down on her lip._  
  
 _"It's not just her that I miss."  Helena moves outside her door now as Giselle's voice calls out to her, she shuts it gently behind her._  
  
 _Myka reaches to Helena's arm, to where the strap of her bra falls.  Where almost too much of her skin is bare and exposed.  And Myka pushes that strap back up onto Helena's shoulder.  Slides her hand down Helena's arm and grips gently just above her elbow._  
  
 _Helena's sigh is shaky.  She closes her eyes and lowers her head._  
  
 _"I miss her touch, too."_  
  
 _"If you want this, Helena, I won't stop you.  I just want you to be happy."  Helena looks up at her then.  "I just want to make sure you know that you want it.  That you'll be happy about it when you wake up."_  
  
 _Helena thinks for a very long while, letting her eyes roam around the pool house before she finally returns her gaze to Myka._  
  
 _"I wouldn't be happy either way," Helena says softly._  
  
 _Myka nods and sighs, kisses Helena on her forehead, says goodnight and turns to leave._  
  
 _"Myka."  Helena's hand on Myka's arm stops her from going and she turns back to her, raises a brow.  "I would be happy," Helena tugs Myka a step closer, "if you stayed with me."_  
  
 _"I can do that," Myka says._  
  
 _Without another word, Helena steps aside to let Myka into the bedroom._  
  
***  
  
Tracy gets worse as summer moves on.    
  
A team of doctors gathers to meet with Myka's mother and Ms. Jane because Myka's dad has become even more useless than he was before.  Only now he has an actual problem to drown himself in because not everything is covered and nothing is free.  It's the gas and the accommodations and some of the medication, the growing list of expected permanent damage, the too close calls that add to the growing money problems.  The what ifs for recovery, the what ifs for no recovery...  
  
Myka has never spent more time in her life thinking about mortality than she had when her mother told her Tracy was being moved to the intensive care burn unit because the doctors, she had said, know what it is now and they know that they can't treat the condition or stop it from happening.   They can only treat the symptoms, halt the pain, make her as comfortable as they can while it continues to happen.    
  
And it's a word they keep using.  Comfort.  As comfortable as they can. But whenever Myka braves the trip to the hospital, and every single time is worse, Myka cannot see any form of comfort in what is happening to her little sister.    
  
Her only sister.  Her only sibling.  
  
Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis.  It's a severe allergic reaction to the sulfa ingredient in the seizure medication she's been taking for months.  And the eye drops she had been given after her eyes originally swelled from the seizure medication had exacerbated the problem, accelerated the progress.  
  
Ms. Jane puts it simply one night, when Myka sits with Pete and Jeannie in their kitchen in her new temporary home.  It was earlier on in the summer, shortly after they found out and Tracy had been moved to the ICU.  As Myka's mother was becoming more of a regular resident of the children's hospital and Ms. Jane refused "to make Myka to stay in the apartment alone with her steadily downward spiraling alcoholic for a sperm donor."  
  
And those, like these, were Ms. Jane's words.  
  
"Her body is trying to fight the medication with fever, she is quite literally cooking from the inside out," and Myka has to lower her head into her hands because the images, so clear in her eidetic memory, flood back like an assault against her resolve.  "At this point, she's losing the top layer of skin on her abdomen and arms, and she'll likely lose more skin over more of her body."  
  
"Is she in a lot pain?"  Jeannie asks.  
  
"She has so much morphine in her system, she's rarely ever conscious," Ms. Jane explains.  "For good reason.  And that is just the underlying problem.  It hasn't been long since they've pulled her off of her medication so it will take a while to clear from her system.  On top of that, she's been having an excessive amount of seizures due to the lack of that medication.  Mostly small, not like you're used to, Myka."  
  
Myka still isn't looking up and she feels Pete's arm wrapping around her, pulling her into him.    
  
"If you don't want to know anymore, I understand," Ms. Jane says softly and Myka feels the older woman's hand on her knee but she shakes her head and looks up, cool air hitting the wetness of her cheeks.  
  
"No, it's fine," Myka says, "whether you stop or not, the images are still there.   I'd rather know."  
  
Pete holds her closer and Ms. Jane nods and continues to explain what is happening with Tracy.  How her eyes have been compromised and blindness has become a worry.  How her lung has collapsed and the task of Tracy's breathing has been temporarily delegated to a machine.  How keeping the feeding tube in place in Tracy's nostril has become a bit of a challenge because she has already pulled the thing out three times in protest during her too-few semi-conscious states.  
  
At some point, she says, the fever will break and Tracy's body will have time to heal.  Her skin, they'll have to graft back on.  She'll need physical therapy to combat the stiffness for the length of time she's been bed ridden.  But now that they know what it is, now that they know the cause and how not to make things worse, things should, eventually, take a turn.  
  
"They're basically treating her like a burn patient."  Ms. Jane concludes and Myka doesn't miss the extra tight squeeze of Pete's arm around her because how had they almost come full circle?    
  
Back to the burn unit of the ICU at a crisis hospital?  Back to Pete's dad?  Back to more tragedy on top of all the bullshit they already have to deal with?  
  
***  
  
Myka dials Helena's number later that same night.  It rings.  Her voicemail picks up.  Myka hangs up.  
  
Myka calls one more time.    
  
The line doesn't ring.  Her voicemail picks up.  
  
Myka tosses the phone on the floor and buries herself under covers, closes her eyes tight.  
  
The images of Tracy, with skin boiling and sloughing off, with bandages from head to toe, with a machine doing all of her breathing for her, come dancing back into her mind.  
  
***  
  
"Where the hell has H.G. been?"  
  
Pete barely asks the question before he's shoving three donut holes into his mouth.  Jeannie signs to him that those donut holes are three days old and Pete rolls his eyes.  Makes something akin to words through all the pastry.  
  
Jeannie stares at him annoyed and looks to Myka and Myka says to Jeannie, whose eyes are on her lips, "He said pastries have a five day grace period and also that you should know better."  
  
Jeannie glares at Pete and he swallows back the remnants of donut in his mouth.  
  
"She spends one year away from home at college and she acts like she doesn't even know me."  Pete shakes his head and sits back in his chair.  "Never wants to turn her ears on either."  
  
Jeannie signs to Pete that she shouldn't have to turn her hearing aid on.  That she should be allowed to embrace her ability to not hear.  
  
"Ability to not hear?"  Pete shakes his head and looks to Myka.  "She's been hanging out with deaf hippies."  He turns back to Jeannie, "You miss my voice, I know you do."  
  
Jeannie rolls her eyes and reaches across the table for another three day old donut hole.  She throws it at Pete's head and it bounces off, lands on his breakfast plate.  
  
"Thanks, Sis."  He grins and shoves it into his mouth.  Still grinning.  
  
Myka laughs softly, she's shaking her head, peeling a banana.  
  
"Pete, you of all people should be able to appreciate deaf culture.  If Jeannie doesn't want to use her hearing aid, she doesn't have to.  She shouldn't be expected to."  Myka takes a bite out of her banana, smiles at the memory of leaving one in Helena's car last year.  
  
"Thank you, Myka!"  Jeannie vocalizes.  
  
"Down a notch!"  Pete matches Jeannie's loudness.  
  
Myka reaches across the table and decks him in the arm.  
  
"Ow!  Goddamn it, Mykes," Pete groans, rubbing at his sore arm.  "Since when are you always on her side? And stop hitting me with your flannel-clad lumberjack mountain-lesbian strength."  
  
"Not okay," she says and points at him threateningly, sitting back in her seat.  
  
"You know, if you're having issues with your girlfriend, you don't have to deflect by sabotaging my sibling rivalries.  Just say you don't want to talk about it."  Pete's teasing, she's sure.  
  
"She's not my girlfriend, we're not having issues," Myka says for the umpteenth time this summer.  "She just thinks her being away is helping.  Because of Tracy and dad and mom and everything that I'm _dealing_ with."  
  
"But it's not, right?"  Pete questions.  "Because you're not _actually_ dealing with those things so much as you are avoiding dealing with those things."    
  
Myka side-eyes him for several seconds before shaking her head.    
  
"No," she sighs.  "It's not.  But that's okay.  It's obviously helping her, so that's okay."  
  
"How do you know?"  Pete eats another donut hole.  Myka starts to wonder how they've managed to slip under his radar for three days.  
  
She sighs.  "I guess I don't know, since she doesn't return my phone calls."  
  
"Do you think she's still freaked out about seeing Tracy?"  
  
"Maybe," Myka shakes her head.  
  
"No offense, Mykes, but _I'm_ still freaked out about seeing Tracy."    
  
"No offense taken, Pete." Myka sighs and stands, picking up her breakfast plate.  "I think I'm going to get ready and go see Abigail."    
  
"I'll take you, Mykes," Pete offers holding his hand out to her.  Myka hands him her plate.  "The one good thing about having two sisters is how very little you eat."  
  
"I'm going to shower," Myka says disappearing into the hallway.    
  
***  
  
 _Myka isn't sure why it goes so smoothly, telling Giselle all the reasons why she needs to go.  Why she and Helena don't need to venture down that road anymore.  But it does.  And Giselle goes._  
  
 _She kisses Helena on her way out the door, and Helena looks for all the world like she wants to take back everything after that kiss, but Giselle goes and Helena lets her._  
  
 _Myka doesn't know when the party ends.  She hands Helena her shirt, leaves only momentarily, when Helena is showering, to tell Pete that she's staying.  He tells her he'll take care of the rest._  
  
 _Helena is in bed when Myka returns with a glass of water, she makes her drink the whole thing before she lays down beside her.  Before Helena curls herself into Myka's side.  Before Myka's hands are in Helena's hair._  
  
 _"Don't think less of me," Helena says in a whisper, nuzzling closer to Myka._  
  
 _"Impossible," Myka responds with a sigh, pulling Helena closer._  
  
***  
  
Tracy wakes up.    
  
Tracy wakes up when she isn't supposed to be awake and it's the worst possible timing again, for all of this, because Myka's mother isn't there.  _Myka_ is there and she is there by herself because, as Ms. Jane has said, her mother needed a break.  A warm meal, a real bed to sleep in.  At least until they had space for her at the extended stay house for families of long-term patients.     
  
So Myka is wide awake in the middle of the night, standing in scrubs in the ICU, and she's peering into Tracy's room through the floor-to-ceiling windows that surround it and sliding glass door when the nurses decide to change her bandages.  When Tracy isn't quite getting enough morphine.  When Tracy wakes up screaming and crying and calling out for their mother.  
  
The scream is horrific, blood curdling. Myka has never heard that noise come from anyone not in a scary film, she has certainly never heard that noise coming from her cocky little sister before.  And it startles her enough to make her take several steps back while more nurses come into Tracy's room.  
  
One maxes out her morphine drip, another is trying not to hold her down while also trying not to let her fall out of her bed, a third is filling a syringe and injecting something into her IV line.  
  
Tracy is sobbing and then she's screaming but she isn't exactly crying, Myka knows this, because her tear ducts are damaged and her eyes haven't been producing a proper amount of moisture for some time now.    
  
She calls for their mom.  And Myka feels like this is what she's here for.  Like this is when she's supposed to be doing whatever she's supposed to be doing but she cannot move.  Myka is completely frozen. With fear. With worry. With the uncertainty of what exactly is expected of her.  
  
Seconds later, Tracy is calm but she is moaning loudly.  Still calling for their mother.  Her hand, the one closest to Myka, is waving limply at the wrist.  Her eyes are closed again.  
  
But then a nurse is saying something about her lung collapsing again and Myka catches nothing else before another nurse, an older woman with a kind smile, who puts her hands on Myka's shoulders and turns her toward the doors of the ICU, tells her she's going to need to go outside for a while.  Hands her a box of tissues.    
  
Myka takes it.  Allows herself to be ushered outside.  Stands there quietly for so long, staring at that door as nurses rush to and fro, that when someone eventually shows up to enter the ICU, she's startled to find out where she is, how she got there, why she's crying with a box full of tissues in her hand.  
  
She rips off the layer of scrubs, tosses them into an awaiting bin and moves back into the waiting area, sits where her backpack leans against the too-tough couch that her mother has been using as a makeshift bed for weeks.  
  
Myka pulls out her phone.  Dials Helena's number.  
  
First, she thinks if Helena answers, she'll apologize for the late hour.  Next, she'll ask how Helena's been.   Then she'll ask if Helena is free.  Finally, she'll ask her to come to the hospital.  To sit with her.  To keep her company.  To ground her just a little bit.   Bring some sense to Myka that the world is not actually spiraling out of control. That her family is not actually falling apart faster than she had ever imagined.    
  
Helena does not answer.  Her voicemail clicks on and after the beep, Myka leaves a message.  And it's the only thing she can think to say:    
  
"Helena," long pause, "I'm sorry.  For whatever I did.  To make you not want to talk to me. Or see me."  Myka is trying not to cry because she doesn't want Helena to worry and she doesn't want Helena to think things are worse than they are.  For Myka, they aren't worse but she doesn't know how she'll make it through the night alone.  "But I need you right now.  I can't do this by myself.  I'm sorry.  I love you.  And I really need you here."  
  
Myka hangs up.  She sits on the uncomfortable couch and pulls her feet up and folds her legs into her chest, buries her face in her knees.  
  
Her phone rings.     
  
She checks the display, even though she's sure no one else would be calling her at one o'clock in the morning.  
  
"Helena?"  
  
"Myka, where are you?"  
  
"The children's hospital.  In the ICU waiting room."  
  
"Give me twenty minutes, okay?"  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"Myka?  Twenty minutes, I'll be there."  
  
"Okay," Myka says softly.    
  
She ends the call.  
  
***  
  
Helena is there in sixteen minutes.  Myka is watching the clock in the waiting room because she has nothing else to do but that or listening to Tracy's screams echo through her memory again and again.    
  
Helena is sitting beside her, pulling her into a hug, kissing her all over her face, before she even registers that Helena is actually present.  
  
"Is this," Helena is looking around the empty waiting room, "is this where your mom has been staying every night?"  
  
Myka nods as Helena looks back to her.  
  
"What happened?"  Helena pushes Myka's curls out of her face.  
  
"I feel bad." Tears are burning in Myka's eyes and Helena is shaking her head.    
  
"Don't feel bad, Myka," Helena says.  "Why _do_ you?  Please don't feel bad."  
  
"I'm crying like I can't handle this. Like I can't _deal_ with it," Myka starts, "and I'm not even the one who has to deal with it. Tracy is.  Tracy is the one dealing with all of the pain.  I'm just," Myka bends forward and begins to sob, "I'm a horrible sister because I don't want to be here.  I don't want to be anywhere near this."    
  
Myka lifts her head and Helena is moving to kneel on the floor just in front of her, sets her hands over Myka's knees.    
  
"I don't want any of this to be happening.  I just want things to go back to their usual level of screwed up.  I just... I shouldn't think that my sister would be better off dead than," Myka points to the ICU, "her skin falling off of her body.  I don't want my sister to die, Helena.  She's annoying but she's still my little sister.  I know I'm a bad older sister, I know we don't get along but I still want her around.   I don't want her to die but how is this any better?"  
  
"Oh Myka," Helena's voice is a whisper, her face completely flushed with tears.  She sounds breathless when she says, "My darling Myka."    
  
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have bothered you."  Myka wipes at her face.  "I'm just being an idiot."  
  
"But you're not, Love," Helena smiles softly, "you're overwhelmed.  It's understandable.  It's a lot to ask of you, staying here to be with Tracy.  With Tracy's condition.  It would be too much for anyone."  
  
"She's only getting worse. I should want to be here for her." Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Myka," Helena says reaching a hand to palm Myka's cheek.  "It's okay to be overwhelmed. It's okay that you're scared.  That you want to run away."  Helena averts her eyes then and lowers her hand to Myka's lap.  "It's not okay to run away without warning, as I've done, but it's okay that you need to get away from this."  
  
"I'm not mad."  Helena's eyes fall back on Myka when she says this.  Myka shakes her head.  "I understand.  I pushed too much. I get it. I'm not mad at you.  Are you mad at me?"  
  
"No, Love, I'm not mad." Helena smiles softly.  "I've just been thinking too much about losing people and avoiding the grief.  I've been selfish, I think.  I should have been here with you."  
  
Helena sighs and Myka closes her eyes and sits up straight, opens them again when Helena's hand is over hers, grasping tight.    
  
"How about a bit of fresh air?" Helena gestures toward the exit.  Myka nods. "Bring your things?"  
  
Myka grabs her bag and lets Helena lead her out of the ICU waiting room.  
  
***  
  
There's a hotel across the street that Myka's mother has spent all of three nights in, the most they could afford even with Ms. Jane's help, during her two month stay in the city.  Helena leads Myka there and, at the counter, she asks the girl what their monthly rate is.    
  
"For a suite, if you have one."  
  
"Helena?"    
  
"Your mother is not spending another night sleeping on that retched couch, Myka."  Helena pats Myka's hand on the counter.  "Neither are you.  It's close enough that she can make it there if something happens."  
  
The girl at the counter has to call the night manager to find out the monthly rate and comes back with a four-digit number that makes Myka's jaw drop.  
  
"Splendid," is Helena's response.  "The month will do for now."  She hands the girl a black credit card and turns to Myka, "Father will mostly be mad that I haven't told him about Tracy's worsening condition.  He won't care about the room."  
  
Myka wants to be in the mood to tease Helena about her method of acting out to get her fathers attention, but the timing isn't right.  Her mood isn't right.  She's sure Helena's isn't either.    
  
"Why haven't you told him?"  Myka asks, her voice barely above a whisper.  
  
Helena twists her lips to the side, averts her eyes.  "More of that previously mentioned escapism."  
  
The girl at the counter seems far too impressed when she slides Helena her card back, the keys to the room shortly after that, and they are barely through the door of that room before Helena's cell phone is ringing in her back pocket.    
  
Myka moves slowly into the one bedroom suite as Helena takes her phone call into the bathroom, "Hi Daddy.  Yes, everything's fine but Tracy is still in the hospital."  
  
She shuts the door behind her.  
  
Myka sets her bag on the couch and walks into the bedroom, collapses on the bed, curls into one of the thick feather pillows and closes her eyes.  
  
She's half-asleep when she eventually feels the bed dip behind her and the warmth of Helena enveloping her in her hold.  Myka keeps her eyes closed, sets her arm over Helena's as the older girl wraps her arm around Myka's waist.  
  
"You forgot the light," Myka says softly.    
  
"Leave it," Helena responds, scooting closer still to Myka's back.  
  
They're quiet for much longer before Myka turns over onto her back, then turns her head to face Helena.    
  
"Thank you," Myka whispers and Helena opens her eyes.  
  
"She'll be okay, Myka," Helena responds softly.  "Remember?  She's stubborn?  She'll be fine."  
  
"Yeah," Myka shakes her head, "but she's also kind of lazy."  And Helena lets out a soft puff of laughter.  Myka smiles, tears slipping from the corner of her eyes, onto the pillow below.  She lets her smile fall, "What if she gives up?  What if she stops caring?  Just lets go?"  
  
"She will not," Helena says this more like a reprimand than anything.  "I'm sure she's dreaming of being at the mall right now."  Helena smiles again and Myka smiles, too.  
  
"I'll take her," Myka laughs through her tears.  "I will endure that trip just for her.  Just to have her awake and healed and whole again.  I would spend five hours at the mall just to hear her nagging again."  
  
Helena's smile is wide now.    
  
"I would tell you to be careful what you wish for, Myka," Helena brings her forehead to touch Myka's, "but that is one fate I do hope you get to suffer."  
  
Myka laughs, sniffles.  She closes her eyes.    
  
"Goodnight," Helena whispers, moving her hand into Myka's over her abdomen.  
  
"Goodnight Helena."  
  
***  
  
"Her fever is dropping."    
  
It's the first thing a smiling nurse says to Myka and Helena who stand side-by-side outside of Tracy's room.  The nurse tells her she should call her mother and let her know.  
  
"She's on her way here," Myka responds softly.  
  
Helena squeezes Myka's hand and turns her head to plant a kiss on Myka's cheek.  Myka smiles at her and Helena smiles and nods in return.    
  
Myka is watching Tracy now and she doesn't look any better.  She doesn't look like she feels any better.  But the nurses look happier, they look relieved, they even smile and are playful in their words to one another.  
  
It's a nice break from the stoicism that had always filled Tracy's room before now.  
  
"I have gained," Myka sighs, shaking her head, "such a new respect for my mother.  I don't know how... she does this everyday.  Every night.  For two months?"  
  
"I suppose she is stronger than you think," Helena suggests to Myka softly.    
  
"Or this entire ordeal," and Myka and Helena turn to the voice that speaks behind them, come face-to-face with the two smiles and four teary eyes of Ms. Jane and Myka's mother, "has just made her stronger."    
  
Myka's mother smiles and wipes at her own tears and Myka moves to her quickly, wraps her arms around her mother.  And she can't remember the last time she hugged her mother so tight, or even at all, but she's certain that she wasn't big enough to be the one whose arms were wrapped entirely around the other.  She's certain that, whenever this last happened, her arms could not even reach entirely around her mother.    
  
And now here she is, her mother leaning into her, her arms wrapped entirely around her mother's back.  It feels so new and yet so strangely familiar.  Myka can't stop the moisture that pools in her eyes. Can't stop the torrential downpour of tears that escape her.  
  
Myka kisses her mother's temple through her hair because that's how tall she is, that's where her lips naturally fall.  And she pulls her mother in closer, holds her tighter.  
  
"I love you, Mom,"  Myka whispers into her ear.  "I love you and I need you to know that."  
  
"My beautiful Ophelia," Myka's mother pulls away smiling, palms Myka's cheeks and wipes away her tears.  "I love you, too.  And I need _you_ to know that things are going to change.  I'm sorry for everything but all of it is going to change.  I promise."  
  
Myka glances to Helena who is all tears beside Ms. Jane who has draped an arm over Helena, pulls her in close to her side.    
  
"How?"  Myka asks and turns back to her mother.  "If Dad's never going to change."  
  
"He doesn't have to change, Ophelia."  Myka's mother squeezes her hold on her and shakes her head.  "All he has to do is sign the divorce papers."  
  
"Are you really..."  
  
"I'm done."  Her mother says softly.  "I should have been done a long time ago and I owe you girls so much but I'm done.  I am officially..."  
  
Myka doesn't care about more words.  Those are all the words she needs.    
  
She pulls her mother back into her hold.  Squeezes her tight.  Kisses her hair again.  
  
"Thank you."  
  
***  
  
 _Myka is seated on the couch in the living room of the pool house, eating a bowl of cereal, when Helena finally wakes up, emerges from her room, slowly shuffles her way to the couch, and drops herself beside Myka._  
  
 _"Good morning sunshine," Myka says before taking in another spoonful of cereal._  
  
 _Helena stares at Myka until Myka turns to her._  
  
 _"You okay?"_  
  
 _"Thank you," Helena says quickly, kisses Myka's cheek.  "For last night with Giselle.  And I apologize if I talked your ear off."_  
  
 _Myka reaches up to touch her own ear._  
  
 _"Nope, still in tact."  She smiles._  
  
 _"You know what I mean, Myka."_  
  
 _"I know what you mean and you're welcome and don't be sorry."  Myka returns to her cereal.  "Cock-blocking Giselle was basically the highlight of my year."_  
  
 _Myka shoves a spoonful of cereal into her mouth to hide her smile and Helena's mouth falls open as she gasps._  
  
 _"Myka Bering, watch your language."  Helena squints her eyes in a playful glare before turning her attention toward the TV.  "And I should have known you'd take great pleasure in that."_  
  
 _"Yes," Myka laughs softly, "you should have known but also," Myka turns to Helena and sets her hand over Helena's on her lap, "you're my friend and I have your back."_  
  
 _Helena gives Myka the most sentimental watery-eyed look that Myka thinks she has ever seen.  It makes Myka laugh, just a little bit._  
  
 _"Don't get all hormonal on me."_  
  
 _Helena's mouth is gaping again as she swats Myka's arm playfully._  
  
 _"Stop."_  
  
 _"You hit like a girl."_  
  
***  
  
Tracy is finally out of the ICU.  Finally awake more often than she is asleep.  Finally able to move her own limbs and have control over the movement of her own limbs.  Finally able to breathe on her own, though the task is difficult.  And talk, though that is difficult for her, too.  
  
Her skin, where it has been grafted onto her body, is healing faster than expected.  Her eyes are not as damaged as originally projected, although she will need glasses and, because of her seizures, one eye is offset but will likely return to normal when her body adjusts to her new medication and the seizures are controlled.    
  
Myka sits with Tracy now, helps her sip some water through a straw and a styrofoam cup.  Brings her a Discman and several new CDs to listen to.  Sets a pile of teen magazines on the stand beside her bed.  
  
"Care of Helena Wells," Myka grins.  
  
She thinks Tracy attempts to roll her eyes but the right eye barely moves from its current position, the muscles too strained to be bothered with such tasks.  
  
When Tracy asks her, through labored breath and a voice that is hardly a voice at all, what she means by her eye being offset, Myka tells her, "One of your eyes is looking at me and the other is currently admiring the view outside of your window."  
  
Tracy's hoarse barely-there voice tells a now chuckling Myka to fuck off.  
  
"I see almost dying has made you rather vulgar," Myka teases.  
  
"Dad pissed?"    
  
Myka shrugs, "Not your concern, Trace."  
  
Tracy is quiet and her good eye floats around the room for a while before it lands back on Myka.  
  
"Wanna go home."    
  
"I know."  Myka lowers her head and reaches for Tracy's hand.  "Doctor said a few more weeks, to avoid unnecessary infection.  Get you into physical therapy."  
  
"Physical. Therapy?"  
  
"For your legs."  
  
"I can walk."  
  
Myka looks up at her sister again, arches a brow.  
  
"Have you tried?"  
  
Tracy shakes her head.  
  
"Move your legs."  
  
Tracy remains still.  Her eyes fall on her legs and Myka looks down at them, at her toes, too, and they just barely shift beneath the sheet.  Myka looks back to Tracy and is not surprised to meet bewildered eyes.  
  
"You've been laying down for almost three months, Trace."  Myka tilts her head.  "Your muscles are out of practice. "  
  
"I need a wheelchair?"  
  
"Just until your muscles get a workout."  
  
Tracy rests her head back against her pillow and sighs.  
  
"You just work on feeling better and coming home," Myka smiles.  "I've had to spend all summer yelling at my own reflection because you're not around bugging the hell out of me."  
  
Tracy laughs, shakes her head. "You loved it."  
  
"I wish I had loved it," Myka says quietly. "I really do.  But I missed you.  I actually _worried_ about you."  
  
Tracy's eyes fall on Myka now but she remains quiet.  
  
"Trace, I never once thought about not having you in my life until this summer and I spent my whole summer thinking about that.  Scared that I wouldn't have you around to annoy me anymore."  Myka wipes at her cheeks. "I love you, Trace, as much of a nuisance as you are.  And you can roll your crooked eye at me all you want just as long as you know that."  
  
Tracy _is_ rolling her crooked eye.  Or trying anyway. Myka is laughing.     
  
"You're my baby sister.  And I love you."  
  
Myka is in tears.  
  
"Hormones."  Tracy points up at Myka's tears.  "You're so. Emotional."  
  
Myka shakes her head and turns away smiling because it is so very Tracy to shy away from affection.  It is so very Bering, too.  
  
"Hey.  Crybaby."  Tracy smiles when Myka looks back to her.  "I love. You, too."  Tracy laughs softly and adds, "Don't care.  That you're a big.  Gay.  Homo.  Lesbian."  
  
"You couldn't work all of those words out in one single breath?"  Myka smirks.    
  
"Not as fun."  Tracy grins.  
  
"Well, thanks anyway," Myka says arching her brow, "I think."  
  
"Don't care.  If you kiss Abigail.  Don't care.  If you makeout.  With H."  Tracy continues then she struggles to swallow.  Myka brings her water cup to Tracy's mouth, holds it steady while Tracy sips from the straw.  "You're happy," she continually pauses for a breath, for her voice, "when you're with them."  Another pause and, "That's all.  I care about.  That you're happy.  Just like mom.  Thanksgiving.  Christmas."  
  
Myka looks away from her sister.  
  
"I would give everything.  To see mom always.  Looking that happy."  
  
Myka returns her gaze to her little sister.  
  
"Don't be.  Like mom, Ophie."  Tracy coughs and Myka gives her some more water.  
  
Myka smiles and nods and she gets it, she does.  But Myka doesn't even know where the mom she had before last year has even gone.  This new woman, that has taken her place and been through a hell much worse than the hell she was used to being in with her children, this new woman is determined and alive and strong-willed and on fire.    
  
And Tracy has missed almost all of that.  Doesn't remember screaming for their mother, doesn't remember their mother being there, by her side, for almost three months.  Doesn't know how much has changed, how much is going to change so soon.  
  
Myka continues to smile.  Nods a little more before holding tighter to Tracy's hand.  
  
"She does try, Trace.  She tries _very_ hard."  
  
***  
  
 _It's raining the day of Helena's nineteenth birthday and her mood seems to match the weather perfectly.  If Myka didn't know any better, she'd say Helena's mood was the cause for the rain to begin with.  But if Helena's mood had actually been causing the weather, Myka's more than certain this rain would actually be a hurricane._  
  
 _Helena begins to act the way she acted when Myka was twelve and Helena was seventeen, like they were in two entirely different universes.  Although, she doesn't disappear for six months this time, even with school an hour and a half away because Helena can't seem to want to stop coming home on the weekends._  
  
 _And Myka isn't exactly sure that she's the reason for that, although she does see a lot of Helena and Helena does ask to see a lot of her.  Myka thinks, more so, that Helena is homesick and, oddly for Helena, not exactly enjoying the way her social life has shifted at college._  
  
 _Myka remembers what Giselle had told her not even a year ago, about how Helena gets a lot of unwanted male attention.  And this, when Myka asks Helena about it, seems to be just a fraction of the problem._  
  
 _Helena tells her, "I don't always want to feel like I have to look behind me when I'm walking to a toilet but I do."_  
  
 _Myka asks her if she's made any good friends or anyone like her at school. Helena, being the little rain cloud that she is on this day, responds with, "Like me?  You mean a sorry excuse for an adult?  No, I don't suppose I have."_  
  
 _Myka rolls her eyes and this seems to offend Helena who mostly tells Myka she doesn't understand and she won't understand because she's young and also she's highly intelligent, so school will be enough of a challenge for her if she ends up not having a social life._  
  
 _"Thanks," is all Myka says to that and this too must offend Helena because whatever they had had planned for that day, for Helena's 19th birthday, it falls apart.  The plans become unplanned and their day together unravels just as quickly as the point of their conversation had._  
  
 _It isn't until later that night that Myka confronts Helena in her typical "I can't sleep until we talk this out" sort of way.  Because they both end up at the Lattimer residence for one reason or another and the complete silent treatment that a nineteen-year-old Helena is giving her is more unbearably juvenile than anything Myka could ever possibly throw back in Helena's direction._  
  
 _"You're upset."_  
  
 _They're on the porch.  Sitting in patio chairs._  
  
 _"I'm always upset."_  
  
 _Helena's arms are crossed.  Maybe because she's upset.  Maybe because it's a little cold out._  
  
 _"Remember when I did this last year at school?  Didn't really talk to you when I should have been talking only to you?"_  
  
 _"I remember that that was not at all like this."_  
  
 _Now Myka is sure she's crossing her arms because she's upset._  
  
 _"So what is this like?"_  
  
 _"I'm not talking to you about this because this is not something I_ can _talk to you about," Helena narrows her eyes on Myka.  "You're fourteen."_  
  
 _"Yeah, I've been fourteen for half a year already and you've been fine talking to me up to this point.  Did I suddenly become less of your friend because you turned nineteen?"_  
  
 _Helena is quiet._  
  
 _"Maybe if I talk to you like every other fourteen year old that I know_ actually _talks, it would be easier for you to try not talking to me about all these things that are bothering you."_  
  
 _Helena says nothing.  Myka sits up straight._  
  
 _"Like how Ms. Calder is super hot and all," Myka starts, "but I don't know who she thinks she is, assigning us 100 pages to read over the weekend.  That's like literally impossible.  Doesn't she know I have a social schedule to keep up with?  Sales at the mall don't exactly last forever and Fall is upon us."_  
  
 _Helena uncrosses her arms and puts a hand to her forehead._  
  
 _"Oh and Amanda, I love her but she hits more home runs in the gossip world than she does on the softball field and don't tell anyone I told you this but I'm pretty sure Pete is going to break up with..."_  
  
 _"Okay, okay, stop!"  Helena is rolling her eyes so wildly that Myka smiles more of an accomplished smile than she had ever expected to smile in the wake of Helena's misery._  
  
 _"You see, Helena," Myka says, "I think you've got it pretty good.  With me, I mean."_  
  
 _"Sometimes it's hard to see it that way," Helena sighs._  
  
 _"Sometimes I look at you and I don't know why such a beautiful woman wants to spend any amount of time with me."_  
  
 _Helena's face is incredulous.  "Myka, you're very much my closest friend."_  
  
 _"As you are mine, so then I remind myself," Myka holds her hands out, palms up, "we didn't_ just _meet.  We've known each other for almost a decade, Helena.  We are the same two people we have always been.  We're just growing, both into our own and together. We're just getting older."_  
  
 _Helena arches a brow and Myka grins, looking away as she adds, "Some of us slightly faster than others."_  
  
 _Helena's mouth is gaping now but she does eventually laugh._  
  
 _"That's what I've been waiting all day to hear," Myka says._  
  
 _Helena shakes her head and says, "It's like what you once told me, Myka," Helena sighs, "sometimes the age difference is like nothing at all.  And other times..."_  
  
 _"It's like a million years,"  Myka finishes nodding._  
  
 _"Yes." Helena turns to look away.  "Exactly."_  
  
 _"And today it is like what?"_  
  
 _Helena turns back to Myka. "One hundred million years, Myka.  Between fourteen and nineteen."  Myka nods at the thought of it for just a moment.  "But only when I think about it too long because you are_ clearly _not normal."_  
  
 _Myka's turn to eye Helena, who then smirks at her._  
  
 _"For a fourteen year old, I mean," Helena recovers quickly. "Of course."_  
  
 _"And here we are, Helena, full circle."  Myka grins.  "You, newly nineteen and hormonally devastated.  Quoting me, fourteen and deliriously brilliant, as a means of explaining to me, the deliriously brilliant, why you, ever the hormonally devastated nineteen year old, feel so far away from me, the ridiculously deliriously brilliant almost fifteen year old."_  
  
 _"What have you even just said to me?"  Helena is giving Myka_ the look _but she is also on the verge of amused._  
  
 _"You're using my advice to you to explain why I'm too young to offer you advice," Myka reiterates._  
  
 _"Jesus Christ, you're right," is Helena's only response to that._  
  
 _"Isn't it ironic?"  Myka asks.  "Don't you think, Helena?"_

 _Helena rolls her eyes._  
  
 _"A little too, ironic."_  
  
 _"Yeah," Myka grins, pauses, nods, "I really do think."_  
  
 _It continues to rain._  
  
 _Myka tells Helena, after they've finished laughing at themselves, that a birthday is kind of like a wedding day._  
  
 _Better in some ways._  
  
***  
  
Tracy's doctors don't know what to make of her excellent progress other than to say she's young and she's very determined to no longer be in the hospital.  Because her physical therapist has only spent a week with her and Tracy can mostly walk on her own a short distance with a walker.  She's just having trouble bending her hips and her knees at once.  And her back, along her spine, isn't as compliant as the rest of her.  
  
But Myka's mother and Ms. Jane have been moving and exercising Tracy's legs, even as she sleeps, ever since the skin there healed enough for them to do so.    
  
Myka, for her part, takes Tracy out into the garden for what has become their weekend thing to do together.  And they sit there for an hour or more, teasing, joking, laughing, and talking about everything.  All the things they never thought they had in common, all the things they still don't have in common.  
  
This particular weekend, Tracy is tired and refuses to walk to the garden, so Myka demands she get into her wheel chair and she wheels her out there herself.    
  
She finds a bench and parks Tracy in front of it, sits down to face her little sister.    
  
"Stop being moody."  
  
"I'm not being moody," Tracy says looking absolutely moody.  "I'm just tired of being here.  I want my room and my bed."  
  
"Well," Myka smiles tilting her head, "I may have overheard your doctor talking to Mom about sending you home next weekend."  
  
Tracy sits up.  "Do not play with my emotions, Ophelia."  
  
Myka shrugs, "I might have also begged Mom to let me tell you."  
  
"Really?  Why?"  Tracy furrows her brows.  "Is this a joke?  Are you messing with me?"  
  
"No," Myka smiles shaking her head, "Trace, I would not joke about you leaving this place.  Mom is already moving her crap out of the hotel."  
  
Tracy looks away, somewhere across the garden, and is quiet for several minutes.  Myka does not interrupt until Tracy turns back to face her and sighs.    
  
"I thought you'd be happier about it than this," Myka says arching a brow.  
  
"I'm happy to not be here." Tracy nods.  "But I haven't seen Dad.  He hasn't come to see me. So I'm not all that happy about seeing him."  
  
"Tracy," Myka starts, lowering her eyes to her own hands in her lap, "Dad is not in a good place right now."  
  
"Has he ever been in a good place?"  Tracy asks.  "Like ever?"  
  
Myka nods and rolls her eyes, "No but now he's _really_ not in a good place.  And Mom, I know she hasn't told you but she's prepared to ask him for a divorce."  
  
"What?"  
  
"Yeah," Myka sighs.  
  
"She can't do that."  
  
"Why not?"  Myka knows she sounds appalled, defensive.  Wounded?  
  
"What is he going to do?"  Tracy asks.  "Where is he going to go?"  
  
"Hell if I know or if I care, Tracy."  
  
Tracy's face reads to her confusion, her own appall.    
  
"He's our dad."  Tracy says it quietly.  Myka knows she wants to stop saying it as soon as she starts saying it because when she finishes saying it, she looks away.  
  
"He's not my dad."  Myka shakes her head.  "Biologically maybe but he stopped being my dad a long time ago, Tracy.  And I know you have a different opinion of him because you've always been his baby girl but I can't remember ever being anything to him."  
  
Tracy lowers her head into her palm.  
  
"You said it yourself," Myka sighs and touches her hand to her sister's knee.  "He hasn't even come to see you.  He hasn't spent one day up here.  He just locks himself in his office and bitches about the bills and drinks until he passes out.  He's not _our_ dad."  
  
Tracy wipes at her face now.  
  
"Now who is getting emotional," Myka teases and Tracy sits up straight, with the hint of a smile on her face.    
  
"Shut up," she pushes Myka's hand from her knee.  "Your hormones are rubbing off on me.  With all your crybaby hugging."  
  
"Well here, have some more."  Myka laughs and reaches forward to hug Tracy.    
  
They're still laughing when Helena appears beside them with a smile, an arched brow and a drink carrier occupied by three cups.  
  
"Hey," Myka smiles, reaching out to Helena.  
  
"Speaking of hormones," Tracy says allowing her voice to trail off.  
  
"Hi." Helena smiles brightly at Myka and turns her smile on Tracy, kisses the youngest girl's forehead before sitting on the bench beside Myka.  Myka wraps her reaching arm around Helena's waist and tugs her closer.  "You two might be having too much fun."  Helena eyes them both suspiciously while pulling a cup from the drink carrier and handing it to Tracy.    
  
"Thank you, Sister In-Law."  Tracy grins when Helena gives her a look.  
  
"Stop," she says softly.  
  
"You're the one wearing the ring," Tracy teases, eyeing Helena's left hand as she pulls another cup from the carrier and hands it to Myka.  
  
"Only because this one closed my other hand in a door," Helena says pointing an accusing finger toward Myka.  
  
"That was two months ago," Myka protests. "Your hand has healed.  I apologized.  Several times."  
  
Helena side-eyes Myka.  "Yes, I suppose you did."  
  
"And thank you."  Myka kisses the older girl's cheek.  "For my drink."  
  
"I rest my case,"  Tracy mumbles taking a sip from her cup.  
  
Helena turns to Myka now and the look Myka gets from her is threatening but mostly playful.  
  
"Stop encouraging her," Helena says.  
  
Myka winks at Helena and that beautiful smile reappears between flushed cheeks.  
  
"I don't need encouraging," Tracy smiles, "My eye might have a mind of its own right now but I'm not _blind_ , H."  
  
Helena makes no protests this time. She simply turns back to Myka as Myka slips her hand into Helena's and laces their fingers together.    
  
"Is this going to be a regular thing now?"  Helena questions with a growing smile, she sips from her cup.  "Me versus the two of you."  
  
"I said nothing."  Myka smiles.    
  
When Helena rolls her eyes and looks to Myka again Myka steals a kiss from her and laughs at the glare she receives in response, and the sound of her little sister's groaning.  
  
"Stop," Helena warns again.  
  
But Myka doesn't stop laughing until Helena's lips find hers again.      
  
***  
  
 _Thanksgiving is weird._  
  
 _Because the three Lattimers, three Berings, and one Wells are seated around the dining table at the Lattimer house and the dining room is filled with talking and laughter, joking and teasing._  
  
 _There are smiles and a few tears but mostly smiles and laughs that induce tears._  
  
 _Pete is teasing Tracy like she is as much his little sister as she is Myka's and in a way she is because Pete has been there from the beginning of her time, just as Myka has.  Helena and Jeannie are signing to one another and giggling, then laughing about something Myka cannot decipher because her knowledge of sign language is nowhere near as proficient or as speedy as Helena's and Jeannie's._  
  
 _Myka's mother and Ms. Jane are in a world of their own at the opposite end of the table from Myka.  And Myka's mother looks happier than she has ever seen her but Myka isn't sure if it is what Ms. Jane says to her when she leans in closer to her, or if it is the wine in her glass which is no longer full._  
  
 _She doesn't think this thought for very long before a hand is over her arm and she turns to Helena, who smiles at her and says softly, just barely, through all the sound, "Hey."_  
  
 _To that, Myka responds, "Hello."_  
  
 _"Are you okay?"_  
  
 _Myka nods and smiles saying, "Perfect."_  
  
 _Now, from the other side of her, a hand or an elbow or maybe even a dinner roll (Myka thinks, very likely a dinner roll) pokes at her arm.  She turns to meet Pete whose brow is arched high, who gestures with his head across the table to where Ms. Jane is wiping tears from Myka's mother's face._  
  
 _It is a weird thing that touch between their mothers because they know they used to be close but it's been years since they've been close.  Too long for Pete and Myka to remember how close.  Maybe not too long for Jeannie because she pays them no attention._  
  
 _Helena regains Myka's attention with a tight squeeze on her arm and the older girl signs to Myka, something along the lines of, "Here with you, I am happy."_  
  
 _It makes Myka smile. Like_ really _smile.  And it's that crooked smile she smiles that makes Helena smile and blush and turn slightly away from Myka but she doesn’t let go._  
  
 _Pete says, "You're staring, Mom."  And Myka looks up to see that, yes, Ms. Jane_ is _staring. At her.  And Helena.  "Like Myka's taken something from you that you really want back."_  
  
 _Ms. Jane blinks several times.  Smiles at Pete._  
  
 _"I wish you were this observant in school, Pete."  Ms. Jane looks back to Myka and Helena. Adds, "I was just thinking about how much Myka and Helena remind me of Jeannie and me in high school."_  
  
 _"I'm sorry but what?"  Pete asks.  He isn't the only one at the table who gives Ms. Jane this same look of confusion._  
  
 _"And maybe Myka does have something that I want back," Ms. Jane says and her look is wistful.  She's thoughtful and content as she looks to Myka’s mother for only a second._  
  
 _Myka's mother smiles, rolls her eyes up to the ceiling.  Takes another sip of her wine._  
  
 _Something really weird and indescribable does something equally weird and indescribable to Myka's existence because nothing about this moment feels real or as though it is actually happening._  
  
 _Myka knows those looks as they would appear on other people's faces.  The faces of strangers or of not-quite-strangers like Helena and Giselle.  Myka also knows Ms. Jane knows the nature of her friendship, her_ very close friendship _, with Helena.  Or she thinks she does.  She's sure she does?  She must.  Of course._  
  
 _So why would she compare the two?_  
  
 _"Are you trying to tell us something, about you and the ladies, Mom," Pete says breaking the sudden silence that has fallen over everyone.  "Because that would explain quite a few questions I have been meaning to ask you about the past three years of non-existent dates you've been on."_  
  
 _Myka can see Helena signing quietly to Jeannie beside her.  Myka looks just in time to see Jeannie roll her eyes.  She stands and grabs her plate and announces aloud her intention to take her dinner into the game room and suggests everyone follow if they value their resolve.  She waits for no one else but she does also say aloud, as she's leaving the room, "Ask her why Dad used to call me Jeannie Jr."_  
  
 _Pete's mouth falls wide open.  Myka's brows fly to the sky._  
  
 _"What does that mean?"  Tracy asks._  
  
 _Helena is covering a smile with her free hand. The hand closest to Myka has wound its fingers between hers._  
  
 _Ms. Jane moves her hand to wave off both of her children.  To Jeannie, her daughter, she says, "Well, I wouldn't name my first born daughter after just anyone.  Your father respected that."  And to Pete she says, “I’ll tell you when you’re older and hopefully more mature."_  
  
 _"Low blow, Mom."  Pete is shaking his head._  
  
 _Myka almost chokes on her own attempts at breathing.  Helena is patting her back and Pete hands her a glass of water, his eyes never moving from his mother._  
  
 _"Jane," Myka's mother is shaking her head._  
  
 _Ms. Jane laughs and sets her hand gently over the back of Myka's mother's hand and this is the thing that moves them.  The kids.  That physically moves them.  Out of their seats.  As hastily as possible._  
  
 _"I'm out."  Pete declares standing._  
  
 _Myka is already on her feet with her plate, with Helena's plate.  And Helena with their drinks, their silverware._  
  
 _"What is happening?"  Tracy asks, entirely clueless.  Pete grabs her plate, gestures for her to grab her drink._  
  
 _"What is happening, Kid, is a mass exodus of all Lattimer-Bering-Wells offspring to the Pete cave," he informs as they head for the hall that leads to the game room._   _"Because things are getting a little too hairy up in here."_  
  
 _Helena and Pete are gone, Tracy tailing behind.  Myka pauses in the hallway, peeks back into the dining room where neither Ms. Jane nor her own mother have turned away from each other or bothered to acknowledge the sudden quiet and emptiness of the room where they now sit alone._  
  
 _Ms. Jane is leaning into Myka’s mother.  Asking her if she remembers something that happened however long ago.  Her mother laughs behind tears and shakes her head._  
  
 _"I guess now we know where you get it from," says Tracy's voice, whispered from just behind Myka._  
  
 _Myka turns to look down at her younger sister.  Studies her expression for a moment.  Can't decide if she means to insult her or not, until Tracy pokes her with a bony finger and actually says, "I'm kidding, Ophelia."_  
  
 _"I've never seen Mom this happy," Myka says turning back to the display in the dining room.  To where Ms. Jane’s hand still rests over the back of her mother's hand._  
  
 _"Yeah," Tracy says shaking her head, "it's kind of creepy."_  
  
 _"Hey you two," Helena's voice whispers from further down the hall.  They turn to the older girl at once who gestures toward the game room with a bit of a reprimanding look about her when she also says, "Let them be."_  
  
 _Tracy rolls her eyes at her before she takes the plates out of Myka's hands and heads to the game room.  Helena comes to stand by Myka's side.  Leans into her to also peer into the dining room.  Sets a hand over Myka's shoulder and let's her arm drape across Myka's back._  
  
 _"I don't know what to do with this."  Myka whispers.  "If_ this _is actually a thing that is happening right now.  Why?  Why now?  Why ever?"_  
  
 _Helena shakes her head and meets Myka's gaze.  Helena's brows turn inward and upward, in response to Myka's no-doubt worried expression and her smile is empathetic and sweet and thoughtful._  
  
 _"You don't have to do anything at all, Myka."  Helena kisses her forehead.  "Except come with me to watch the absurdity that is Peter stuffing as many dinner rolls as can fit into his mouth."_  
  
 _“Not again,” Myka laughs, shaking her head._  
  
 _Myka gives one last glance to where Ms. Jane sits with her mother and where Ms. Jane sets a kiss on her mother's forehead, just before Myka turns back into the hallway, turns to Helena, and allows herself to be pulled away from this space in time in which absolutely nothing about her life makes any sense._  
  
***  
  
Myka is doing something she never in her life thought she'd be doing.    
  
Cleaning Tracy's room.    
  
And not just cleaning but deep cleaning, throwing away things that probably should have been thrown away a long time ago. Collecting cups and bowls and dishes that have not been seen in ages.  
  
Myka's dad won't even let her leave the kitchen with with food half the time, she's not sure how Tracy has managed to store up her own collection of dish ware.  
  
Myka cleans those dishes and all the dishes her dad has left behind in his time at the apartment alone in the past week.  She's been stopping by regularly when he isn't home for that purpose.  But she isn't doing it for him.  She is doing it for her mother.  
  
So Myka cleans the kitchen as she cleans Tracy's dishes, then she returns to her sister's room and rearranges everything so that it is more fresh and new.  She does Tracy's laundry, washes her bed sheets, even moves her bed closer to the window, closer to the sunlight.  
  
Myka sweeps the hard wood floors, vacuums the rug, wipes down every bit of dust on every surface she can find.  And when she is done, Tracy's room almost looks  better than Myka's room.  Because Tracy has so many things to decorate her room: pictures and colorful stuffed animals, posters of boy bands, far more toys than Myka had ever accumulated in her fifteen years of life.  
  
When she's done, Myka showers.  She cleans the bathroom.  She tidies up her own room, untouched for most of summer.  
  
Myka sits on her bed to rest for a second.  To take a quick break.    
  
Closes her eyes.  
  
***  
  
 _Myka doesn't feel like running away anymore._  
  
 _From this feeling inside of her that moves from a twist in her belly to an ache in her heart.  An ache that comes with some new strength she had never and could never anticipate.  Because how could she possibly feel anything more for Helena than what she had already felt?  How could her love for Helena possibly expand to anything greater than what it already had been?_  
  
 _When Helena is far away from her, as she is on the drive that their families take in three separate cars, up to this cabin, in the snow, in these woods, Myka’s heart aches._  
  
 _When Helena is right next to her, as she has been every night, in this room they share with Tracy and Jeannie, in the top bunk of a bed that Helena climbs into beside her, Myka’s heart aches._  
  
 _And Helena, who usually looks for all of the world like she is ready to runaway from all of this, these feelings, this closeness, and Myka herself, has not looked this peaceful, as peaceful as she now appears to be with Myka, since the weeks before her nineteenth birthday._  
  
 _She doesn't seem scared or anxious or full of guilt._  
  
 _She just looks happy to be where she is currently.  With Myka._  
  
 _Myka can see that she looks happy, even in the dark, with the lights out and Tracy snoring in the bunk below them.  As Myka’s eyes adjust against the darkness, she can see the smile that transforms into a grin that Helena bites down on, as they lay quietly across from one another for the third night in a row._  
  
 _“What does it feel like now?”  Myka asks, whispering.  She touches a finger to Helena’s nose and that grin disappears.  “A million years or nothing at all?”_  
  
 _Helena’s eyes focus on Myka’s eyes, moving from one to the other.  Quietly.  Thoughtfully.  Until Helena breathes in and Helena exhales._  
  
 _“It feels,” Helena starts, her voice also a whisper, “perfect."_  
  
***  
  
"Myka!"  
  
Myka wakes up with a start, ready to fight whatever, whoever is falling over her, until arms embrace her and too-wet lips are on her cheek.  
  
"Oh god, it's happening."  Myka squirms beneath Tracy's embrace.  "It's happening!  The end is nye!"  
  
Myka carefully pushes Tracy off of her and the girl almost goes too far, unable to move her legs quick enough to steady herself. My catches Tracy's hand before she can lean too far in any direction and steadies her.  
  
"You're like a Weeble,"  Myka teases.  
  
"Except Weebles wobble but they don't fall down," Tracy jokes.  "My ass will definitely fall."  
  
Myka pulls her sister into a hug.  "Stop swearing," she whispers.    
  
"Never," Tracy whispers back.  Myka smiles when they pull apart.  
  
"Heathen," Myka tells her.  
  
" _Lesbian_ ," Tracy counters.  
  
"I don't find that insulting," Myka shrugs.  
  
"And I'm insulted by heathen?"  Tracy laughs and Myka wraps her arm around Tracy's shoulder.    
  
"I suppose not," Myka sighs.  "Have you seen your room?"  
  
"Uh yeah," Tracy says peeling herself away from Myka and moving awkwardly on her feet to Myka's desk.  "I told Mom to buy me a lock as soon as humanly possible."  Tracy fiddles with some pens on the desk, thumbs through a stack of papers.  
  
"Maybe I should ask for the same," Myka says pointing a finger in her direction and sitting back on her own bed.  Tracy looks up and grins at her.    
  
"Thanks for cleaning my room," Tracy says finally.  
  
"You're welcome," Myka nods.  "I have something for you, too."  
  
Myka goes into her closet to retrieves her cell phone, comes back out to where Tracy stands and hands it to her.    
  
"Seriously?  Isn't this your Helena phone?"  
  
"Why does everybody call it that?"  Myka looks away raising her hands in the air.  
  
"Really, Ophelia?" Tracy gives Myka her best disbelieving face.  
  
"Mom has the number but dad cannot know you have it," Myka explains.  "He'll have a conniption.  Keep it on silent when he's home."  
  
"What about you?"  
  
Myka reaches into her back pocket and pulls out Helena's most recently discarded phone.  "More hand-me-downs."  
  
"Ophie."  Tracy straightens her face.  "I think you have a Sugar Mama."  
  
"No, I do not and stop _calling_ me that." Myka turns on her heels to her bedroom door, leaving Tracy to follow on her own.    
  
"But Ophie!  I love you!  Sister?  Don't leave me.  I thought you missed me!"  
  
Myka rolls her eyes as her sister falls into her bed cackling behind her.  
  
***  
  
 _“Guilt,” is what Helena tells Myka when she asks why Helena’s father suddenly decided to rent a cabin in the woods for everyone to stay at over Christmas break._  
  
 _Myka does not ask for an elaboration because she’s pretty sure she understands what that means but she is thankful when Helena provides an explanation anyway._  
  
 _“He missed my graduation because his flight home was delayed,” Helena sighs.  “He missed my first day of college for supposedly the same reason.  Thanksgiving too, even though he says that one doesn’t count since we don't exactly celebrate it.”_  
  
 _“Supposedly?”_  
  
 _Helena turns to look back at Myka, where they sit barely fitting next to one another in a bay window, staring outside at the cold and the snow as more of it falls to the ground._  
  
 _“I have my suspicions."  Helena nods.  “That he’s just avoiding telling me the nature of his relationship with a particular monster of a woman that I had it out with over the summer.”_  
  
 _Myka’s eyes are wide._  
  
 _“Why did you have it out with her?  Who is she?”_  
  
 _Helena shakes her head, “Someone from my father’s past.  An old girlfriend, I guess.  She comes around when she needs to.  When her bills have gone unpaid. He can't seem to let her go.”_  
  
 _Myka is quiet as Helena looks away to stare out of the window and when Helena is this quiet for several minutes after that, Myka sets her hand over Helena’s hand, over the blanket that covers their legs._  
  
 _“So yes, guilt I think would be the main reason,” Helena concludes, still looking outside of the window but turning her palm up to allow Myka’s fingers to lace with hers.  “Not that one year of him putting effort into us spending a holiday together really makes up for all of that.”_  
  
 _“Is that why you’ve been avoiding him?”  Myka asks and Helena turns to her then._  
  
 _“I’m not avoiding him, Myka.”  Helena is immediately defensive.  “And if I were, he’d deserve every minute of it.”  Myka gives Helena a look and a soft smile, Helena sighs.  “Can we change the subject?”_  
  
 _“Sure.”  Myka smiles, reaching up to push Helena’s hair from over her shoulder, letting it fall onto her back.  “You need a haircut.”_  
  
 _Helena rolls her eyes and laughs, “Nice subject change?”_  
  
 _“It made you laugh.”  Myka grins._  
  
 _“Clever,” Helena hums._  
  
 _They are too quiet for too long when Myka decides to set a kiss to Helena’s cheek.  When Helena’s cheeks flush, when her smile widens and her brows slowly rise on her forehead._  
  
 _“What was that?”  Helena asks._  
  
 _“I know this doesn’t fix things, for you and your dad,” Myka starts, “but you should know that this is the best Christmas I have ever had in my whole entire life and it's only Christmas Eve.”_  
  
 _“Myka,” Helena laughs softly._  
  
 _“I’m serious.”  Helena’s smile softens.  “I kind of want to spend all of my Christmases like this, you know?  Sharing a four bedroom cabin with seven other people, freezing my butt off in the snow,” Helena’s laugh is soft at Myka’s playful admission, “doing absolutely nothing with my very best friend sitting beside me...”_  
  
 _Myka lets her voice trail off as she feels herself falling closer to Helena, or Helena moving closer into her, she isn’t quite sure.  But they are inches away from one another and Myka can feel the heat of Helena’ s breath against her lips when Pete’s voice is echoing around a corner._  
  
 _Helena turns away from her and Myka sighs._  
  
 _“Who wants hot choc-o…” Pete stops in the doorway, arches a brow, “…my bad?”_  
  
 _“Pete,” Myka says with a scolding voice._  
  
 _“Uh, Moms are making hot chocolate for everyone,” he says pointing back toward the kitchen.  "Anyone want to partake?"_  
  
 _“You know what,” Helena smiles removing herself from beneath the blanket and climbing over Myka to stand, “I think I will help them.”_  
  
 _Myka arches her brow when Helena comes face-to-face with her amidst her departure._  
  
 _“Be good,” Helena says kissing Myka’s forehead._  
  
 _She is gone before Myka can respond._  
  
 _“Pete.”  Myka glares._  
  
 _He shakes his head and throws his hands in the air, “Total accident this time.”_  
  
 _Myka rolls her eyes._  
  
***  
  
Pete and Myka are at the movie theatre a week later when Myka misses the phone call that she doesn't know she's received until an hour and a half later when the movie has ended.  
  
Pete is watching, as she listens to the voicemail her sister has left, when he says, "Mykes, you're scaring me.  You just turned ghost white.  Not that you weren't already pa..."  
  
"It's Tracy," Myka says holding the phone to Pete's ear.  "We have to go now."  
  
Myka doesn't need to listen to the recording again.  It's lodged in her memory.  It plays over in her mind as Pete speeds back to her apartment downtown.  
  
"Myka.  Answer your phone.  Do not come home.  Dad found my phone."  Tracy is whispering, crying.  "He's tearing your room apart.  He's wasted.  Please, don't come home tonight."  
  
There's muffled conversation.  Then Tracy's voice spewing a litany of swears at their father. There's a loud slap, Tracy cries, followed by a loud thump.  Tracy's next cry is excruciating.  Like that cry in the hospital.  
  
Myka can't breathe.  Myka is seething.  Her vision is tunneling.  She balls her fists.    
  
The drive is only a couple minutes.    
  
It feels like forever.  
  
***  
  
 _It's New Years Eve and Helena and Myka are assigned to kitchen duty, to help make dinner and appetizers for the evening.  They are assigned there right alongside Ms. Jane and Myka’s mother and it is almost torturous, Myka thinks, but also mesmerizing to see those two together, like this, in this space that seems to work some sort of magic on the apprehensive.  Like Helena.  Like Myka’s mother._  
  
 _Because Myka’s mother, for the first time ever, kinda-sorta acknowledges what is happening in this strange universe that Myka is still trying to convince herself is real._  
  
 _They’re bickering over the ingredients of a casserole when Ms. Jane concedes to Myka’s mother and says, “Okay, you win Chef,” followed by, “as long as you’re happy with this.  And you had better be happy with this.”_  
  
 _To which Myka’s mother says, “I am happy,” eventually followed by, “with this.”_  
  
 _But Myka’s mother isn’t looking at the casserole.  Myka’s mother is looking at Ms. Jane._  
  
 _Myka turns suddenly away to look at Helena who is smiling and looks to Myka.  Her eyes are wide and full of delight and amusement.  The face she’s making is expectant.  Like she’s_ expecting _Myka to say something to her about what is happening just behind them on the other side of the kitchen._  
  
 _Myka shakes her head._  
  
 _“No,” she whispers._  
  
 _“It’s adorable.”  Helena’s smile grows.  “You and Pete becoming step-siblings."_  
  
 _“Stop.”  Myka demands._

_"You'll have to change my nickname to Future Mrs. Lattimer-Bering-Wells."_

_"I will not hurt you, Helena Wells, but I will hug you until you can no longer stand to be hugged_ _if you do not stop."_  
  
 _Helena laughs and shakes her head.  She dips her finger into a bag of flour then reaches up to touch the tip of Myka’s nose._  
  
 _“Never," Helena whispers into Myka's ear._  
  
 _Myka dips her finger into the flour, touches Helena’s cheek and then the other._  
  
 _“You’re lucky,” Myka says softly, turning back to rolling cookie dough on the counter in front of her._  
  
 _“And why am I lucky?”  Helena asks and Myka looks back to Helena whose smile fades away, who watches her anxiously for only a moment before a hint of that smile returns._  
  
 _Myka doesn’t know how close or how far apart their lips actually are when Ms. Jane walks by to lean into the space between them and says, "Save it for the ball drop, ladies.”_  
  
 _She only knows that by the time she opens her eyes to Helena again, the older girl has turned away from her and is trying very hard not to smile._  
  
***  
  
"He's not here."  Pete says after they've searched downstairs, upstairs.  "Tracy?"  
  
"I can't find her."  
  
"Tracy!" Pete calls into the hallway.    
  
"Here."  Her sob is barely audible.  Myka makes it to her room before Pete, throws her door open.  
  
"Trace?"  
  
"Under the bed."  She calls again and Pete and Myka are both falling to their knees, pulling Tracy out from under her bed.    
  
"Jesus Christ, Tracy."  Myka is pulling her sister into her arms and when she pulls away, she sees the hand-shaped welt on her face.  "I'm going to kill him."  
  
"I said _don't_ come home, Ophelia.  Didn't you hear me?"  And Tracy is hitting at Myka's shoulder, crying, turning more red.  
  
"Hey, it's okay."  Pete is holds Tracy's arms into her, pulls her into _him_.  
  
"Where did he go?"  
  
"I don't know."  Tracy is shaking her head.  "I don't know, he just left."  
  
"Pete."  Myka keeps her voice steady.  "Wait here."  
  
"Where do you think you're going?"  
  
"Stay here."  Myka is on her feet quick.  She feels Pete reach out for her but she is out of the door before he can stop her.  
  
She's out of the apartment.  Down the stairs. Standing outside the office door at the back of the book store.    
  
She bangs on it with her open palm.  Then her fist.  Both of her fists.  Kicks at the door.  
  
"I know you're in there!   You drunken bastard!  You have nothing better to do than hit on little girls who can't defend themselves?"    
  
Tears are burning in her eyes. Her knuckles sore against the heavy wooden door.  
  
Myka eyes her surroundings, spots the fire extinguisher along the wall beneath the stairs.  She yanks it from it's hold and steps back to the door.  
  
It takes one solid hit of the thing against the doorknob to knock it off.  She kicks the door open but the office is empty.  
  
Myka screams her frustrations through gritted teeth.  Throws the fire extinguisher across the room.  A shelf crashes, things crash to the floor and shatter.  
  
She wants to do _more_ damage than this.  
  
"Hey!"  
  
Myka turns.  Her face wet.  Her eyes red and narrowing. Her brows furrowed.  She breathes in deeply, exhales.  Balls her fists.  Darkness tunnels her vision.  Only a sliver of light remains.  
  
Her father occupying that space.  
  
***  
  
 _Myka finds Helena asleep in Tracy’s bunk in their shared bedroom just forty minutes before midnight._  
  
 _She sits beside the older girl, runs the back of her fingers over Helena’s warm cheek before threading those fingers through Helena’s hair._  
  
 _“Myka,” Helena speaks softly._  
  
 _"Rise and shine."_  
  
 _Helena scrunches her nose and says, “Ten more minutes."_  
  
 _Myka’s laugh is soft, she leans in close when she tells her, "You're going to sleep right through the new year.”_  
  
 _“You’re not helping," Helena hums her delight at the feel of Myka's hand still in her hair and sighs her disappointment when Myka removes her hand from that hair._  
  
 _“Everyone else is in the living room already.”  Myka tugs at Helena’s arm.  “Mom is letting us have champagne."_  
  
 _Helena sits up now and is face-to-face with Myka.  Her cheeks are red with the warmth.  Myka resists the urge to touch them._  
  
 _“Count me in.”  Helena’s sleepy smile grows and she is beautiful, always is but Myka thinks especially now, she is the most gorgeous she has ever been._  
  
 _Myka does not resist the urge to kiss her._  
  
 _But Myka’s eyes open to Helena’s finger against her lips and the smile that Helena almost smiles but does not smile when she says, "You heard Ms. Jane."_  
  
 _Myka narrows her eyes at Helena.  Kisses her finger instead._  
  
***  
  
Darkness is all she sees.  Pain is all she feels.    
  
It's over her eye, burning at her lips, swelling in her cheeks.  In her abdomen, the back of her head, her back too, she thinks.  
  
She can't breathe.  Oxygen won't fill into her lungs.  Her lungs won't expand. Her chest feels heavy.  The pressure is unbearable.  
  
Her ears are ringing but she hears muffled screams, yells, the pressure on her chest is suddenly gone.  There's a crash and more yelling.    
  
There are faint sirens in the distance.  Soft, cool hands palm her cheeks, lift her head, cradle her.  
  
She turns into the embrace.  She takes in a deep breath.  The first deep breath she has been able to breathe in minutes.    
  
The scent is familiar.  It's soothing.  She curls further into the embrace.  Those arms pull her further into them.  This touch is familiar, too, but distantly so.  
  
It isn't Helena.  That isn't Helena's scent.  That isn't Helena's touch.    
  
"Ophelia," comes the whisper.  The voice is familiar.  The cadence, the worry, the absolute sorrow and guilt, all new.    
  
"Mama," Myka cries.  
  
"You're okay, I have you.  It's over.  It's all over."  
  
Myka feels herself rocking in these arms.  Her mother's arms.  Arms she hasn't been rocked in since she was a toddler, maybe an infant.  
  
The motion is so soothing.  Myka cannot keep her eyes open, if they even are open.  She closes them, it's just as dark as before.  She relaxes into the embrace.  Tries to return the hold.  Her arms refuse to comply.    
  
"It's okay, Baby, just stay still."    
  
"Okay," Myka whispers, breathes out, "I'll be here."  
  
Her mother's laugh is soft.  Her face, when she presses it to Myka's, is tear-soaked.    
  
"I'll be right here with you."  
  
Again the voice is her mother's. The sentiment is estranged.    
  
"Okay," Myka curls even closer to her mother.    
  
Darkness is all she sees.  She doesn't feel the pain.  
  
***  
  
 _It is ten minutes to midnight when Myka and Helena settle into a lounge chair that is not quite built for two people, beneath a blanket, close to the fireplace. To fit, Helena drapes one leg over Myka’s.  Myka wraps her arm around Helena’s back and turns slightly into the older girl._  
  
 _Myka’s mother walks into the living room and sets two glasses of champagne on a side table beside Helena just before she leans in to kiss Myka’s cheek and then Helena’s forehead.  Just before she walks across the living room to sit beside Ms. Jane on the couch just opposite from where Helena and Myka sit._  
  
 _Pete sits on the other side of his mother, shooting her periodic glances.  Occasionally nudging her when she gets too close to Myka's mother._  
  
 _In another lounge chair, Helena’s father is drinking a glass of something that no one else was not offered.  Whiskey maybe.  His gaze is focused on the fire that burns before them.  Jeannie and Tracy are sprawled out on their bellies, looking at teen magazines on the rug in the middle of the living area.  Tracy will ask Jeannie how to sign a certain word and Jeannie will show Tracy how to shape her fingers or move her hands the appropriate way._  
  
 _All of it is surreal to Myka.  The least surreal of it all, in fact, is having Helena beside her._  
  
 _Right on cue with Myka’s thoughts, Helena rests her head against Myka’s shoulder._  
  
 _Myka tightens her grasp around Helena and kisses the hair at the top of her head._  
  
 _“Seven more minutes,” Tracy says and also signs._  
  
***  
  
When Myka rolls over, onto her other side in what she suspects is a bed, she rolls into something.  Or someone.  
  
She opens her eyes only a little.  It's dark.  
  
That someone next to her moves, rolls over, too.  Into Myka.  
  
A hand finds Myka's face.  Palms it.  Pinches her nose lightly.  Tugs at her bottom lip.  Pats her cheek.  
  
"Ophie?"  
  
"Emmanuelle."  Myka tries to groan.  Can't really find the motivation to make that much more noise than she already has by calling her sister out.  
  
"You're awake," Tracy's voice says softly.  "Go back to sleep."  
  
Myka's eyes are slowly adjusting.  She can barely see but can definitely hear and feel as Tracy sits up on her elbow beside her.  She grabs Myka's arm, lifts it, lays down against Myka, lowers that arm over her.  
  
"What are you," Myka starts but an arm or an elbow from her little sister presses too far into a rib and she winces, gasps at the pain.  
  
"Sorry, sorry."  Tracy adjusts herself so that there is less pressure against Myka's ribcage.    
  
Myka is thankful but again, no energy to say anything.    
  
Tracy tells her, "Forgot about your ribs."  
  
"What," Myka yawns.  
  
"Dad," is all the explanation Tracy gives.  
  
"Time?"  
  
"It's late," Tracy says.  She throws her arm across Myka's abdomen but sets it down gently, cuddles closer.  
  
"Hormones."  Myka laughs softly.  That makes her ribs hurt.  "Ow."  
  
"Between Mom and Jane and H, I couldn't get rid of all these emotional cry baby hormones even if I showered for a week straight."  
  
Myka laughs again.  That hurts, too.  
  
"Where are..."  
  
"Lattimer house.  Now please stop talking, Ophie," Tracy yawns, "some of us are trying to sleep.  We can talk about your complete disregard of my voice mail instructions _tomorrow_."  
  
It's fine.  Because Myka is exhausted though she doesn't know why.  And Myka is in pain, though she definitely knows why.    
  
She can only somewhat recall being in an ambulance with her mother crying over her, being at the hospital in a mostly sleepy daze.  Seeing Abigail and Mrs. Cho there, seeing Helena at some point, too.  
  
The car ride home is a bit more foggy.  How she ended up in bed is a memory her mind has decided not to hold on to.  
  
She lets her eyes close.  Stops trying to recall anything.  Exhales.    
  
"Night," she says softly, tightening her hold on Tracy.    
  
"Goodnight, Sister."  
  
***  
  
 _Two minutes before midnight, Myka’s stomach is unsettled.  Tracy is already counting down every second of every minute, staring at her tiny glass of champagne, currently being overseen by Myka’s mother, with great anticipation._  
  
 _Pete has collected every noise maker in the house that hasn’t already been claimed and shoved them all between his lips._  
  
 _Helena’s father, Myka’s_ Uncle _Charles, tilts his head and arches a brow when his eyes meet Myka’s.  Instinctively, she hugs Helena closer._  
  
 _He only smiles and turns his attention back to the drink he swirls in his hand._  
  
 _“You don’t have to, you know,” Helena is sitting up now, watching Myka closely with that pouted lip.  “If you’re not ready, I mean.  I don't want you to.”_  
  
 _Myka smiles at Helena._  
  
 _“Pete said that what you’re doing when the clock strikes midnight on a new year is a reflection of what you’ll be doing for the rest of that year.”_  
  
 _Helena laughs, “That is why he’s chosen to be his usual obnoxious self?”_  
  
 _Myka bites on her bottom lip and brings her hand to Helena’s chin._  
  
 _“I have spent a lot of new years thinking about you,” Myka admits.  Helena’s smile falls.  She remains quiet.  “This might be the first new year that you’re actually thinking about me, too.”_  
  
 _Tracy is holding a borrowed watch in the air._  
  
 _“Twenty seconds, everybody!”_  
  
 _Myka’s mother rolls her eyes and finally hands Tracy the small glass of champagne._  
  
***  
  
"Are you sure you're up for this?"  
  
Myka smiles and nods.  "I'm sure.  I'm fine."  
  
"We can go back to town," Helena tugs at Myka's arm.  "We can just go eat lunch or see a movie or do nothing at all..."  
  
"Helena."  Myka raises her brow.  "It's our last weekend before school starts.  I'm not spending it having lunch.  Or in a dark movie theater where I can't even see or talk to you."  
  
"We could watch a movie at the house."  Helena actually pouts.  "Where I definitely won't make your ribs hurt more than they already do."  
  
"It's fine," Myka says and walks past Helena with a coy smile, "I know you were just trying to get back at me for closing your hand in the door."  
  
She hears Helena's gasp before the older girl is close behind her, following the path she walks down to the lake shore.  
  
"I would never," Helena argues.  
  
"My ribs beg to differ," Myka jokes.  
  
Helena's hand is on Myka's arm, stopping her along the path, turning Myka toward her.  
  
She opens her mouth to speak but no words come out.  Her eyes fall to the ground.  Myka smirks and moves her hand into Helena's.  
  
"I'm only teasing you."  Myka reaches up to tap Helena's nose.  "You're not the one that bruised them in the first place."  
  
Helena sighs.  "I've been a bad friend this summer.  I should have just moved home."  
  
"We already talked about this," Myka turns and walks away, a hand in the air, "I am _not_ mad at you, Helena."  
  
"You should be,"  Helena calls, still standing where Myka has left her.  Myka turns back to her and shrugs with her arms in the air.  
  
"I'm not," Myka says.  "I get it.  You were freaked out.  You ran away.  I would have run away too, if I could have.  I _tried_.  I couldn't."  
  
"Maybe if I had been there you wouldn't have felt like that," Helena says walking down to where Myka stands.  "It wouldn't have been so bad..."  
  
"Helena."    
  
The older girl stops talking.  
  
"Do you know what I want most in this world right now?"  Myka asks.  
  
Helena shakes her head.   Myka steps closer to her and tugs at her shirt.    
  
"You," Myka says softly, "sitting on this blanket.  By the water.  With me.  Until the sun goes down."  
  
Helena does.  Eventually.  Sit with Myka.  
  
They are side by side and Myka is running the tips of her fingers over the exposed skin of Helena's back.  Where her tank top leaves little to the imagination when a strap falls haphazardly off of her shoulder.    
  
Myka kisses that shoulder and Helena turns slightly to her, eyes lowered to the ground.    
  
"Myka."    
  
It's Helena's warning voice.  Only softer now and Myka smiles at the sound of it.   
  
She lifts the strap of Helena's tank back onto her shoulder and continues running her fingers across Helena's back, over freckles, as they sit in near silence.  Pushing hair over her other shoulder.  
  
Myka leans over, kisses the center of Helena's back.  She feels the shiver that overtakes Helena then.  Can see the bumps that raise up across her skin.  Kisses a little higher, toward the nape of her neck.  
  
Helena tilts her head to the side, takes in a deep breath.  
  
"Myka," that voice warns again on an exhale.  "Do you remember what I told you last year?"  
  
"You're not so impossible these days," Myka says quietly.    
  
"What exactly does _that_ mean?"  Helena asks turning around to face Myka now.    
  
"It means I really wish I was eighteen."  Myka smirks.  "Or you fifteen. Even sixteen.  I'd take seventeen, too."  
  
"You'd take nineteen,"  Helena teases.  "If you could."  
  
Myka's smile fades.  
  
"If you'd let me.  Are you saying I can't?" Myka asks.  "Or that I shouldn't?"  
  
"I'm saying it's not an option that is currently being given to you," Helena corrects.  But then Myka shrugs and looks to the blanket below them where her fingers catch a loose thread.  And as soon as her eyes are no longer on Helena's, Helena's lips are on Myka's.    
  
They're gentle and slow and careful, cautious in their movements.  Helena's hand comes to rest just over Myka's heart, against her chest, and she's not sure if Helena means to push her away or pull her closer, but Helena's grip tightens around the fabric of Myka's shirt and Helena is pushing, gently, slowly, carefully against Myka's chest.  Urging her backward.  
  
Myka goes.  Wherever Helena takes her.  For as long as Helena's lips are against hers, delicate and exploring yet so reserved, simple.  And where Helena takes her is back, all the way back, until Myka's laying back against the blanket beneath them and Helena is hovering over her.  
  
And only then does Helena move somewhat away, putting space, and too much of it Myka thinks, between them.  
  
"What?"  Myka doesn't meant for it to sound so abrupt, so needy.  But that's how it comes out.  Annoyed, yearning, frustrated, desperate, _hungry_.  
  
"Is this okay?" Helena asks, her voice a whisper.  "Do you feel like running away?"  
  
"If I run at all," Myka breathes, "it'll be because a bear is after us.  And you'll be running with me."  Helena smiles and Myka tugs her into another gentle kiss, with her finger hooked over the top of Helena's tank, where here cleavage just barely shows.    
  
Helena moves inches away again.  "This cannot happen again, Myka," Helena warns. "Not after today."  
  
"What are you," but Helena cuts her off with another kiss, a quick peck of a kiss.    
  
"You cannot wait for me," and Helena kisses her again, "I won't let you."  
  
Myka wants to roll her eyes but Myka does not want to take her eyes off of the way Helena looks hovering over her.  The way Helena's hair falls just beside her face, the way Helena tilts her neck to the side to keep that hair out of Myka's face.  The intensity with which Helena is watching her, eyes flitting from hers to her lips and back to her eyes again.  
  
"Could you stop me from waiting?"  Myka finally asks, she lifts her hand to touch Helena's cheek.    
  
Helena shakes her head and suddenly there are tears slipping from her eyes.    
  
"Please don't wait for me, Myka."  Helena sighs.  "I love you and I'm asking you, begging you, to find someone else.  Do not wait for me."  
  
"Helena why would I?  Find someone else."  Myka furrows her brows.  Tries hard not to glare, in all of her confusion.  "Why when I have you?  What am I even waiting for anymore?  You're here, aren't you?"  
  
"I won't always be here, Myka."  More tears slip from Helena's eyes, fall against Myka's face.  "If I go to London.  If life takes me away from here."  
  
Myka pulls Helena close to her again, kisses wet lips before parting and moving her tongue over her own lips.  She tastes the salt of Helena's tears and presses her lips back into Helena's lips, kisses gently.  
  
"Why won't you date Abigail?"  Helena asks.  
  
"Because she's not you."  
  
Helena shakes her head.  
  
"Because I will always love you, Helena."  
  
Helena closes her eyes when Myka's hand runs through the length of her hair.  
  
"Because I love kissing this perfect face," Myka teases grinning, but her grin disappears just as soon as it had appeared.  "Because I can't say no to you and I'll just end up cheating on her.  Kissing you.  I can't do that to her. I do care about her."  
  
"Then I'm saying no to you."  
  
"What?"  
  
"I'm saying no _for_ you."  Helena rephrases.  Myka stares up at her.  Narrows her eyes.    
  
"No to what?"  
  
"No more of this, Myka.  No more kissing and cuddling and hand holding and," Helena lowers her forehead to Myka's chest for a second before bringing her gaze back to Myka's, "no more acting on all these feelings that we can't even figure out, that I too soon, very soon, won't be able to draw a line on."  
  
"Draw a line on?"    
  
"Until you're eighteen."  
  
"What?!"  Myka knows she sounds exasperated.  "Helena, don't be so..."  
  
"What, Myka?  Careful?  Cautious?  Don't think so hard about this age difference between us?  Is that what you're going to say?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"You're not the nineteen year old in love with a fifteen... year old."  Helena's voice gets quiet as Myka's eyes grow wide at the admission.  
  
Helena sits up slowly.  Moves slightly away from Myka.  Turns to face the water again, as she had been however long before they had started kissing.  
  
Myka sits up slowly behind Helena and is quiet for several moments before she puts her hand on Helena's shoulder.  Helena turns slightly to her, wipes at the tears that are falling down her face.     
  
"Helena," Myka says softly and Helena turns away again.  "Look at me, please?"    
  
She does.    
  
Myka sits closer to her, wipes her tears from her cheeks, pushes her hair behind her ears and out of her face.    
  
"Whatever you want to do or not do," Myka tells her.  "Tell me what you want and we'll do that.  Or not do that.  Whatever it is or isn't."  Helena looks down again and Myka palms her cheek, brings her gaze back up to Myka's.  "Whatever will make this better for you."  
  
"One year," Helena says.  
  
"One year?"  
  
Helena nods.  
  
"I can't go a year without seeing you, if that's what you're asking."  
  
"No kissing, no hand holding, no cuddling," Helena begins.  
  
"No cuddling?"  
  
Helena is nodding, "None of these touches that we're sure don't mean anything.”    
  
Helena touches Myka's bottom lip just then and she's sure it means _everything_.  
  
"Uh-huh," Myka nods slowly.  "And why again?  Are we doing this?"  
  
"So you can date whoever you want," Helena touches Myka's chin.  
  
"Whoever I want that isn't you?"  
  
Helena nods.    
  
"And because that's what I want.  Because you asked and that's my answer."  Helena runs her hand through her hair.  "If it isn't too much to ask."  
  
"One year?"  
  
"One year."  
  
"No kissing?"  
  
"No kissing."  
  
"I really like kissing you," Myka sighs.  
  
"No kissing," Helena repeats.  
  
"No hand holding?"  
  
Helena eyes her.  
  
"Not even at the movies?"  
  
"Not even at the movie."  
  
Myka is quiet for several seconds before tilting her head, biting on her lower lip.  She tugs at her hair, twists it in her fingers while in thought then sits straight again.  
  
"May I ask one question... no, two questions?  Aside from that one."  
  
Helena smiles and nods.  
  
"First question, is this really what you need from me to make you feel better about us?  You're not just letting me down gently?  Because I can take it, Helena.  I'd rather be let down now than..."  
  
"I love you," Helena says interrupting, "and this is what I want.  It will ease my mind."  Helena tugs at Myka's shirt.  "That you aren't waiting for me.  That this thing will be a little less... tempting."  
  
"Okay."  Myka's voice is accepting.  "All right."  
  
"Second question?"  Helena's expression is expectant.  
  
"Can we maybe start the one year clock tomorrow?"  
  
"Myka."  Helena scolds and Myka already has her hands in the air, surrendering.  
  
"I just thought I would ask, considering we're already here and the blanket is here and it's warm and the sun is going down and," Myka sighs, her gaze all over Helena and all of that exposed Helena skin, "you're so beautiful right now.  Well, always but especially right now and I love you so much I just want to kiss that face..."  
  
"Shh."  Helena hushes Myka with her index finger over Myka's lips.  Quickly replaces that finger with her lips, leaves a chaste kiss there.  Pulls away.  "Tomorrow."  She adds softly.    
  
Helena's grip is on Myka's shirt again.  Tugging her closer while pushing her back.  Myka falls quickly this time, ignores the pain in her ribs, pulls Helena back into her with her hands on the other girl's hips.  
  
Helena's lips fall into hers.  They're kissing again.  And there is something new in this touch.  Myka's belly is twisting in new ways, completely knotted.  Worse when Helena's palm finds her neck and rests there gently.  Worse still when Helena's thumb is caressing her cheek.    
  
Myka could die, she thinks, at any point tonight.  She's sure she does when she feels the gentle press of Helena's tongue against her lips.    
  
She's sure she _has_ when she opens her mouth to Helena's for the first time in her young life.  
  
***  
  
 _They do not join the countdown.  Even if they had, Myka’s sure they would not have been heard over both Tracy and Pete together._  
  
 _Myka’s gaze is on Helena whose gaze is on Myka, and Helena smiles and says, “I will be.”_  
  
 _To which Myka asks softly, “Will be what?”_  
  
 _“Thinking of you.”_  
  
 _Myka swallows._  
  
 _“All year,” Helena whispers.  “Even when I’m trying not to think about you.”_  
  
 _The last five seconds stretches out.  Seems to never end.  But when midnight finally comes, Myka does not hesitate, does not want to run, does not feel the least bit fearful._  
  
 _They kiss._  
  
 _It’s the first time since the very first time at Helena’s graduation.  Only this time the kiss is more of a kiss because Myka isn’t scared, there is no apprehension.  No voice in the back of her head telling her that this isn’t what Helena wants.  No voice in her mind telling her that Helena would want nothing to do with this or her or some faint idea of_ them _._  
  
 _The warmth of Helena’s hand falls over Myka’s heart when they part but Helena leans in closer, kisses Myka again.  And these kisses are gentle and soft and almost nothing at all, except for the fact that they are from Helena and they are everything to Myka._  
  
 _Myka smiles when they do finally part.  Helena’s eyes are closed for several seconds before they open again, before Helena smiles._  
  
 _“Happy New Year, Einstein.”  Helena whispers, almost against Myka’s lips before another kiss pulls them back together._  
  
 _Myka nods and holds Helena closer, if she can get any closer at all.  “Happy New Year."_

 _Helena rests her head back against Myka's shoulder as they turn to face and enjoy the rest of their family's celebration._  
  
 _Tracy is finally taking her long-awaited sip of champagne, takes a minute to swallow it down, and almost gags before offering the rest to their mother._  
  
***  
  
The sun is setting.   The sun is set.  The sun has set long ago.    
  
By the time Myka is standing and pulling Helena into her, close enough for their foreheads to touch and with her arms around Helena's waist, it is dark.  Their only light the full moon and a flashlight that they don't bother turning on.  
  
"I'll miss you," is what Myka whispers to Helena.  "Every bit of you."  
  
"You haven't _had_ every bit of me, Myka," she's sure Helena is teasing but she’s also sure Helena is serious because Helena knows what it means to give every bit of herself to someone else.  And she’s right, Myka realizes, she has not had, and is nowhere near close to having, every bit of Helena.  
  
Myka tells her, "Let me have my moment."  
  
Helena puffs out a soft laugh and nods, whispers, "I'm sorry, Love.  I will miss you, too.  But I will still see you."  
  
"From a distance," Myka informs.  
  
"It won't be that far," Helena punctuates that knowledge with a kiss.  "It won't be that long."  
  
"Any further away than this is too far, Helena Wells."  Myka sighs, pulls Helena's body closer.    
  
"I think you'll survive, Myka Bering."  Helena kisses her again.  "Ophelia."  
  
Myka glares, though she's not sure Helena can even tell.  So she softens her face, kisses Helena also and Helena brings her hands to palm Myka's cheeks before burying her fingers in curls, deepening this kiss.    
  
Myka wants to melt, almost does, into this kiss.  She steps forward to be sure of her balance because she feels like she's falling.  She might be falling.

And Helena's fingers are scratching lightly against her scalp and gliding down the column of her neck before they find their way to Myka's arms to hold her steady.    
  
Helena pulls away first, just an inch before setting a much more gentle kiss to Myka's lips.  
  
And this, too, makes Myka melt.  
  
"We should go," Myka breathes when they part.  And to ground herself, to reality, she adds, "I have a curfew you know."  
  
She thinks Helena rolls her eyes.  Helena definitely steps away from her.  But Helena's hand is in her hand, holding tight as she reaches down for the blanket with her other hand.  She playfully and gently pushes the blanket into Myka's arms.  
  
"You are such a brat sometimes," Helena sighs.    
  
Myka laughs, tugging Helena back up the hill, to the path that leads to where Helena's car is parked.  
  
"A lovable brat, though."  Myka smiles back at Helena.  
  
“Don’t test me, Ophelia."  
  
***  
  
 _It is Myka’s fifteenth birthday when the families next meet in Spring at the Lattimer home for dinner.  And after dinner, Myka, who has developed something that looks and feels a lot like confidence, catches Helena when she is leaving the bathroom, tugs on her arm until she follows her into the guest room.  Does not turn on the light._  
  
 _“Myka?”  Helena’s voice is uncertain but not frightened when Myka pulls Helena closer to her, sets her hands on Helena’s hips, pulls her even closer._  
  
 _“Can I kiss you?”  Myka asks.  She hears Helena’s soft laughter.  “Can that be my birthday present?”_  
  
 _“I bought you an actual present,” Helena says but she wraps her arms over Myka’s shoulders, around Myka’s neck, still in the dark._  
  
 _“I like it,” Myka is nodding but she’s sure Helena cannot see her, “the actual present but I like you even more.”_  
  
 _“Myka,” Helena is sighing, letting her arms slide from Myka’s shoulders to rest somewhere over her chest, just between them._  
  
 _“I love you, Helena,” Myka says softly._  
  
 _“Myka, no,” Helena pushes her away slightly and Myka backs away entirely, sits on the bed behind her._  
  
 _“Okay.”_  
  
 _Helena sighs and flicks on the light, leans back into the door when her eyes fall on Myka’s._  
  
 _“I do love you, Myka, but…”_  
  
 _“Helena.”  Myka interrupts and shakes her head before smiling up at the older girl._  
  
 _Helena sighs and looks away as quiet fill up the room._  
  
 _“I talked to my mom.”_  
  
 _Helena gives her a look, arches a brow._  
  
 _“About us,” Myka adds.  “She doesn’t care.  She adores you.  She doesn’t care if we’re together.”_  
  
 _“Myka, that’s not going to happen,” Helena sits beside Myka on the bed, “and it isn’t up to your mother to decide that.  It’s up to both me and you.”_  
  
 _“She doesn’t care if we make that decision.”_  
  
 _“We cannot be together, Myka,” Helena kisses Myka’s cheek, “you’ve only just turned fifteen.  I’m nineteen.  We cannot be actually be together, not really.  And me saying no should be enough for you."_  
  
 _Myka nods and concedes because yes, it should be enough, but then Helena does things like she does now and kisses Myka, pushes her curls out of her face, tells her happy birthday anyway._  
  
 _“You told me yourself, Myka,” Helena smiles, still close to Myka, “that you wanted to know what you were giving me.  You wanted that confidence.  The confidence to know that you were ready.”_  
  
 _“That was before I kissed you.  I’ve changed my mind,” Myka smiles and looks to Helena.  “I was young and naive.”_  
  
 _“It was a year ago.”  Helena laughs, tilting her head to the side._  
  
 _“A lot can change in a year.”  Myka nods and arches a challenging brow at Helena.  “A lot did change in a year."_  
  
 _Helena shakes her head._  
  
 _"You are so impatient."_  
  
 _Myka shrugs._  
  
 _“Our first date is in six years.” Helena reminds Myka._  
  
 _“Can we move it up a couple of years?”  Myka asks.  “Like, I don’t know, to my 18th birthday.”_  
  
 _“And what exactly do you think is going to happen on your 18th birthday that wouldn’t happen on your 21st birthday?”  Helena narrows her eyes at Myka._  
  
 _Myka wags her eyebrows suggestively as Pete would and Helena laughs.  When she stops, she smiles, and leans in to Myka to set another quick kiss on her lips._  
  
 _“In your dreams.”_  
  
 _“Exactly.”  Myka sighs._  
  
***  
  
Myka tests Helena.  
  
Several times.  
  
At the top of the hill at the lake.  Outside of her car.  Inside her car.  In the Lattimer driveway.  On the Lattimer porch.  
  
"Time to go," Helena whispers between all these gentle tests.    
  
"Cuddle," Myka whines playfully.    
  
Helena shakes her head, "The clock starts when I walk away from you tonight."  
  
Myka growls playfully and Helena kisses her scowl.    
  
"Goodnight, Myka."  
  
"Goodnight, Helena."  
  
Helena takes several steps to her car before she stops, midway down the walkway, and moves quickly back to Myka, into Myka's arms.  And Myka ignores this pain that propels into her ribs too, as Helena throws her arms around Myka's neck.  Holds her close, kisses her cheek.    
  
“It is a different kind of love."  Helena whispers into her ear.  “But I do love you, Einstein."  
  
Myka smiles, wraps her arms around the small of Helena's back.  Pulls her closer.  
  
"It is very different."  Myka whispers back. "I love you, too."  
  
The last kiss is quick, to the corner of Myka's mouth as Helena's hand is set along Myka's jaw, her thumb resting over Myka's bottom lip.  
  
This time, when they part, when Helena backpedals down the walkway before turning on her heels and walking, hastily to her car, she does not stop.  She does not turn around.  
  
Myka steps off the porch.  Wraps her arms around herself as Helena gets into and starts her car, backs out of the driveway.    
  
Helena doesn't wave, she doesn't even smile.    
  
She wipes her tears, she looks anywhere that isn't at Myka, she puts her car in drive.    
  
She drives away.  
  
Myka let's her go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The condition that Tracy has in this chapter is also known as Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. Everything I've written about it is from my own memory and experiences from when my younger brother had suffered through it. If you do Google around for information about it, just be forewarned that the images can be unsettling.


	13. Fifteen & Twenty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Helena's birthday and the plan, of no kissing, no cuddling, no holding hands, demands revision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another chapter that was never meant to be. That kicked my ass by never sounding right or feeling right or flowing right until finally it kind of did and this is about as close as I could get it.

"Ophelia."  
  
Jeannie Bering's voice has never sounded so consistently gentle, loving, caring, attentive, relaxed, calm, at peace...  
  
Myka could think of one thousand words or more to describe these things that her mother's voice has never, before this year, seemed capable of conveying.  
  
But her favorite word, of all the words she can think of, is free.  
  
Myka feels the bed dip beneath her mother's weight as Jeannie Bering sits just behind her and pulls Myka's hair out of her face.  She touches the back of her hand to Myka's forehead and Myka rolls onto her belly, softly groans her protest.  
  
"Are you feeling okay?"  
  
"Mm tired," is Myka's lazy response, partially muffled by her pillow.  She turns her head, clears her throat.  "Coach was in a mood."  
  
"You're supposed to be taking it easy," Jeannie says patting Myka's back softly.  
  
Myka rolls completely over and smiles up at her mother, "I'm good, Mom.  I promise."  
  
Jeannie regards Myka in silence for several long moments before she smiles and nods.  
  
"Okay," the older woman says softly.  "Jane and Pete are here.  Breakfast is ready."  
  
***  
  
Myka is still debating leaving the comfort and warmth of her bed so early on a Saturday morning when her phone vibrates on the dresser beside her.  She picks it up, eyes Helena's name as it appears on the display, and accepts the call.  
  
"Morning, birthday girl," she greets, voice still drenched with sleep, a soft smile playing across her lips.  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother is seated at the table with Tracy on one side of her, a surprisingly wide awake Pete across from her.  Ms. Jane has taken up a comfortably familiar position by the stove.  It's a thing she's just become used to doing on Saturday mornings in the Bering home.  
  
Myka is greeted by four smiling faces when she unceremoniously drops herself into a chair beside Pete.  
  
"There she is," Jeannie Bering says.  
  
"Morning, Ophie."  Tracy greets her with a soft barefooted kick to her leg beneath the table.  
  
"You look awful," Pete adds while simultaneously devouring a sausage link.  
  
"Hi Mom.  Morning, Sister."  She narrows her glare precisely on him when she adds, "Pete."  
  
"Just saying," Pete chews aloud.  "You might want to fix that before tonight."  
  
"Leave your sister alone," Ms. Jane teases as she moves around the table to Myka.  She sets a plate with scrambled eggs down in front of her, a bottle of ketchup beside that, then leans down and kisses the top of Myka's head before returning to the stove.  
  
"The last thing I need is more sisters," Pete says under his breath.  "Or more lesbians."

"It's just you and me, Pete," Tracy shakes her head, "fighting the good fight."  
  
"Thanks for the breakfast, Mom."  Myka smirks while punching Pete's shoulder.  Ms. Jane glances back at Myka with a wink before returning her attention to the stove.  
  
"You kids have plans today?"  Ms. Jane asks over her shoulder.  
  
"Mom, we've talked about this one million times," Pete says.  "It's H.G.'s birthday.  We're meeting her housemates?  Movie afterward?  Is any of this ringing a bell?"  
  
"Today is Helena's birthday?"  Her eyes widen along with her smile.  
  
"Oh right, it is."  Jeannie smiles wide.  "Is she nineteen?"  
  
"Twenty."  Myka corrects.  
  
"Jesus Christ." Jeannie Bering sighs. "She was seven when I first met her."

"I'm sorry, what?" Myka asks.  
  
"She's having a thing at her place.  I'm sober driver."  Pete points at himself.  
  
Ms. Jane turns and glares, points her spatula between him and Myka.  "With sober teen aged passengers, I should hope."  
  
"Don't worry, we aren't staying long." Myka smirks, squirting ketchup over her eggs.  It is possibly the worst but best thing she has picked up from Pete in their lifetime together.  "And I have no intention of touching any alcohol."  
  
"Good girl."  Myka's mother smiles behind a mug of coffee just before taking a sip.  
  
"It's really just an excuse to meet her housemates."  Myka further explains before turning back to her mother, "You met Helena when she was seven?"

Jeannie Bering smiles, gives a small nod.  
  
"Gotta size 'em up," Pete adds patting his full belly.  "We can't have our precious H.G. living with a bunch of serial criminals."  
  
"Definitely not," Myka nods her agreement, taking a bite of her eggs, staring at her mother.  "So where was I during this meeting?"

"Don't talk with food in your mouth, Ophelia," Myka's mother scolds.  Myka swallows her food.  "You were around."

"Did I meet Helena?"

"Dude, Myka," Pete turns to her with wide eyes.  "Pull it back, Desperado."

Myka squints at her mother, "This conversation isn't over."

Jeannie Bering shakes her head.  
  
"Mama Jane, please tell me you have more of these delicious biscuits over there."  
  
"Tracy Emmanuelle, you have legs."  Jeannie Bering's scold is endearing, she gently swats at Tracy's thigh.  "Get off your lazy butt and go get a biscuit yourself."  
  
"But Mom," Tracy feigns a whine and hugs herself, "my everything hurts."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and says, "Milk it for all of it's worth, Trace."  
  
"Says the girl with the crooked back and still-busted ribs."  
  
Myka returns the barefooted kick from earlier.  
  
" _Ophie_."  Tracy scolds playfully, pointing a fork threateningly at Myka who hides her smile behind a cup of orange juice.  
  
"It's all right, Jeannie."  Ms. Jane is all smiles as she comes to the table and drops another biscuit onto Tracy's plate.  "I don't mind spoiling my girls."  
  
Myka and Pete exchange the same curious look when Ms. Jane moves to a grinning Jeannie Bering to lean in and kiss her cheek.  And Myka's mother catches Ms. Jane by her wrist before she can return to the stove.  She tells her, "Stop moving. Sit down.  Eat."  
  
Ms. Jane rolls her eyes but she concedes.  Moves to the stove to turn off the burners, lets go of the spatula, and returns to the table to take a seat directly beside Myka's mother.  Her hand resting over Myka's mother's lap as it has so recently been discovered to do.  
  
Jane turns her smile on Jeannie.  Myka turns her arched brow back to Pete.  
  
"Go get ready," he tells her, "so we can get out of here before things start getting _real_."  
  
"You don't have to ask me twice," Myka laughs softly and swallows her last forkful of scrambled eggs.  
  
"Please, take me with you," Tracy grumbles.  
  
Jane and Jeannie share knowing smiles as the three present of their four combined kids hastily excuse themselves from the table.  
  
***  
  
Myka showers with the water hot.  Just below scalding.  
  
She tilts her head back under the shower head.  It's the only way she really fits.  The only way she can wash all of her hair.  
  
She takes in a deep breath.  Inhales steam. Closes her eyes.  
  
Helena is there.  In her mind.  In her shower.  With her.  Wearing nothing.  
  
What she hasn't seen of Helena's body, which is most of Helena's body, she imagines.  
  
The things she does know, freckles, moles, dimples, scars, slowly materialize as her lips in her mind move tenderly over Helena's shoulders, from her back to her front, down her chest and back up the column of her neck.  Over her chin, her jaw line.  Across cheeks, to lips.  
  
"Helena," Myka sighs her name softly under running water.  Just to hear it.  Just to punctuate all of these things she's feeling with the name of this woman she has found herself loving far too much, for far too long.  
  
A loud knock on the door shatters her thoughts.  
  
"Stop taking up all the hot water, Ophelia!"  
  
Tracy.  
  
Myka sighs.  Turns off the water.  Steps out of the shower and wraps herself in a towel.  
  
When she opens the door, Tracy is eyeing her with some suspicion but she is quiet as Myka walks past her, through the doorway, into the hallway.  
  
She is quiet until Myka stands just outside of her bedroom door, water dripping onto the floor, hand on the knob and turning.  
  
Tracy smirks and before stepping into the bathroom, she says, "I hope you took your vibrator with you."  
  
The bathroom door closes before Myka can find anything to actually throw in that direction.  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't think about where she'd left Pete before going to shower.  Before she stands in front of her closet, dressed only in a towel, and swings the door wide open.  
  
"I'm coming out of the closet!"  Pete is yelling as he jumps out at her with his hands raised.  One of her tee shirts draped over his head and wearing one of her coats backward over his arms.  
  
Myka growls as she jumps back, as her towel begins to fall, as she barely catches the thing on the way down.  
  
"Lattimer!!" is the next thing that escapes her lips.  "Get out, get out!"  She's hitting him with one hand, covering herself with a towel that is no longer wrapped around her but falling in front of her like a curtain.  
  
Pete is laughing and maybe crying from the laughter but also apologizing as Myka pushes him toward her bedroom door, out of her bedroom.  
  
"I'm sorry, Mykes!"  She slams the door in his face. "How was I supposed to know you'd be butt naked?"  
  
"I just got out of the shower, Pete!"  she yells through the closed door.  
  
"You should take your clothes in the bathroom with you like a normal person."  Pete responds.  
  
"That is _not_ normal!" she retorts and groans.  "Go away!"  
  
The sound of Pete's amused laughter fades away as he moves away from her door, down the hallway.  
  
***  
  
Myka punches Pete one more time for good measure as they're getting ready to leave the apartment.  
  
"Ow."  Pete is rubbing the sore spot.  "It's not like I haven't seen you naked before."  
  
Myka tilts her head to the side, scrunches her nose, and adjusts her glasses as she glares at Pete.  "Things have changed since we were four, Pete."  
  
"Hmm."  Pete's face is skeptical.  
  
Myka punches him again.  
  
"Lattimer, Bering."  Ms. Jane calls.  "Take it outside."  They head for the door, pushing and swatting at one another.  
  
"Don't stay out too late guys," is what Jeannie Bering says, stopping Myka at the front door with a hand on her arm.  Followed by, "Jane and I are heading to the city for a bit."  Jeannie tugs Myka closer, narrows her eyes on her oldest daughter. "Do _not_ stay out too late."  
  
" _You_ guys don't stay out too late,"  Pete says in response and Myka smiles, nods her agreement, kisses her mother's forehead.  
  
"Um, last time I checked, _we_ are the parents here," Ms. Jane starts, " _we_ will stay out as late as we want to."  
  
"But we won't want to," Jeannie says, smiling back at Ms. Jane, "because _someone_ promised me a night in and a bottle of wine."  
  
" _Someone's_ memory is almost as sharp as her daughter's," Ms. Jane smirks.  
  
"Lush," Myka teases.  
  
"Whoa, don't get too crazy, Moms."  Pete's hands are in the air as he backpedals away from the two older women.  
  
"Mom, can you spot me a ten?"  Tracy appears from the hallway, her hand already out as she crosses the living room to where everyone else stands in wait by the door.  
  
"Honey, I told you things would be tight with your dad gone and no one dealing with the store," Jeannie sighs.  "Until I can get back to teaching or win the Lottery..."  
  
"Or find something to do with the money pit that he left you with downstairs," Ms. Jane adds under her breath.  
  
The solemn look that Myka's mother gives to Ms. Jane does not go unnoticed.  Nor does Ms. Jane's subsequent sigh.  
  
"Here." Ms. Jane pulls out her wallet, pulls out a twenty and hands it to Tracy.  And Tracy stands there with the bill in her hand, quiet for several seconds.  She looks to their mother, to Ms. Jane, to Myka and Pete, back to Ms. Jane and her mother again.  Finally, Ms. Jane tells her, "Go.  Have fun."  
  
"Uh, thank you?"  Tracy's voice is unsure when she says this, looks to Myka again.  
  
"Yes, thank you is the appropriate response."  Myka smiles and pushes Tracy past her, out of the door.  Pete follows the youngest Bering while Myka turns back to Ms. Jane.  She hugs the older woman, squeezes her tight, whispers a soft "thank you" into her ear.  
  
"Let's go Mykes!"  Pete calls, already halfway down the stairs.  
  
Myka points and arches a brow at her mother, at Ms. Jane.  "Be good."  
  
She turns on her heels and disappears down the stairs before either woman can respond with anything more than a smile and a head shake.  
  
***  
  
"It's been five weeks and they already act like they're married."  
  
Tracy isn't quite pouting in the back seat of Pete's mother's car, with Pete at the wheel and Myka in the passenger seat, but her forehead is wrinkled, brows furrowed as she stares at the twenty dollar bill she holds in her hands.  
  
"If you're upset about it, maybe you shouldn't accept the money," Myka suggests, letting her head fall to the side to stare out of her window.  
  
"I'm not upset," Tracy says.  "I love how happy they are, I just don't want either of them to get caught up in whatever it is they're doing.  I don't want them to get hurt and then stop being friends because the way things are right now it's like," Tracy sighs, "like it's almost too good to be true."  
  
"Well, it's been much longer than five weeks for them, Trace."  Myka shakes her head.  "Much longer than any of us has been alive, so think about what they've already been through.  They've already had their fair share of hurt.  Mom certainly has.  Ms. Jane has too."  And Myka looks to Pete when she says this.  
  
"They'll be fine," Pete says and gives a reassuring nod to Tracy in the rear view mirror.  "They have us for kids and we wouldn't let anything bad happen to them.  And if they get into it with one another, we'll just snap them out of it."  
  
Myka smirks at Pete and nods her agreement.  "Don't worry about them, Trace.  Ms. Jane has been looking out for Mom for years.  I doubt she's going to stop anytime soon."  
  
"Yeah, I guess."  Tracy slumps back into the car seat.  
  
***  
  
They drop Tracy off at a friend's place and Pete drives back across town.  Where to, Myka doesn't know, until they pull into the large empty parking lot of the church where Abigail's father is a pastor.  
  
"I thought you wanted to go to the mall?"  Myka asks.  
  
"Not for shopping," Pete grins.  "The parking lot is too full."  He takes the car keys out of the engine and Myka arches a brow.  
  
"Then for what exactly?"  She's certain she looks bewildered.   
  
"Ew, not _that_ , Mykes.  Gross, what is _wrong_ with you?"  Pete throws the car keys at her and she narrowly misses catching them.  "Switch me spots."  
  
"What?"  
  
Pete is already out of the car.  Myka gets out too, eyes him over the roof of the vehicle.  He nods, gestures her over to the driver's side.  
  
"Get in."  
  
"Pete," Myka chuckles now, walking to where he stands, stopping in front of him with a brow raised.  "What are you..." She's shaking her head.  
  
"Your dad dropped the ball, Mykes.  Like one million times.  And your mom has a full plate in front of her, trying to get her credential in order, looking for a teaching job so she can support you guys."  
  
"Okay?"  
  
"You're going to be sixteen next year and neither of them are going to teach you how to drive, so I will."  
  
Myka's brow arches higher.  She asks, "Do _you_ know how to drive because I'm a little suspect at times..."  
  
"Get in," he says cutting her off.  
  
***  
  
"Pete."  Myka smiles every time Pete's foot pushes down on some imaginary brake on the passenger side of the car.  "Are you regretting your decision now?"  
  
"That depends, are you _trying_ to make me regret my decision?"  Pete sounds a lot more calm than he looks.  Myka slows the car, brakes a little too hard on the stop.  "You're doing fine.  Why did you stop?"  
  
"Abigail."  Myka smiles as she eyes the figure that stands near the church on the far end of the parking lot, looking in their direction.  She turns back to Pete with a grin on her face.  
  
"Try not to run her over," he says with a roll of his eyes, clutching onto the handle of the car door as Myka steps on the gas.  
  
***  
  
"Your parking job is absolutely superb."  
  
Abigail is trying very hard to contain her smile when Myka looks back at the car she's just parked at somewhat of an angle across two parking spaces.  
  
"That was purposeful."  
  
"Right." Pete chuckles.  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and smirks, looks back to Abigail and says, "Pete's being the perfect big brother, teaching me how to drive."  
  
"Huh, more evidence that my own older brother is miserable at his job," Abigail laughs softly.  
  
"So," Myka steps slightly closer to Abigail with a crooked smile forming across her lips, "can we kidnap you now or are you busy?"  
  
"My answer to that question depends solely on who exactly will be operating that three ton land boat that you call a car."  Abigail smiles when this elicits a laugh from Myka and a curious puppy-dog head-tilt from Pete.  
  
"I don't think I appreciate you talking about Darlene like that."  Pete narrows his eyes on Abigail.  
  
"Darlene?"  Abigail questions.  
  
"The car," Myka whispers.  
  
"Oh, the car has a name?"  
  
"And a vagina, apparently."  
  
***  
  
They kidnap Abigail.  But not actually because they ask her father and he seems genuinely okay with her being disappeared into town with Pete and Myka, so disappearing is exactly what they do.  
  
They're out for two hours before Pete drops Myka and Abigail back off at the Bering home.  He leaves to meet up with Amanda, warns Myka that he'll be back just before it's time to head to Helena's place that evening.  
  
Tracy is still at her friends.  Their mother and Ms. Jane still out.  And it is hardly after noon when Myka is pulling Abigail into the apartment for the third time ever.  
  
For the second time since they've officially been _a thing_.  
  
***  
  
They're sitting on the couch in a way that reminds Myka too much of the way she would sit with Helena.  That makes Myka try hard not to wish she were sitting with Helena.  
  
Myka is leaning back into cushions with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.  Abigail is leaning back into Myka, the back of her head resting over Myka's shoulder.  
  
Myka's arm circles behind Abigail's waist, falls over the couch alongside Abigail's leg, her palm turned toward Abigail's thigh.  And Abigail's own hand falls over Myka's hand by her side, holds it closer to her.  Squeezes periodically.  
  
The TV is on but Myka pays it little attention. She's turning her nose into Abigail's hair, inhaling the scent of her conditioner, kissing dark strands.  
  
Abigail turns slightly into the kisses, smiles.  
  
"Hey," Myka kisses hair again, squeezes Abigail's hand. "Are you sure you don't mind going by Helena's tonight? We're not planning on staying very long.  Just long enough to say happy birthday and meet her housemates before the movie."  
  
"I don't mind," Abigail sighs as she laces her fingers with Myka's.  Her voice is too soft and she's uncharacteristically quiet Myka thinks but it isn't until her head lulls to the side and her breathing softens that Myka realizes she's falling asleep.  
  
"C'mon, Abigail."  
  
***  
  
Abigail's smile is soft when Myka lays beside her on the twin bed in Myka's room.  Myka lets her hand rest on Abigail's hip, loops a finger into a belt buckle of Abigail's jeans and pulls her closer.  
  
"Door open?"  Abigail asks sleepily, her eyelids drifting closed.  
  
"You're not sexually active," Myka teases.  "Nor am I."  
  
"You tempt me."  Abigail sighs.  "Sometimes.  With your stupidly pretty face."  
  
Myka is quiet watching Abigail's eyes close, her mile sleepy and barely there.  
  
"Do I?"  Myka finally asks letting her forehead rest against Abigail's.  
  
Abigail nods then asks, "Do I tempt you?"  
  
Now her eyes do open.  Almost.  To mere slits.  
  
Myka's laugh is soft when she says, "I've had a thought or three."  
  
Abigail closes her eyes again.  She grins.  
  
"You have always been trouble, haven't you?"  Myka asks, her hand on Abigail's waist moves to Abigail's cheek, pushes hair behind her ears.  Cradles Abigail's neck, just below her jaw line.  
  
"I plead the fifth."  
  
The quiet between them lingers longer.  
  
"The door is wide open."  Myka eventually says and pulls Abigail closer to her.  She kisses a cheek, two eyelids, one very sleepy smile.  
  
Abigail yawns.  
  
"Sorry, Papa had me decorating the sanctuary all morning for Fall."  Abigail sighs and nuzzles closer to Myka, wrapping an arm fully around Myka's waist.  
  
"No apologies necessary."  Myka holds her closer.  "Now stop talking."  
  
" _You_ ," is Abigail's sleepy challenge.  Her smile grows and Myka kisses it.  
  
"Goodnight, Abigail."  
  
Abigail's soft breath against Myka's neck is the only response she receives.  
  
Myka's thoughts, once again, turn to Helena.  
  
***  
  
Jeannie Bering finds them two hours later.  Myka isn't sure what to do with the fact that her mother isn't mad.  That she can exist like this with Abigail in this space.  
  
In their apartment. In her home that actually feels like a home now.  
  
With her mother not only knowing but fully understanding.  
  
With her father gone.  
  
Myka's mother speaks softly when she says she and Ms. Jane are going out for a late lunch, if Myka and Abigail want to join.  Offers to take Abigail home afterward.  
  
Abigail stirs slightly in Myka's hold.  
  
Her mother points toward the living room.  Says softly that they'll be waiting.  
  
***  
  
Myka sees the look her mother exchanges with Ms. Jane when they eventually emerge from her room holding hands.  
  
"Hello Abigail."  Ms. Jane greets her with a smile.  
  
"Hi Mrs. Lattimer."  
  
"Did you sleep well?"  Myka's mother grins.  
  
"Mom."  Myka raises a solitary brow.  
  
"All right, let's go."  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother is grinning ear to ear when she calls it a double date.  
  
In the past five weeks since her father has been restrained from coming anywhere near them and their home, it is the closest Myka has ever seen her mother interact with Ms. Jane.  
  
They hold hands while walking into the restaurant.  Ms. Jane pulls a chair out for Myka's mother, sits so close to her that when Abigail sees this, she sits closer to Myka.  And Ms. Jane's hand is hidden below the table for most of lunch, resting against Myka's mother's leg as it tends to do now.  
  
The conversation, when it does happen, is only the tiniest bit awkward because they're skirting around what is currently happening.  The very wordless development of this relationship that is forming between Myka's mother and Pete's mother.  At the same time, Myka has grown so used to what is happening that questions don't need to be asked.  Words don't need to be said.  
  
When lunch is over, as they are waiting on the check, Ms. Jane _kisses_ Jeannie Bering.  The slightest peck of a kiss.  And both of them look to Myka immediately after, as if they had suddenly remembered she was present and had never actually seen them kissing before.  
  
Myka is arching a brow.  
  
"Myka, your mother and I have a confession," Ms. Jane starts.  "I mean to say, we had an  ulterior motive in inviting you to lunch because we wanted to talk to you about how you would feel if..." Ms. Jane clears her throat, "if your mother and I..."  
  
"It's okay," Myka says before Ms. Jane can continue.  Myka smiles.  "I'm one hundred percent okay with this happening.  If that's what all this awkward conversation has been about."  
  
Her mother brings her palm up to cover her own mouth to hide some hint of a grin that grows there.  Ms. Jane's hand falls back over her mother's thigh.  
  
Both older women are smiling.  
  
"I hope you didn't think this was a secret," Myka adds with a smile.  "This thing between you two.  If so, you are both really horrible at keeping secrets."  
  
"No," her mother speaks up softly and Myka can hear the break in her voice.  She shakes her head and looks to Ms. Jane for a moment before returning her gaze to Myka.  "Just not," Myka's mother clears her throat, reaches for her glass of water.  
  
Ms. Jane pats her leg and nods, says to Myka, "Just not _official_."  
  
"Until now?"  Myka asks.  
  
"Until now," Jane nods.  
  
"Why are you only telling me?"  Myka smiles, or half smiles, then looks to Abigail whose eyes are wide but is also smiling a sort of amused smile at the older women before them.  When she looks back to Myka, her expression is a mixture of delight and sympathy.  "Why not Pete and Tracy, too? Or Jeannie?"  
  
"You are the most sensible of all our children," Ms. Jane smirks.  "If you're okay then we know this is okay.  That it's not as crazy as it has felt to the both of us for a year.  And when _they_ know you're okay, Pete and Tracy and Jeannie Jr. will also be okay."  
  
Myka grins at the sound of _Jeannie Jr_.  
  
"And what about Mom's divorce?"  Myka asks.  "It's not finalized."  
  
"Myka," her mother is sitting straight now, bringing her hands together over the table and already shaking her head when she continues on to say, "I'm not waiting anymore."  
  
Myka remains quiet.  
  
"I'm not waiting for bad things to stop happening.  I'm not waiting for good things to _start_ happening.  For people to change and bend to my needs, to _our_ needs."  Her mother reaches a hand closer to Myka who returns the reach.  They lock fingers.  "I'm not waiting on your father anymore.  I have waited on him, _for_ him, for over sixteen years.  I am not waiting anymore."  
  
The restaurant is boisterous around them.  Every table lit up with conversation.  Waiters moving through aisles.  Dishes clinking everywhere. 

 _They_ are quiet.  
  
Myka stands up and rounds the table to her mother, leans down into her, wraps her arms tightly around her and kisses her temple.  She whispers into her ear, " _This_ is the mother I have always needed.  That I have _always_ dreamed of having."  
  
Myka pulls away slightly and smiles as tears fall down her mother's cheek.  She wipes them away, kisses that cheek.  
  
When Myka's seated again, Abigail's hand is instantly in hers.  Abigail's other hand is wiping tears away from Myka's cheek.  
  
Ms. Jane too is crying, Abigail's eyes are wet and red.  
  
When the waitress returns with the check, her face is at first confused but then she smiles, sets the check down on the table and says, "The food was that good, huh?"  
  
Myka puffs out a soft laugh, followed by Abigail's muffled chuckle into Myka's shoulder.  Her mother and Ms. Jane are both smiling, shaking their heads at the waitress, Ms. Jane setting money down over the check and handing it back to her.  
  
"And on that note," Ms. Jane says with a nod, "I believe it is time to go home and open a bottle of wine."  
  
***  
  
They drop Abigail off at home.  Myka walks her to the door, smiles her way into a kiss.  
  
"I'll be back around seven," Myka tells her.  
  
"I'll be here," Abigail smiles.  "Waiting."  
  
Myka only turns to leave when the door closes and locks.  
  
***  
  
Myka wears a bow tie.  
  
She does not do this for any specific reason at all other than she's found one while rifling through her dad's things and has now taken ownership of it.  
  
When she's caught standing in the bathroom with the bow tie around her neck, trying desperately to figure it out on her own, Myka's mother crosses her arms, tilts her head, arches her brow, and smirks at her oldest daughter in a very knowing way.  
  
In a very _loving_ way.  
  
She tells Myka, "Your dad hates bow ties."  
  
Myka responds with, "Now I love them even more than before."  
  
Myka's mother moves to where her daughter stands in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and Myka's mother, a woman that Myka is just now really getting to know, swats at Myka's hands and says, "Let me show you."  To tease, she adds, "And don't you forget."  
  
Myka huffs out a small laugh and rolls her eyes away from her mother, smiles when she looks back to her and then watches in the mirror as her mother's hands busy themselves at her neck.  They quickly and effortlessly tie the thing into place and then adjust it, straighten it, pull it tight.  
  
"Thank you."  
  
Myka's mother's busy and knowing hands are next on Myka's cheeks and Jeannie Bering smiles up at Myka, so much taller than her.  
  
"She'll love it," Jeannie says to Myka.  "Helena," her mother clarifies and Myka's brow arches higher.  
  
Myka lowers her head and Jeannie lets her hands fall to her side.  
  
"Mom, Helena and I are not," Myka pauses because she doesn't know what to say until she finally settles on, "It's for Abigail."  
  
Jeannie smiles at Myka and lifts a hand to just over Myka's heart.  She pats Myka there gently.  
  
"Sure, it is," she says softly.  "Abigail's sweet.  I like her."  
  
Myka squints her eyes at her mother whose smile grows as she turns to leave the bathroom.  
  
"Tell Helena that Jane and I say happy birthday."  
  
Myka opens her mouth to speak, moves on her feet to follow her mother in protest but is stopped suddenly when Tracy appears in the doorway with a huge grin and a flat iron in her hand.  
  
"And where do you think you're going?"  
  
"Tracy, I don't have time for this."  
  
"You promised me, Myka Ophelia Bering," Tracy says snapping the flat iron closed several times.  "You said you would let me straighten that curly mane of yours the next time you went out.  And it looks to me like _you_ are going out.  So..."  
  
"I don't like you."  
  
Tracy's grin grows wider.  
  
"You _love_ me."  
  
***  
  
A miniature Abigail answers the Cho's front door and Myka can't immediately tell which one it is until she says, "You again?"  
  
"Nice to see you too, Leila," Myka greets with a smile.  
  
"Abi is putting on her face, you can come inside if you want to."  Leila walks away without another word and Myka steps inside, closes the front door.  
  
"Myka!"  The squeal comes from down the hallway and Myka looks up just in time to see Laila running toward her.  She braces herself and catches the six-year-old.  
  
"Hello Beautiful."  Myka greets the smiling young girl in her arms.  
  
"Are you okay?  Abi said you got hurt and went to the hospital."  Myka sets Laila back to the ground and straightens her back.  It pops several times, loudly, and Laila grimaces before her face turns into wide-eyed panic.  "Did I just break you again?"  
  
"I'm okay," Myka smiles and leans down to place a kiss on Laila's head.  "I was in the hospital but I'm good now.  All better.  Just a bit noisy."  
  
Laila hugs Myka with tiny arms wrapping gently around her waist.  "I'm glad you're fixed.  Ma said her really good friend was your doctor and that you were in good hands."  
  
"I was."  Myka smiles and pats Laila's back. "Speaking of, is your mother here?"  
  
Laila steps back and shakes her head.  "She had a big delivery."  
  
"A big delivery?"  
  
"Triplets."  Abigail's voice calls from down the hallway and Myka immediately turns at the sound.  
  
"Good lord."  Myka sighs, her mouth dropping open at the sight.  
  
Abigail smirks as she comes to stop just in front of Myka.  
  
"Good lord triplets?"  She asks.  
  
Myka blinks several times and arches a brow, "Triplets?  What about triplets?"  
  
Abigail laughs softly and lowers her gaze, shakes her head and looks back up to Myka.  "The big delivery that Ma had scheduled for today is triplets."  
  
"Oh."  Myka puffs out a soft laugh and reaches an arm across her chest to rub at her shoulder.  
  
"Are you okay?"  Abigail's smile is gentle, concerned.  She reaches up to touch where Myka's hand is and her fingers press firmly over the slightly pained spot.  The pain subsides for the few seconds Abigail's fingers are there.  Returns when the smaller girl lowers her hand.  
  
"I broke her," Laila pouts.  "I'm sorry, I forgot."  
  
"Hey Beautiful," Myka smiles and kneels, gestures for Laila to come closer.  "How about another hug?"  
  
Laila furrows her brows, pulls her lips to the side in hesitation.  Myka opens her arms up to the young girl and she smiles, moves forward cautiously and falls into Myka's arms as Myka wraps her up tight.  
  
"See," Myka says softly.  "Not broken at all."  
  
"Laila," Abigail's voice is cautious as she moves past the two of them and to the front door, "please stop trying to steal my girlfriend.  I only _just_ acquired her."  
  
Laila tightens her grasp on Myka and whispers softly into Myka's ear, "Too late."  
  
Myka laughs, kisses Laila's cheek and stands.  
  
"Don't stay up too late, Princess."  
  
Laila grins when Myka taps her nose.  She says, "I won't!" then turns a glare on her older sister with hand on hip, "No hanky panky."  
  
"Right."  Abigail's smile is mischievous as she turns to Myka.  "There may or may not definitely be any trace of hanky panky at all, whatsoever."  
  
Myka smiles, rolls her eyes.  
  
"Huh?" is all Laila can manage in response.  
  
Abigail pulls Myka out of the house.  Closes the door behind them.  
  
***  
  
There is definitely hanky panky.  
  
The second the door locks, Myka pulls Abigail into a kiss and when they part, Abigail shakes her head, playfully admonishes Myka.  
  
"What would Laila think?"  She asks.  "I'm sorry, I mean your _princess_."  
  
Myka grins.  "Hush."  
  
Myka's second attempt at a kiss is thwarted by the sound of a car horn.  
  
"Oh, Darlene."  Myka sighs.  
  
***  
  
Pete takes the long way to Helena's by Myka's request and when they arrive, Myka tells them to go ahead without her.  She stays in the car, Abigail stays with her.  
  
"Lock up when you're done," Pete winks at her.  
  
"Do me a favor, Pete?"  Myka asks, letting her head fall back against the head rest in the back seat.  "Punch yourself in the arm."  
  
"Don't worry," Amanda says, peaking into the car, "I've got this one."  
  
They close their doors and Myka smiles when she hears Pete's faint "ow" in the distance.  
  
***  
  
Abigail slips her hand into Myka's hand which prompts Myka to turn to her and smile.  
  
"Hey," Abigail says softly.  
  
"Hi."  
  
Abigail kisses Myka's cheek.  Says, "You're thinking about Helena."  
  
"Thinking about avoiding Helena."  
  
Myka sighs, shakes her head to brush off the thoughts she has definitely been thinking about Helena.  About being near Helena for the first time since that weekend before school.  Since they spent that afternoon at the lake.  
  
Since before Myka finally asked Abigail out.  
  
Maybe it was against her better judgment to think this thing would just be easy to control, avoiding physical contact with Helena and maintaining an actual relationship with Abigail.  
  
But this relationship with Abigail, too, felt inevitable.  
  
Bound to happen.  
  
Necessary.  
  
***  
  
Abigail's hand on Myka's cheek and Abigail's lips over Myka's lips pull her from her thoughts.  Myka opens her eyes to a bright smile that slowly falls away.  Abigail bites down on her bottom lip, moves closer to her, moves into her lap.  
  
She kisses Myka again.  
  
"Abigail."  Myka whispers wrapping her arms around Abigail's waist with some caution because _this_... is so far out of Abigail's character.   
  
"Let me take your mind off of her?"  
  
"Abi Mei."  Myka's voice is almost scolding but still cautious and gentle, laced with a smile.  
  
"Come here," Abigail whispers.  
  
She tugs at Myka and Myka gives in to the pull like she tends to do, until Abigail is on her back, stretched across the back seat of Pete's mother's car and Myka resting over her.  
  
The smaller girl bites into her bottom lip.  
  
Myka palms her cheek, leans into a kiss.  
  
***  
  
A stray hand trails Abigail's side, palms her hip and slides ever-so-slowly to the small of her back.  
  
Myka leans down into another gentle kiss, pulls Abigail closer at the waist until their hips meet.  The touch elicits the softest whisper of a moan from Abigail.  A sound that makes Myka's heart jump, makes her entire body warm, makes their kiss grow deeper.  
  
They are this way for several minutes before they part and they are breathless when they do.  
  
Myka kisses Abigail's forehead.  
  
"Better?"  Abigail asks softly.  
  
Myka shakes her head and says, "Not quite."  
  
She moves into another kiss and lets her hand slide further down Abigail's side, grips the back of Abigail's thigh and just barely lifts it, moves her own thigh the tiniest bit closer.  
  
That soft sound again escapes Abigail's lips.  
  
Abigail's kisses grow hungry.  
  
***  
  
Myka slides slender fingers up smooth skin.  Pushing fabric up, away.  Exposing more of Abigail's leg.  
  
Fingertips find elastic and cotton.  More of those gentle moans find Myka's ear. They are punctuated only by a sharp gasp when Myka's hand cups the back of Abigail's thigh where the elastic of her underwear meets open skin.  When Myka's thumb simultaneously disappears beyond that elastic and glides against soft skin.  
  
Abigail turns her face away from the next kiss.  Closes her eyes.  Takes in a deep breath.  
  
Myka exhales softly, slowly.  Moves her forehead to touch Abigail's.  Slowly removes her hand from the other girl's thigh, from beneath her dress.  From her legs altogether.  
  
She pushes back strands of loose black curls that fall in Abigail's face.  Cradles Abigail's chin.  
  
"Do you want to stop?"  Myka asks softly.  
  
Abigail nods, turns her face further away.  
  
"It's okay, Abigail."  The only response she receives is a soft whimper of a cry.  "I'm sorry, Beautiful.  Did I hurt you?  Did I do something wrong?"  
  
Abigail shakes her head.  
  
"No."  Her voice is soft.  Almost inaudible.  "It's not you.  It's me.  I just... I can't...right now."  
  
"It's not you either."  Myka kisses her cheek. "It isn't anyone.  It just means we move slower, okay?"  
  
Abigail nods.  
  
"You're okay?"  
  
Abigail nods again, whispers a soft, "I'm okay."  
  
"Okay," Myka nods.  She runs her thumb gently over Abigail's cheek.  Urges Abigail to look at her.  "I adore you, Abi Mei Cho."  
  
The smaller girl laughs softly. Tears falling over the bridge of her nose.  Down the side of her face.  
  
"I adore you, too."  
  
***  
  
"Did it work?"  Abigail asks softly, seconds later.  
  
"Did what work?"  Myka arches a brow, eyes Abigail curiously.  
  
The smaller girl smiles and shakes her head.  
  
"Nothing," she says and wipes her tears.  "Never mind."  
  
Myka smiles.  Sets a gentle kiss against Abigail's lower lip.  The corner of her mouth. Her chin.  
  
"We should go, before they come looking for us."  
  
***  
  
A just-turned twenty-year-old Helena opens the pool house door to Myka with a smile, looks to Abigail with something that is slightly less than a smile but still enough of a smile to seem genuine.  
  
"Long time no see," she says to Abigail.  
  
"Likewise," Abigail responds softly just before turning to Myka.  "I'm going to go find Pete and Amanda."  
  
Myka nods and Abigail heads into the pool house after setting a quick kiss to Myka's cheek.  
  
***  
  
"Your hair," Helena says softly reaching up to touch straight brown locks.  
  
"Hmm," Myka hums a soft laugh and looks away from Helena.  "Tracy," is her only explanation for that.  
  
They're quiet for too long.  
  
Myka feels Helena's eyes on her before she feels Helena stepping closer to her followed immediately by Helena's hands tugging at her bow tie.  Her exhale is noticeable.  
  
Helena smiles and reaches up to set her thumb over the skin above Myka's chin.  She strokes firmly just under the length of Myka's lower lip and holds her hand up to show Myka a streak of glittery pink lip gloss.  
  
"You've been having fun without me."  Helena smirks.  
  
"That's the idea," Myka says.  " _Your_ idea."  
  
Helena's hands are on Myka's suspenders next, grasping tightly just over her stomach, and the older girl leans into her with eyes closed and heavy breath.  
  
Myka can smell the alcohol.  She is no stranger to that smell.  
  
"I miss you, Love."  Helena sighs, she presses the bridge of her nose against Myka's cheek and the touch is so warm it makes Myka want to fall and keep falling and pull Helena down with her as she falls.  Pull Helena into her and never let go, never get up again.  
  
Myka closes her eyes and she lets the warmth radiate in her cheeks and spread throughout her as Helena's breath reaches her neck.  And Helena's hands tug tighter on suspenders, pull Myka closer, slide further down her abdomen until knuckles rest against Myka's waist.  
  
This is the thing that Helena doesn't want.  That Myka has agreed to give up for at least a year.  
  
It has been all of three weeks.  
  
Myka gently removes Helena's hands from her suspenders and moves to brush a ghost of a kiss against Helena's cheek, places a small gift box in her hands.  
  
"Happy birthday, Helena."  
  
Myka steps around the silenced older girl, heads inside the pool house.  
  
***  
  
Abigail must have spent a great deal of her little amount of time inside just staring at the door because as soon as Myka walks in, her eyes find Abigail's.  And it's great timing (not great timing at all) that Helena walks in directly after Myka and also typical that Helena can't help touching her palm to Myka's back as she walks past her.  
  
Abigail averts her eyes, turning herself on a stool at the breakfast bar, and Myka is immediately by her side.  But before she can open her mouth to speak to Abigail, Helena is introducing everyone.  So Myka, instead, puts her hand at the small of Abigail's back and turns the other girl slightly to her.  
  
Slightly toward where Helena now stands between their group, at the kitchenette, and her housemates, seated in the living room.  
  
She has three housemates and Myka files them away in her memory as follows:  
  
Sally is the talkative blonde with the southern accent who is just asking for it when she approaches Pete with hands that reach and touch a little too freely for what Myka assumes is Amanda's attempt at actually tolerating something.  
  
(Myka gives Amanda credit, both silently and also much later on after this evening, for not strangling the girl despite her fingers already shaping themselves to the column of the talkative blonde girl's neck.)  
  
Walter is the short round kid with the platinum white hair that says so little with his mouth and far too much with his eyes.  Myka thinks to herself that if _any_ of Helena's roommates actually were serial criminals or killers, this one would be the one.  
  
And Marcus, tall and handsome barely-tolerable Marcus, is soft-spoken yet conversational and oddly charismatic, judging by the way he and Pete eventually get along over the topic of sports.  
  
Myka is sure that if she weren't always so sure about certain aspects of her life to which these insurances relate, she'd probably find him extremely attractive.  
  
She's also pretty sure that Helena _does_ find him extremely attractive.  
  
***  
  
They are there for far too long when Helena goes to sit next to Tall and Handsome Marcus on the couch with a cup in her hand that Myka is certain is the source of her intoxication.  And Helena sits so close to him that she is _on_ him, much the same way she usually sits with Myka on that very same couch.  
  
Marcus moves his arm to rest against the back of the couch behind where Helena sits and when she moves further into him, he lets his arm fall over her shoulder, around her, _pulls her closer_.  
  
Myka squints, takes in a deep breath.  
  
"Down, Cujo," Abigail says softly from beside her.  
  
"It's not what you think." Myka narrows her eyes.  
  
"You don't even know what I think," Abigail's laugh is incredulous.  
  
"We don't know this guy," Myka sighs, furrows her brow.  "We don't know anything about him and he's... just... and she's just..."  
  
"An adult?" Abigail supplies.  "Fully capable of making her own decisions?"  Abigail leans in closer to Myka and whispers, " _Not_ your girlfriend?"  
  
Myka takes in a deep breath, looks back to where Helena sits with Marcus.  
  
Abigail's hand under Myka's chin urges Myka to look her way and when she does, Abigail's smile has fallen into a soft smirk accompanied by an arched brow.  
  
"Maybe we both need fresh air."  
  
Myka exhales.  
  
"Yes. Air."  
  
***  
  
No longer having to see Helena helps.  No longer having to see Helena with Marcus helps _a lot_.  
  
They are hand-in-hand when Abigail leads Myka to the edge of the pool, turns to Myka with her head down and steps the tiniest bit closer to her.  
  
"Feel better?"  Abigail's voice is soft, her head still bowed.  
  
Myka nods.  
  
"You can push me in if you want," Myka says.  "I probably need to be pushed in.  I _deserve_ to be pushed in."  
  
Abigail looks up at Myka, then to the pool and back to Myka with a smile.  
  
"Up until five seconds ago, there was a very strong probability of that happening." Abigail smirks and shakes her head, looks down again.  
  
"And now?" Myka arches a brow.  
  
"The odds are in your favor," Abigail nods. "That you won't be pushed in.  Despite my still wanting to push you in."  
  
"I'm sorry," Myka sighs.  "We can leave.  I mean, we probably should be leaving.  I can get everyone..."  Myka moves to head back inside and Abigail pulls her back with a gentle tug that instantly stops Myka from moving away from her.  
  
"It's not Helena," Abigail says softly.  
  
"Huh?"  
  
"The reason I want to push you in, it isn't Helena exactly."  
  
"What other reason..."  
  
"I'm used to this thing with you and with Helena and the inevitability of you two.  That you love her.  That you'll always have feelings for her.  I'm used to that."  Abigail shakes her head and rolls her eyes, "I've actually grown to like her."  
  
Myka arches a curious brow.  
  
"Not that much," Abigail puffs out a soft laugh, "like _just barely_ a tolerable amount."  
  
"Then why..."  
  
"It's you."  Abigail nods.  "And your investment _into_ Helena.  The amount of time you spend catering to her emotions, to her so-called needs.  Sometimes I _get_ it, she's like Richy Rich with all the money in the world and no one to love her.  I get that and it makes me more tolerable of her than I think I should be.  Makes me actually feel bad for her."  Abigail takes in a deep breath and lets go of Myka's hand, folds her arms together in front of her and sighs.  She shrugs, goes on to say, "And other times it's obvious that she's toying with you, _manipulating_ you, and I just don't think you see it.  I don't even think _she_ can see it."  
  
"You know you're not the first person to think that," Myka's laugh is soft, disbelieving.  "About Helena.  That she's taking advantage of me or stringing me along or manipulating..."  
  
"No, Myka," Abigail interrupts, clearing her throat, "but I'm the only person left with my vantage point.  The only one standing between you and her.  And I've been doing a lot of thinking, you know."  
  
"I guess that would explain the lack of talking."  Myka nods.  "Also the lack of not-talking."  
  
"Don't get smart with me, you annoyingly handsome person."  Abigail's voice is narrowly audible when she says this but she smiles and Myka crooked-smiles in return.  
  
"What have you been thinking about?"  
  
"You and your learned behavior."  Abigail nods.  "The way you react to Helena, the way you so willingly do what she asks of you.  The way our relationship to one another is dependent entirely on what _Helena_ wants.  How I am no longer buying the age excuse.  Why you two aren't just _together_."  
  
"Okay, so you really have been thinking."  Myka says slowly, cautiously, and nods.  "A _lot_."  
  
Myka turns away now, steps further away from the pool, and Abigail turns to her, watches her.  
  
"Helena doesn't want to be with me," Myka shrugs.  "But she wants me to be happy.  She knows you make me happy."  
  
"That woman wants nothing more than to be with you," Abigail laughs. "She wouldn't invite you here to witness her cozying up to some guy you've never met before, never  _seen_ before, if she didn't want you to notice her in some way.  To remember?  To want?  To react?  Just like you have."  
  
"She's just been drinking," Myka throws her hands in the air.  "She's not entirely herself..."  
  
"You're making excuses for her," Abigail interrupts.  
  
Myka bites down on her bottom lip, lowers her head.  Turns away again.  
  
"What do you want me to do, Abigail?"  And Myka says this completely defeated.  Lifts her eyes to the smaller girl to study her for the first time since their conversation began.  And Abigail's stance is still defensive.  Abigail is shifting her weight from one foot to the other foot.  She reaches up to push hair back behind her ears, crosses her arms in front of her again.  
  
"Myka," Abigail says her name with her eyes low, cast to the ground where her gaze falls into pool water, where her feet stand precariously close to the edge.  
  
And Myka wants to pull her away from the pool, to fold that smaller girl into her arms and apologize for not seeing this hurt that is suddenly bubbling to the surface.  For having some idea that something was wrong because Abigail hasn't been her talkative self lately at all, but not taking the time to ask Abigail what's been on her mind.  
  
"I want you to be with me because you want to be with me," Abigail says finally and she looks up now just as Myka looks up to meet her eyes.  "I don't want you to be with me as a result of Helena's wants, whatever those may be or whatever motive she has for wanting us to be together."  
  
"What makes you think..."  
  
"I want you to date me because you _like_ me, not out of obligation or guilt or want of Helena Wells, and furthermore," Abigail takes in a deep breath.  
  
"Furthermore?"  Myka echoes under her breath and smiles because that is so very Abigail.  
  
"Yes, _furthermore_ , Myka Bering, I want to know _why_ you want to be with me.  Why me?  Why always me?  Why not one of the fifty-seven other girls at school who adore you?  Who are not me."  
  
"Uh, because I like you?"  
  
"Why not girls who are popular, girls who are smarter and prettier, girls who can actually compete with someone like Helena.  Who aren't just safe to fall back on because you know I'll be waiting..."  
  
"Okay, I'm going to stop you right there," Myka says holding her hand up, laughing softly, her expression incredulous.  "What are you even talking about girls who are popular and smarter and prettier than you?  Are you out of your mind, Abigail?"  
  
Abigail turns away from Myka to face the pool, wipes at her eyes, shakes her head.  
  
"I don't care about girls who are _popular_ , Abigail.  Why would they even date me?"  Myka steps to the smaller girl with purpose now and with a hand on her arm turns Abigail around, grabs Abigail's wrists.  She backpedals away from the pool, tugs Abigail forward with her.  "Just in case you get any sly ideas."  
  
Abigail rolls her eyes but smiles.  
  
"And smarter?  Prettier?  Are you _insane_ , Abigail?  There are none."  
  
"You implying that I'm not mentally sound is not helping this situation," Abigail says softly.  
  
"I'm sorry but when you say things like that it makes me think you _aren't_ mentally sound or someone's been saying really stupid..." Myka rolls her eyes up to the sky as the thought hits her.  She sighs and catches Abigail's gaze again.  "Did someone say something to you?  To make you think I wasn't actually interested in you?"  
  
Abigail immediately averts her eyes.  
  
"Who?"  Myka narrows her eyes on Abigail as an angry heat rises in her chest, into her face, warms her cheeks.  "Was it Helena?  Did Helena say something to..."  
  
"No, no."  Abigail is shaking her head.  "Not Helena.  Myka.  And it's not like what they said isn't true or isn't valid?"  
  
"Uh, Abigail, that is _exactly_ what it's like," Myka laughs, sighs, allows her eyes to wander over the landscape of the backyard then pulls Abigail out into the grass, across the yard to where a bench sits in a forgotten corner.  
  
Myka sits, pulls Abigail down next to her but does not let go of her hands.  
  
"Abigail, I adore you.  I have since middle school.  I think I might always," Myka smiles and Abigail lowers her eyes, turns her head away.  "You think you have to compete with other girls at school but you don't.  Even if you think they're smarter and prettier, which they aren't, not a single one of them, Abi, but even if you think that you're forgetting the most important thing."  
  
Abigail turns her eyes back on Myka, waits in silence for her to continue.  
  
"You are one of my closest friends and I don't ever want to lose you."  
  
Abigail lowers her gaze again.  
  
"There is no obligation or coaxing involved with my being with you.  I'm with you because I care about you but also being with you is scary because I'm clumsy and I screw things up and I make mistakes.  And I don't want our friendship to become a casualty of us being together."  
  
Myka sighs, slouches slightly and lets go of her hold on Abigail's hands in favor of rubbing away an ever growing pain in her forehead.  
  
"It sounds like," Abigail speaks slowly as she looks back to Myka, "you don't want to be together.  Not really."  
  
"I do, Abigail."  Myka sits straight again.  "I just don't want to eventually _not_ be together.  I don't want to ruin a great friendship by messing up a relationship."  
  
"So don't ruin it."  
  
Myka arches a brow at Abigail and sighs out a soft laugh.  
  
"I don't actually know what I'm doing," Myka says.  "I don't actually know if I'm any good at being in a relationship."  
  
"And I do?"  Abigail asks.  She shakes her head before Myka can respond.  "Myka, I'm clueless.  Far more than those fifty-seven other girls."  
  
"Fifty seven, hmm?"  
  
Abigail nods.  
  
"I bet you have a list of all their names in alphabetical order with a tally beside each one that denotes how many times they've encroached upon your territory by talking to me."  
  
Abigail glares at Myka in silence for a while before she says, "You don't know me."  
  
Myka winks and kisses her.  
  
"The only girl I care about is the one making the hit list."  Myka kisses her again.  
  
"And the one who, only very narrowly, did not make the list."  Abigail arches a brow.  
  
"Speaking of, we should probably go get Pete and Amanda..."  
  
"Here you are!"  
  
As if on cue, Amanda is stalking toward them from across the yard.  
  
"What's wrong with you?"  Myka chuckles.  
  
"Your girlfriend," and Amanda turns immediately to Abigail and says, "sorry, no offense, old habits," then back to Myka, " _Helena_ is freaking the fuck out.  She's locked herself in the bathroom and she's refusing to come out."  
  
Just then Myka's mobile phone rings and she's on her feet, pulling Abigail up beside her, eyeing the display on her phone.  
  
"Ms. Calder's calling me."  Myka looks back to Abigail while answering the phone, bringing the thing to her ear.  Vanessa Calder is talking before Myka can even manage a hello.  
  
"Myka, Honey, are you with Helena?  Or do you know where she's at?  She just called me, she sounded pretty scared."  
  
"I'm at her place right now.  I'm just about to go in and talk to her."  
  
"Okay, I'm on my way into town.  I'll be about twenty minutes, if you can calm her down."  
  
"What did she say?"  
  
"She said a  _he_ followed her into her bathroom.  She didn't say who _he_ was.  Should I be calling the cops, Myka?"  
  
Myka takes in a deep, steady breath.  
  
"I'm not sure, Ms. Calder," she says and exhales, "but I'll find out."  
  
***  
  
This scene looks vaguely familiar.  
  
Talkative Blonde Sally is sitting with Tall and Handsome Marcus, now Tall and Handsome and Bloody-Nosed Marcus, on the edge of Helena's bed.  And Sally is holding a cloth to Marcus's bloody nose, both of them glaring across the room at Pete. 

The Platinum-Haired would-be serial criminal is standing in a far corner of the room, trying very hard not to be noticed but this only makes Myka notice him even more and that fact alone doesn't sit well with her resolve.  
  
Pete is outside the bathroom door trying to coax Helena to come out and Myka hears a soft and defiant, "I want Myka," just as she approaches Pete's side.  
  
"What happened?"  Myka asks looking back to Sally and Marcus.  
  
"H.G.'s tripping balls, Mykes."  Pete says in a whisper.  
  
"Ms. Calder said she called her.  She said a _he_ followed her into the bathroom?"  Myka gestures to where Sally sits with Marcus on the bed.  
  
"She was freaking out and he had his hands on her.  I decked him before he could get a word in but he says he was just trying to calm her down."  Pete shrugs.  "And she just freaked out even more."  
  
"And you just took his word for it?  Over Helena's?"  
  
"Well no, I _hadn't_.  Until she started freaking out on _me_ , Mykes."  
  
"I wasn't trying to hurt her," Marcus speaks up.  Myka crosses her arms and turns her glare on him.  "I would never hurt Helena.  I _like_ Helena."  
  
"So you only hurt people you _don't_ like?"  Myka counters.  "You want to try putting your hands on me?"  
  
"Hey, look who has the nerve to talk."  Marcus gestures to Pete before turning back to Myka, "And don't twist my words."  
  
"I'm simply reiterating the point that _you_ just made," Myka argues.  
  
"I'm not going to waste my time arguing with a high schooler."  Marcus shakes his head.  
  
Myka turns back to Pete, "I hope you _broke_ his nose."  
  
"Um, I didn't do that, Mykes."  Pete arches a brow.  
  
"You said you decked him, Pete."  
  
"Yeah, in his jaw, Mykes.  That's my signature punch."  Pete smirks and shakes his head, points at Marcus's still-bleeding nose.  "That's all H.G. and her crazy drunken Kung Fu."  
  
Myka turns her glare back on Marcus with arms crossed, tilts her head, "Gee, I can't imagine why Helena would need to use her self-defense training on someone for absolutely no reason at all."  
  
"Maybe you should hear him out," Amanda interjects.  "It's not like Helena has never overreacted before."  Myka isn't sure what look she gives Amanda but the older girl takes a step back where she stands in Helena's doorway and then says, "Or not."  
  
"Look, you can ask her yourself," Marcus says standing up now.  "It's not like we haven't done it before.  And she was _all_ about it until she suddenly wasn't at all about it."  
  
"All about what, exactly?"  Myka asks.  
  
"What do you mean all about _what_?  What do you think?"  Marcus says.  "She just started freaking out, pushing me away, hitting me.  I was trying to calm her down.  She shoved me into the wall. Unprovoked."  
  
"Unprovoked?  Right," Myka laughs.  "Here's some advice for you, _Marcus_ ," Myka steps toward him, "if a girl starts pushing you away, turn your dumb ass around and _walk_ _away_."  
  
"If the girl I care about starts freaking out, I'm not going to just let her freak out.  I'm going to try and comfort her," Marcus counters.  
  
"By all means, let her freak out," Myka's arms are in the air, challenging.  Myka steps closer to Marcus, holds up her finger and says, "Because the alternative is either going to be Pete's fist to your jaw _again_ or my knee in your groin."  Myka stops just a foot away from the much older, much taller Marcus and narrows her eyes on him before saying softly, "Do you _want_ to be able to have children, Marcus?"  
  
"Okay, y'all need to chill out," Sally interjects.  "Just go get Helena to come out and explain what happened so we can get the hell out of here."  
  
"I don't have time for this, anyway." Marcus turns to Sally, then Walter.  "Let's just go."  
  
Pete, who Myka realizes is standing, has been standing, right beside her the entire time, steps up to Marcus now.  "Sorry dude but you're not going anywhere until we figure out what happened."  Pete turns back to Myka and nods, turns back to Marcus.  "We're a pretty protective bunch when it comes to H.G., so you can either stay voluntarily or we can call the cops.  Totally your decision."  
  
Marcus stares between Pete and Myka for a solid minute before he sits, defeated, back on the bed beside Sally.  
  
"Fine."  
  
Pete pulls Myka back toward the bathroom door, whispers, "Mykes, I'm pretty sure H.G. drank too much."  
  
"I haven't been gone that long, Pete.  She was fine when I left."  
  
Pete shakes his head and narrows his eyes on Myka, "I know drunk when I see drunk, Mykes."  
  
"That doesn't mean he has a right to put his hands on her," Myka says angrily.  "If she told him to back off, I don't care how much she's had to drink.  I don't care how badly she overreacted.  He doesn't have a right."  
  
"I agree with you, Mykes.  That's not what I'm saying."  Pete shakes his head and shrugs.  "I'm just letting you know.  This guy isn't Leo."  
  
Pete crosses his arms and Myka sighs, running her hand through her hair before turning toward the bathroom door and knocking softly.  
  
"Helena."  
  
Silence.  
  
"Helena, it's Myka.  Can you open the..."  
  
The lock clicks before Myka can finish asking.  And Myka turns to look back to where Abigail stands just beside Amanda in the doorway to Helena's bedroom.  
  
"Couple minutes."  Myka's voice is steady but her tone is pleading because if this wasn't relevant to the conversation they had just had, Myka did not know what else possibly could be.  
  
Abigail nods one single, defeated nod and turns away.  
  
***  
  
Myka locks the door behind her just before Helena falls into her arms, throws her arms entirely around Myka, and pulls the both of them to the ground by relinquishing all of her strength and the weight of herself to Myka.  
  
Myka, in the approximately two seconds it takes for them to hit the ground, adjusts her stance so that her knees bend just so and Helena falls mostly in her arms before she falls into the carpeted floor.  Before Myka falls over her.  
  
Helena's hands are on Myka's bow tie, then over Myka's chest, then tugging Myka closer with hands clutching suspenders that pull lips so closely together Myka can feel the heat of Helena's breath moving over and through her own lips.  Against her own tongue.  
  
"Hello."  Myka greets softly, smiles down on Helena then pushes herself up with palms against floor to put something a little closer to _space_ in-between the two of them.  
  
"Hi, my Love," Helena whispers softly, sadly, and Myka smells the alcohol on her breath still, though it is no stronger than it was before.  No more intolerable.  
  
Myka shifts the weight of her upper body onto one arm so that she is not directly on top of Helena.  
  
The older girl closes here eyes as tears slip through and fall into a steady path toward Helena's temples, past Helena's ears, into her hair.  
  
"Are you okay?"  Myka brings her free hand to Helena's forehead, strokes the skin there gently with her thumb before pushing her fingers through Helena's hair and pushing dark strands to the floor.  
  
Helena inhales deeply as her hands release their hold on Myka's suspenders and move to Myka's sides, grasp tightly onto her shirt.  
  
She opens her eyes, shakes her head.  
  
Myka's smile is soft as she moves to shift her weight onto her other arm, now resting on Helena's other side, but Helena's palms open to press firmly over her sides, stopping her from moving her weight completely away from where she now rests on top of Helena.  
  
"Stay," Helena says softly.  "Please?"  
  
Myka tilts her head to the side, moves her hands to Helena's hair and gently runs the tips of fingernails against scalp.  
  
"Okay." Myka makes her voice gentle and cautious.  As she would when speaking to a child.  
  
Helena lets her eyes close again.  
  
"Tired."  
  
"Hey," Myka moves her right hand to Helena's cheek, runs her thumb gently over it.  "Stay awake."  
  
Helena's eyes open again just before she pouts.  
  
"Hi," Myka smiles.  
  
"I'm an idiot," Helena says letting her head lull to the side.  
  
"No, you're not."  Myka shakes her head, leans down with every intention of setting a kiss against Helena's cheek but stops herself just before her lips touch warm skin.  "Why do you say that?"  
  
Helena looks back to Myka, her blinks slow and exaggerated.  
  
"Letting you go."  Helena's grip tightens on Myka's sides.  
  
"I haven't actually gone anywhere."  Myka wipes Helena's tears.  
  
Helena takes in another deep breath.  
  
"You know what I mean."  Her head lulls to the side again, eyes heavy with sleep.  "I should have kept you for myself."  
  
Myka bites back her smile. Whispers, "You really have had too much to drink, haven't you?"  
  
Helena turns back to Myka and arches a brow before her eyelids fall to slits and her eyes begin to roll up beneath them.  
  
"Hey, Helena."  Myka pats her cheek softly.  "Stay awake, please?  Why are you so tired?"  
  
Helena moans her protest.  Shakes her head.  
  
"I didn't drink enough," Helena whispers.  
  
"I think you drank plenty."  Myka smiles.  "I think _that's_ the problem."  
  
"No," Helena opens her eyes now, more tears falling, "I had two.  I feel like I had ten."  
  
Myka arches a brow, "And exactly how much alcohol was in each of those two drinks?"  
  
"I don't know."  
  
"You don't know?"  
  
"I don't know.  I didn't make them."  
  
"You need water, Helena."  
  
Helena sighs and moves her hands up Myka's sides, brings them back to the bow-tie and tugs until it loosens.  Slender fingers untie the bow and pull it slowly from the collar of Myka's shirt.  
  
"Hey." Myka feigns upset.  "That wasn't exactly easy to put on."  
  
Helena bites her bottom lip, tosses the thing away and brings her fingers back to Myka's shirt.  She toys with the top button until that, too, comes loose, followed by a second.  
  
Helena's fingertips touch lightly against the skin that had been hidden there and draw straight lines down from Myka's throat to the skin just above her heart.  
  
Myka closes her eyes, takes in a deep breath. Tries to control the unending series of shudders that pulsates through her body which only grows warmer with the touch.  With every line that Helena traces down the column of her neck.  
  
"Helena, stop."  
  
She does, letting her hands freeze where they are.  And when Helena's eyes meet Myka's eyes, Helena's fingers also rise to touch Myka's neck.  She runs thumbs along Myka's jaw, gently pulls Myka closer, closes her eyes.  
  
Myka sighs, closing her own eyes.  
  
"Abigail is right."  
  
This stops Helena altogether and when they open their eyes to one another, Helena's look is mostly confusion.  Myka knows her own expression likely lingers somewhere between defeat and sorrow.  
  
"Abigail is right about what?"  Helena looks and sounds more sober now than she has in the past ten minutes.  
  
"About you," Myka says softly, "about me."  
  
Helena flattens her palms against Myka's chest and gently pushes her up and away and Myka goes willingly.  Sits up to where she is straddling Helena's hips and lingers there for several seconds in momentary awe before she pulls herself away to sit beside Helena.  
  
Helena sits up, runs a hand through the length of her hair and looks away from Myka.  
  
"And what does the creature have to say about me?  And about you?"  Helena's voice is already challenging and Myka only hesitates for a second.  
  
Myka looks down at where Helena's left hand falls, palm against the floor, just between them.  Her ring is still there.  
  
"I told you why we couldn't do this," Myka says.  "I told you I don't want to hurt Abigail."  
  
Helena turns to her and furrows her brows.  Says, "But you don't mind hurting me?"  
  
"Hurting you?"  Myka is first annoyed and just a little bit angry but then she smiles, puffs out a soft laugh.  "I'm hurting you, Helena?  By doing exactly what you wanted?"  
  
"I don't want it anymore," Helena quips.  
  
Myka shakes her head, laughs some more.  "Pete's right. You're drunk, Helena."  
  
"I'm not drunk, Myka."  Helena's face falls into a pout and begins to transform into something like anger.  "I had two drinks.  I'm not drunk.  You of all people should know that..."  
  
"Stop saying that," Myka interrupts, narrowing her eyes on Helena. Raises her voice above a whisper. "Stop saying that I should know.  I _know_ that I know.  I don't need to be reminded of it every single time you decide to drink and make stupid decisions."  
  
They both fall quiet.  
  
Myka brings her hand to her forehead, rubs at the hint of a headache that begins to pulsate there.  She sighs again and runs a hand through her straight hair, suddenly missing her curls, before turning slightly back to Helena.  
  
Helena's head is lowered into her hand.  
  
"I need you to know what you want," Myka says quietly.  "Because you tell me one thing one day and you do the exact opposite the next day.  You told me you didn't want this.  No kissing, no cuddling, no hand holding.  Remember that, Helena?  Remember me being too young for you?  And _now_?  Now that I'm _with_ Abigail?  After you told me you wanted me to be... because you didn't want me waiting?  Because..."

"I didn't know," Helena says softly.

"Excuse me?"

"I thought it was the same as always, with you two just hanging out.  I didn't know you were _with_ her already, Myka.  I'm sorry, I didn't..."  
  
The older girl is quiet, head still lowered.  Myka takes in a deep breath and turns away from Helena.  She clears her throat, shakes her head.  Doesn't let her voice soften.  
  
"What happened with Marcus?"  
  
"Nothing."  
  
"He has a nosebleed that says a little bit more than _nothing_ , Helena."  
  
Helena sighs and sits up, she leans to one side.  So much so that Myka, for a second, thinks she might have to catch her again.  
  
"Are you two... together?"  Myka looks back to Helena who meets her eyes with that guilty look that Myka has seen before.  Myka turns away, pushing her own hair back behind her ears and shrugging.  "It's okay if you are.  I mean... it's none of my business really.  I have Abigail, you should have someone, too..."  
  
"It's my fault," Helena says quietly.  
  
Myka turns back to Helena and waits.  
  
"I wanted to like him," Helena continues. "I _did_ like him.  I mean, I was fine with the way things were.  I don't need him to love me.  I don't need to love him.  It was fine that way.  A distraction..."  
  
Myka moves closer to Helena, sits with her legs crossed just beside where Helena sits the same way.  
  
"I thought living in the same house would make it _complicated_ but it's been fine.  Everything was fine until..."  Helena's voice trails off and she looks up at Myka with that guilty expression again.  "Today."  
  
"What happened today?"  
  
"I came home," Helena says looking away.  "I invited you over.  I told you to bring Abigail. I _saw_ you together."  
  
Myka sighs, bites her lip.  
  
"It's not fine anymore."  Helena's head falls back into her hand.  
  
She groans softly and leans back and this time Myka does prepare to catch her, places her hand on Helena's back as she falls back, until she is laying on the floor again, staring up at the ceiling.  
  
"He was just doing what we have always done.  It's not his fault."  Helena says this quietly before throwing her arm across her forehead.  
  
Myka leans in over Helena to push that arm away, arches her brow.  "And the nosebleed?"  
  
"He followed me into the bathroom.  I know he didn't mean any harm by it, I know that now."  Helena's head lulls to the side and she closes her eyes.  "But I... I didn't _see_ Marcus."  Helena opens her eyes again and turns to Myka.  "I saw _him_."  
  
"Him?"  
  
Helena holds her gaze.  
  
"Leo?"  
  
Helena seems to wince at he sound of that name.  She turns her head away again.  
  
"Helena."  
  
"I'm so tired, Myka."  
  
Myka stretches out beside Helena, leaning against the floor, propped up on an elbow.  She reaches her free hand to Helena's cheek and the older girl tilts her head into the touch and sighs.  Myka's fingers move to her temple, to wisps of baby hairs, through dark strands, over and behind Helena's ear.  
  
Helena's eyes begin to flutter closed and Myka knows this look because she's watched Helena fall asleep countless times before.  
  
Just as Helena's eyelids shut, just as Helena's breathing begins to soften and even out, Myka's phone rings in her back pocket.  Brown eyes gaze up at her once again as she reaches for her phone and answers it.  
  
"Ms. Calder?"  
  
"Is that Vanessa?"  Helena's sleep-coated voice questions.  Myka nods.  
  
"I'm in the driveway, can you come get the gate?"  
  
"Is she here?"  Helena's look is entirely hopeful.  
  
Myka nods again.  
  
"I'll head out there now," Myka says but before she can finish her conversation, Helena is sitting, standing, moving to and unlocking the bathroom door.  "Helena?"  
  
"I have to see Vanessa."  
  
The older girl is out the door.  
  
***  
  
Pete leaves with Myka as she follows Helena and tells everyone else to stay put, asks Amanda to make sure the others don't leave.  He makes it to the driveway before Myka and stops just at the open gate that Helena had run through moments before.  
  
Pete doesn't go any further.  
  
Myka approaches asking, "Pete, where's Helena?"  
  
Pete is staring outside of the gate with wide eyes and a wide open mouth as Myka pushes at the heavy wooden door.  
  
Pete turns to her, stops her from pushing the gate any further.  
  
"Uh, Mykes?  You might not want to see this..."  
  
Myka arches a brow.  
  
"Pete?  Don't be ridiculous.  Is Ms. Calder here?"  
  
Myka pushes at the door again.  
  
"Yeah, Mykes, she's... _definitely_ here," Pete says and on Myka's next push, he lets the door fly open.  
  
Myka stops now, too, upon seeing what she is seeing.  And she pushes her glasses further up on her nose to make sure she's _actually_ seeing what she thinks she's seeing when she sees Helena's hands on Ms. Calder's face and Helena's lips on Ms. Calder's mouth and Ms. Calder's hands at Helena's waist, _around_ Helena's waist, and moving further up her sides.  
  
"Is that..."  
  
"It is," Pete is nodding.  
  
"Are they..."  
  
"They are," Pete still nods.  
  
And to Vanessa Calder's credit, she is using the grip she has on Helena's sides to push her away from that kiss.  Though there is very little effort at all when she pushes.  There is very little urgency.  And there exists, in that touch, no panic or shock or any of the things you would expect to see in the touch of someone who has never been kissed by that other someone before.  
  
"What is happening?"  Pete asks, his voice low.  "That _is_ your super hot English teacher from last year, isn't it?"  
  
Myka can do more than shake her head and she doesn't know why she shakes her head because yes that is her super hot English teacher from last year.  The very same English teacher whose classroom Helena spent an hour of her every day in being what Myka always knew was too happy, being what Myka always thought was too playfully scolded.  
  
And Myka had guessed that Helena was a little smitten with the older woman because Myka had never seen Helena so _compliant,_ so _pliable_ under the gaze of a teacher or anyone at all, including Giselle.  But this...  
  
This... is not smitten.  
  
This is something much larger than smitten.  Much larger than a crush.  Much larger, even, than unrequited.  
  
Myka doesn't realize they've stopped kissing or how much closer she is to them, how much closer Pete has _pulled_ her toward them, until she hears Vanessa Calder tell Helena, "Sweetheart, I don't think that's a good idea."  
  
And Helena is just a notch below begging when she responds, tears streaming down her face, saying, "Vanessa, please?  Please?  I miss you.  I want to go home with _you_.  Please take me home?"  
  
Vanessa Calder sighs and looks to Myka and Pete as if she is only now realizing they are present.  Helena leans into Vanessa Calder, turns the other way, away from Myka, buries her face into a shoulder, into long blonde hair.  
  
"Myka." The older woman smiles and rests her head against Helena's as the older girl wraps her arms entirely around Vanessa.  "Pete."  
  
"You know me?"  Pete asks.  
  
"Everybody in school knows who you are, Pete."  Ms. Calder answers with a smile.  "Is everything okay?  Inside?  Can I take her home?"  
  
"She _is_ home," Myka says with some caution.  
  
"Myka, I'm sorry, I meant my home.  It used to be..."  Ms. Calder sighs and shakes her head, "I'm sorry, Myka."  
  
Myka doesn't know why the older woman apologizes to her but strangely, it helps.  It hurts a little less.  
  
"Look, we just want to make sure H.G. is okay so we can get away from these weirdo roommates of hers," Pete explains.  
  
"I'm fine," Helena's voice comes, muffled by the fabric of Vanessa Calder's top.  Helena stands straight, looks at Vanessa Calder before turning to Pete and nodding, "Marcus didn't do anything, I just... I'm just really tired."  Helena's eyes fall on Myka, "And I don't want to be here all night by myself."  
  
Myka is sure she's glaring at Helena because the older girl crosses her arms in front of her and turns away with her head low.  And Myka doesn't stop glaring until Vanessa Calder asks Pete to help her do some damage control and they disappear into the backyard, toward the pool house.  
  
Myka sighs, shakes her head, walks away and Helena is calling her name softly from behind her, following.  But Myka doesn't stop.  She just walks.  Further down the driveway, all the way to the sidewalk, and two houses over before Helena finally puts herself in Myka's path, puts her hands on Myka's arms, and physically stops her from walking.  
  
Helena's hands are next on Myka's face, and they're cold against warm tears, warm cheeks.  Myka turns away but Helena gently pulls Myka's gaze back on her.  
  
"I don't even want to know," Myka manages before Helena can begin to say anything.  
  
"Myka."  
  
Myka shakes her head, "I don't want to know."  
  
"I'm sorry, Myka," Helena says softly.  "For me.  That you have to put up with me.  For all of my indecision and insecurities.  That I tell you I want nothing and then ask you for everything.  I'm so sorry, Myka."  
  
Myka says nothing, she looks away from Helena.  Somewhere over her shoulder, further along the sidewalk, at empty streets, dark houses, up at a starlit sky, down at the ground.  
  
Helena drops her hands to Myka's shoulders, steps closer and into Myka's vision.  Captures her wandering eyes.  Moves her arms around Myka's neck until they are so close that they are too close.  Again. As always.  
  
"I do know what I want, Myka." Helena looks down at Myka's lips, up to her eyes again.  "I know _exactly_ what I want."  
  
That twist in Myka's belly.  It's there.  Profoundly.  Despite Myka's apprehension.  Despite Myka's disbelief.  Myka's heartbreak and abandonment and shattered resolve.  It is still there.  
  
"But I can't have it," Helena finishes softly.  "I can't have you."  
  
Myka closes her eyes and shakes her head.  
  
"I can't do this," Myka finally cries.  
  
"Can't do what, Love?"  
  
"This, Helena. With you.  All the time.  Every year.  Every month, everyday."  
  
"Myka?"  
  
"I am so stupid."  Myka opens her eyes, reaches her hands up to Helena's arms, still over her shoulders, and pulls them away.  "I should have listened to Giselle... to Amanda... to everyone."  Myka lets Helena's arms fall away from her.  
  
"Giselle and Amanda?" Helena's voice, though near inaudible, already sounds hurt when she says this.  
  
"I need to walk," Myka breathes out.  She shakes her head and moves past Helena.  "I need to walk very far away from here."  She keeps walking down the sidewalk, away from the older girl.  
  
"Myka, wait." Helena is close behind Myka, grabs onto her arm and turns her around.  
  
"No, I'm _not_ waiting, Helena."  Myka is crying.  "That's exactly what you told me not to do. _Wait_. Except you told me that you didn't want me waiting for my own benefit when really it was for your benefit, right?  Helena?  Because you can't or don't want to be with me?  Because you have someone already?  Because you have plenty of options already and I'm just some silly little girl with a crush, right?  Not an adult, not someone who can _actually_ love you or," Myka shakes her head, " _make_ _love_ to you."  
  
"Myka, what are you talking about?"  
  
"Marcus, Helena?"  Myka gestures back toward Helena's house, "How long have you been doing what you're apparently doing often with him?"  
  
Helena's mouth opens, then closes wordlessly.  
  
"And Ms. Calder?  I mean, I figured you had a crush on her but that's..." Myka is nodding now.  "Giselle said you had issues, Helena, she said you had secrets and I didn't believe her.  Amanda warned me about loving you too much because you love too much and I _stood up_ for you."  
  
"Myka," Helena chokes out.  
  
"I stood up for you, Helena, because you're my absolute best friend and how _could_ I let anyone mistreat you or talk bad about you?  And how could I love you _too much_?  How is that even _possible_?  And I _thought_ I knew you but I, apparently, don't know anything about you!"  
  
"Myka, please." Helena is in tears now.  "Myka, please don't..."

Myka shakes her head, looks away.  
  
"I told you, Helena, that if you didn't want to be with me, you didn't need an excuse.  You just needed to be honest.  I _told_ you that," Myka cries.  
  
"Myka, I want nothing _more_ than to be with you," Helena is sobbing now.  "It's what I want more than anything."  
  
"If you really wanted that, Helena, you would have it.  You don't seem to have a problem getting everything else you want.  You don't have a problem being with Marcus or kissing my English teacher.  You don't have a problem trying to take back all the things that you made me promise to you not even a month ago.  So why, Helena, do you have a problem being with me?"  
  
"You already know why," Helena's voice falls soft and Myka sees her trembling as she wraps her arms around herself, turns slightly away. "You're not ready, Myka.  _I'm_ not ready."  
  
"Because I'm fifteen?  Because you're twenty?"  Myka shakes her head.  "Did that stop you from whatever it is you have with Ms. Calder?  What is she, like thirty?  Did ten years stop you, Helena?"  
  
"No, Myka!" Helena covers her mouth, she lowers her voice.  "It didn't.  _That_ is the problem.  It didn't stop us."  
  
"What...?"  
  
" _You're_ right.  _Giselle_ is right.  _Amanda_ is right," Helena covers her entire face with her hands now, lets go of a loud groan, turns slightly away from Myka.  "I'm sorry, Myka.  I have these feelings that I cannot control... that I can't manage... because it didn't stop me or her from being together but _she_ stopped loving me.  She stopped loving me when I never stopped loving her and I don't... I don't want you to feel the way I do, Myka.  For Vanessa but with me. I don't want that for you... if it happens.  If we're ever together, Myka."  
  
Myka can't think of any actual words to say.  
  
"And I still don't understand why it stopped for her and why it hasn't stopped for me.  How she can stop loving me when I still love her.  How you can love me the same way I loved her and I can't stop loving you.  I don't understand why I still feel this way."  
  
More silence.  
  
"And what if it does stop?  What if I only feel this way about you because that's what I wanted most from her?  What if that's all this is and I leave you like this, Myka?  I can't do that to you."  
  
Helena turns completely away from Myka now.  
  
"I thought Marcus would fix it.  I thought _being_ with Marcus could make the feelings go away, help me move on like it helped her move on.  Before it even becomes a problem."  Helena's tears are relentless, her entire body shaking.  "It didn't work.  I'm sorry, Myka.  I tried.  It didn't work."  
  
Myka slowly steps to Helena, where she stands turned away from Myka, and stops just short of touching the older girl's back. Just short of pulling that girl into her and holding her in the way she really wants to hold her.  To cradle her in her arms.

Myka doesn't move.  
  
"It's me.  It has to be me, right?  There's something wrong with me? That I just cling to her?  To you?"  Helena turns around then.  "There's something wrong with me that being with Marcus didn't work?  I like him, he's handsome, he's nice, he's... he makes me feel..."  Helena let's her voice trail off before she adds, "But it isn't the same.  It doesn't feel the same."  Helena takes in a deep breath, lowers her head.  "Not even Giselle felt the same."  
  
"There's nothing wrong with you, Helena," Myka sighs, "I didn't mean that, I'm just..." Myka lowers her eyes.  "There's nothing wrong with you.  For not liking Marcus."  
  
"I'm sorry, Myka," Helena wipes at her own tears, "I don't know how to fix this.  I don't think I can fix it this time."

"I don't..." Myka starts and shakes her head, "I don't think I can fix it either."  
  
Helena's eyes are immediately on Myka, wide and sad and full of so much guilt, before they fall to the ground again, before she nods in defeat.  
  
"I think... maybe... we need more space than previously anticipated."  Myka is biting down on her lip a bit too hard when Helena's eyes meet hers again.  "I adore Abigail, she's a good friend, she's an amazing girlfriend, and I don't want to hurt her like this.  Doing what we're doing right now.  Going back and forth.  Because I want to be _so close_ to you right now, Helena.  But I... I don't want to hurt her and the only way that I will be able to accomplish that... is by not seeing you... for a while."  
  
"I don't want to hurt _you_ , Myka," Helena's voice is barely a whisper when she steps closer to Myka.  "If that's the only way..."  
  
Myka lowers her head.  "I think... it is."  
  
Helena runs a hand through her own hair, crosses her arms in front of her again and nods.  
  
"Okay."  Helena bites down on her lip now, closes her eyes.  "Space." She wipes at her eyes and steps away from Myka, moves to the curb and sits.  "Ironically enough," Helena says looking back up at Myka and following her movements as Myka sits beside her, "This feels..."  
  
"Like a break up," Myka finishes.  
  
Helena gives Myka a small smile, leans slightly into her, and says, "You even complete my sentences."  
  
Myka smirks, nods, pushes hair back as she turns to face Helena.  She puts a gentle hand on Helena's knee.  
  
"There's nothing wrong with you, Helena.  I'm sorry I said that, I was just upset.  I'm still a little upset..."  
  
"I'm sorry... that I upset you," Helena whispers.  
  
Myka shrugs, rolls her eyes.  "We're really good at this."  
  
"Like we're already married," Helena sighs and Myka puffs out a soft laugh before turning to Helena, catching her gaze again.  "I love you, Myka.  I really do. Despite all our fights. I love our fights, too."  
  
Myka hums softly, bites back a smile before leaning into Helena and leaving a kiss on her forehead.  
  
"I love you, too.  My beautiful wife."  Myka smiles fully now, "My birthday girl."  
  
Helena is _trying_ not to smile at that as Myka wipes the older girl's tears away.  
  
"Helena, if you need me..." Myka sighs, "...to talk, to be there for you, if you _really_ need me.  I will be here for you but... if I need to pull back?  If _we_ need to pull back...  
  
"We will, Myka." Helena presses her lips together tightly and nods.  "I understand."  
  
"You're still my best friend," Myka adds.  
  
"You're mine," Helena responds slipping her hand into Myka's and lacing their fingers. 

Myka doesn't take her eyes of Helena, in these few minutes where they sit together, in peace, in quiet.  She watches Helena, smiles when Helena looks back to her.  When Helena smiles, too.  Closes her eyes when Helena leans in, until their foreheads are touching. Until they are resting together this way, listening only to each other's breath.  Breathing only when the other breathes.

After a long while, too long of a while, Helena speaks first.  "We should probably... head back."  
  
Myka sighs, "Actually, I think I'm... going to walk home."  
  
They stand, Myka helping Helena to her feet and steadying her when she almost stumbles backward.  
  
"Still not drunk?"  Myka smiles.  
  
Helena rolls her eyes, yawns, leans into Myka's shoulder and hugs her tightly.  Myka returns the hold with her hands over Helena's arms, around her back.  
  
"Go to bed," Myka says turning into Helena's hair, kissing the back of her head.  And Helena stands straight then, gives Myka that pitiful pouted look she is so tempted by, slips her hand back into Myka's.  
  
"Please walk safely, Love."  
  
And Helena, on the tips of her toes and with her free hand against Myka's shoulder, leans in to set a gentle kiss against Myka's lips.  A kiss that Myka's sure is meant to be meaningless but a kiss they both know means more than either of them can really say in this moment.  
  
So they say nothing.  Not a single word.  Even as they both take a step back followed by another step back.  Even as their hands, outstretched and just barely grasping the others, fall apart.  Even as they turn to walk in opposite directions, even when they both, at once, look over their shoulders to see the other looking back at them, they say nothing.  
  
They especially do not say goodbye.  
  
***  
  
Myka is almost out of Helena's housing development when Pete pulls up, driving Darlene along the sidewalk where Myka continues to walk.  
  
The passenger window rolls down and Amanda sticks her head out.  
  
"Hey."  
  
Myka stops walking and turns to her, "Hey."  
  
"You want a ride or are you planning to walk all the way home?"  
  
Myka looks further up the street, where the edge of Helena's neighborhood opens up mostly to a quiet tree-lined avenue and beyond that empty fields.  Myka turns back to Amanda.  
  
"I think I'll walk," Myka nods.  
  
The back door opens and Abigail gets out.  The look on her face not at all pleased.  Her arms crossed.  
  
"I think I'll walk, too," Abigail says softly.  
  
"You sure?"  Amanda's voice is cautious and low, she looks back to Pete and says, "I think they have some shit to work out."  
  
"You could say that," Abigail nods.  
  
"Yeah, I think we do," Myka leans down far enough to see Pete.  "If I'm not home by morning, please check the fields for my body."  
  
"Sure, Mykes," Pete says, "but the last thing I'm going to do is snitch on a tiny angry Asian girl, so consider your ass cold cased."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and stands straight.  
  
"Bye Pete."  
  
"Have fun," Amanda grins, rolling up the window.  
  
"Oh we will," Abigail all but growls.  
  
***  
  
"You left me," Abigail says.  
  
"I'm sorry," Myka lowers her head.  
  
"I want so badly to be standing next to Helena's pool again," Abigail continues.  "But I also want to never stand anywhere near Helena's pool or Helena's house ever again. Or Helena for that matter.  So the faster we walk in the opposite direction the bet..."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes as she steps into Abigail's space and pulls the smaller girl into her and kisses her mouth, still trying to say words, still trying to be mad at Myka.  Until it stops moving to the shape of words and starts moving to the shape of the kiss that Myka is desperately needing from Abigail right now.  
  
And when they part, Abigail is breathless and wide-eyed and then glaring and then suspicious.  
  
"What was _that_ for?"  
  
"It was for you, Abigail," Myka says softly.  She leans into another kiss, this time Abigail's lips are compliant from the very start, and the kiss is gentler, less _Myka being needy_ and more _Myka needing to give something of herself away_.  And when they part, Myka smiles and says, "As was that."  
  
Abigail's suspicious glare returns.  
  
"Also," Myka swallows the lump in her throat, "for being more mentally sound than I previously gave you credit for."  She fails miserably at hiding the break in her voice before tears rush from her eyes.  And Abigail's glare falls into something else, like pity or understanding, a knowing expression and a sigh.  
  
She steps to Myka, pulls Myka into her arms.  And Myka stays there, on a sidewalk in a neighborhood in which she does not live, crying in the arms of her girlfriend or, more accurately, in the arms of the girl she hopes will still be her girlfriend after tonight.  
  
***  
  
They're twenty minutes into their walk home, walking hand-in-hand, when Myka pulls Abigail closer to her, under her arm, into her side and kisses her temple, her hair, her cheek.  
  
"I missed you," Myka says softly.  
  
"I miss Darlene." Abigail sighs.  
  
"I can call Pete, if you really want a ride."  Myka chuckles. "Although, I doubt he's made it home yet."  
  
Abigail hums her amusement, "Better not. Besides, someone has to keep you company and it might as well be me."  
  
"Right, it might as well," Myka smirks pulling Abigail back into her and burying her nose into dark hair.  
  
"You're smelling me again, aren't you?"  
  
"Yes," Myka sniffs, smiles.  
  
"It's a good thing I shower.  Like, daily."  
  
"It's a good thing your mother fancies herself a soap maker," Myka smells more hair, kisses that head.  "Mm, Plumberry infused Abigail.  My _favorite_ scent."  
  
"You're so weird.  How do you even _have_ a girlfriend?"  
  
"You know, I still haven't figured that one out," Myka smiles.  "And a hot girlfriend, too."  
  
"Oh shut it," Abigail pushes at Myka, pulls completely away from her.  
  
"Okay." Myka grins then presses her lips together tight, remains quiet for several seconds before Abigail stops her with her hands on Myka's belly.  
  
"I'm not Helena, you know?"  
  
"What does _that_ mean?"  Myka finally speaks with brows furrowed.  
  
"It means you can't use my insecurities to falsify compliments about me."  Abigail's suspicious glare returns.  "I'm not falling for it."  
  
"Who is falsifying compliments?" Myka asks, throwing her arms out in questioning. "You're beautiful Abigail."  
  
"I told you, about how I felt in comparison.  To you.  Don't keep trying to make me feel better by contradicting everything."  Abigail crosses her arms. "It still doesn't make it true."  
  
"I think you give me way too much credit with your not-worthy, fifty-seven-other-girls business," Myka arches a brow.  "You do know that I'm a nerd, right? Glasses?" Myka points, "Crazy hair? Lanky limbs, clumsy walk, really big feet?  Too-high I.Q., eidetic memory, fifteen-year-old high school senior?  That's Myka Bering."  
  
"I like all of those things about you," Abigail nods, "but you're forgetting varsity volleyball, varsity basketball, varsity softball? Had an affair with the hottest girl in school? Organized a strike that led to the arrest and incarceration of a juvenile sex offender? _That_ is also Myka Bering."  
  
Myka shrugs, shakes her head, rolls her eyes. 

Then she smirks, smiles, eventually grins at Abigail.  
  
"I do not, however, like this creepy grin you have going on," Abigail chuckles.  
  
"Do you remember eighth grade?"  Myka asks.  "You know, before high school, before I played sports or even knew I _could_ play sports, before Helena and perverts and my fifty-seven girlfriends?  Before straight hair," Myka holds a handful of her hair up in display, "before I could ever talk to you like _this_?"  
  
Abigail sighs, "What's you're point?"  
  
"Do you remember how we would pass each other in the hallway and look and smile but never say anything?  Do you remember the time I came up to you and stood in front of you like an idiot for ten solid seconds trying to _talk_ to you but said absolutely nothing before running away?  Remember that?"  
  
Abigail rolls her eyes and smiles, nods.  
  
"Remember the graduation dance?  Remember me walking up to you, scared out of my mind, and asking you to dance with me?"  Myka raises her brows.  
  
Abigail's laugh comes softly before she bites it back and tilts her head and nods.  
  
"Yes, Myka, I remember," Abigail smiles.  
  
"Well," Myka smiles, "I thought you were beautiful then."  
  
"Even though you were in love with Helena?"  
  
"Abigail," Myka says, her smile falling, "I don't want to talk about Helena right now.  I don't want to talk about Helena at all. I want to talk about _you_. I want to talk _to_ you. And _furthermore_ ," Myka winks and Abigail laughs, "I want us to not talk. _A lot_."  
  
Abigail's suspicious squint returns but it fades away quickly when Myka pulls Abigail into her, kisses the smaller girl quickly, sets another kiss on her forehead, in her hair.  
  
"Now can we please keep walking?" Myka asks in a whisper, just beside Abigail's ear.  "Or else I'll be late getting you home and your father will ask me to make it up to him by attending a church service.  And I _cannot_ have that."  
  
"Okay," Abigail whispers back, laughing softly. "But can I just say one final thing about Helena?"  
  
Myka rolls her eyes and throws her head back, "Go ahead.  Just _say_ it."  
  
"Well, not if it's going to upset you." And when Myka stands straight again, Abigail's expression is skeptical.  
  
"By all means," Myka says holding out a hand, "I know you've been holding it in."  
  
"Oh god, yes." Abigail smiles.  
  
"I know you've probably been biting your tongue raw over it."  
  
"Yeah, well, it wasn't exactly rocket science."  Abigail laughs now.  
  
"Just get it out of your system now, Babe."  
  
" _Babe_?" Abigail smirks now. "Is that a downgrade from _Beautiful_?"  
  
"Definitely not," Myka winks. "So get on with it."  
  
"I," Abigail points at her eye.  
  
Myka rolls hers.  
  
"Told." Abigail makes her hand move as if her hand itself is talking.  
  
"Abigail, I swear to God, we will find a pool and I will push you into it," Myka teases.  
  
"Yooou," Abigail sings, followed by laughter.  "You, Myka Bering. Apple of my eye, pain in my ass..."  
  
Myka smiles.  
  
"So!"  
  
Myka is quiet.  
  
Abigail arches a brow.  
  
Myka says nothing.  
  
"Okay, it's just not that enjoyable when you're not protesting," Abigail squints.  
  
Myka steps closer to Abigail, wraps her arms around the smaller girl, pulls her in close.  
  
"You're freaking me out. Please use words."  
  
"I love you," Myka says with both a smile and a shake of her head.  
  
Abigail's squint turns back into skepticism before it melts into curiosity, confusion, then understanding, disbelief.  Myka smiles as Abigail's face transforms into all of these things, as Abigail searches for words to say.  
  
She eventually asks, "What did you say?"  
  
"I said I love you." Myka nods.  
  
" _Now_ who is mentally unsound?" Abigail questions.  
  
"You're beautiful. Abigail. You're hilarious, you crack me up.  You don't take everything so _seriously_.  You're _my age_."  
  
"I'm sane," Abigail adds.  
  
"Well, that part is neither here nor there." Myka cuts off Abigail's laughter with another kiss.  
  
"Hmm," Abigail hums through a smile, pushes her hair back behind her ears. "I suppose you want me to tell you I love you back or something?"  
  
Myka shakes her head, "You don't have to.  I've pretty much got this unrequited love thing down to a science."  
  
Abigail's smile grows as her arms snake their way around Myka's neck and pull Myka further into her for another kiss.  And when they part, Abigail is shaking her head, smiling wide again.  
  
"Definitely _not_ unrequited," she winks, bites her lip.  
  
Myka grins, " _Definitely_ tempting."  
  
***  
  
Myka walks Abigail home.  
  
It's more than just a couple of miles but they make it there around the same time that the movie they never made it to would have ended.  
  
Abigail drags Myka straight into the backyard, to the tree house, to sit over blankets, to lay down, to curl up together, to close their eyes. 

By the time their eyes are opening again, it is almost four in the morning.  
  
It is way past Myka's curfew.  
  
***  
  
The sun is threatening to rise when Myka, as quietly as she can manage, enters the apartment.  And she's halfway to her room when a light flicks on in the hallway and Myka finds herself face-to-face with Pete's mother.  
  
"Ms. Jane?"  
  
"Myka, what time is it?"  
  
"Uh, it's a little past five o'clock in the morning..."  
  
"Are you _just now_ getting in?"  
  
"Are you _just now_ leaving?"  
  
Ms. Jane narrows her eyes on Myka expectantly, like a mother would.  
  
"Yes, I just got in," Myka admits.  
  
Ms. Jane sighs, averts her eyes and admits, "I'm not _actually_ leaving."  
  
Silence fills the hallway as Ms. Jane and Myka share mirrored expressions of suspicion, then guilt, and finally understanding and compromise.  
  
Ms. Jane says to Myka, "I won't tell your mom if you don't tell Pete."  
  
"I mean, he's going to figure it out when there's no hot breakfast in the morning..."

"Myka Ophelia, when a good deal is offered to you, you aught to take it before it leaves the table..."

"Okay, deal."  Myka says quickly.  
  
Ms. Jane nods, "I'll even make sure your mother lets you sleep in."

"Thanks, Mama Jane." Myka smiles in return.

***  
  
Myka isn't exactly sure how she feels about Ms. Jane quietly making her way back into the bedroom her mother used to share with her father.  Myka's isn't exactly sure how she feels when she hears her mother ask Ms. Jane what's wrong, when she hears Ms. Jane telling her to go back to bed.  When she hears her mother respond, in a voice she's never heard from her mother before, with, " _You_."  
  
All Myka knows, as she slips quietly into her own bedroom, slips off her shoes, takes off her glasses, and climbs into bed, is that she will never ever be able to wipe her memory free of all the things she has just seen and also heard.


	14. Sixteen & Twenty I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By Myka's sixteenth birthday...  
> ...it has been seven months since the last cuddle.  
> ...it has been six months since the last kiss.  
> ...it has been four months since they held hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first part of what I'm hoping will only be three parts total, the first two are complete, the third still in progress. They all made up the original chapter fourteen but it has grown to almost 35,000 words and rather than make one very long chapter (that will take me way too long to edit) I am posting this sucker in pieces. SO, please keep that in mind when you reach the end here and perhaps still feel a giant void inside of you for sixteen year old Myka.

By Myka's sixteenth birthday...  
  
***  
  
...it has been seven months since the last cuddle.  
  
It was that night back in September, on the shore of the lake.  When the sun had fallen low behind a hill and shadowed them, the blanket they lay on, everything around them, in near-darkness.    
  
It had been perfect. The sound of the water, a soft breeze, the fading light, the complete isolation.    
  
Those so many kisses had started out needy and hungry and full of desperation until chill after chill ran through Helena's body, raised far too many tiny bumps over the exposed skin of her arms, her shoulders, across her back.  
  
Myka had been the one to pause, to pull Helena into her, to wrap her arms around the older girl.  And Helena had found no reason to protest, not even when Myka had told her rather unceremoniously to turn over.    
  
Helena did turn over and Myka curled around the older girl from behind her and that's all there was to that at first. Then Myka's eyes had fallen on Helena's shoulder, still near-naked and exposed to cool air, and the strap of Helena's tank, existing so unnecessarily where it was.  
  
Myka's lips over Helena's shoulder were a sort of reassurance before Myka's fingers had worked their way beneath that strap, worked that strap away from Helena's shoulder.  
  
Now entirely exposed, Myka pulled Helena closer into, pulled that shoulder closer to her lips, and kissed it into oblivion.  
  
***  
  
...it has been six months since the last kiss.  
  
It happened one month after Helena's birthday, when Myka tried to give Helena her phone back.  It felt like the first time in a long time that Myka had held genuine anger for Helena.  The first time that Myka's anger had been truly justified.  
  
Helena told Myka to keep the phone, that it was more for her mother than it was for her, that she didn't have a need for it.  That she didn't want the permanence of that act to weigh on whatever future they had together.    
  
And Myka supposes she had been angry long before that evening, long before Helena rejected her offering.  Myka supposes that the time with Helena, out on the sidewalk, down the street from her house, in the middle of the night, had upset her more after she had time to think about what all those words and actions and _things_ actually meant.  
  
What it meant for Myka.  What it meant for Helena.  For Abigail and Vanessa Calder.  
  
So the anger that Myka felt, that had been building up in her since that night, or the day after that night, resonates itself when she tells Helena, "I don't want your phone.  I don't want a future together."  And the anger only grows when Helena tells her, "I'm not taking it back.  Throw it in the lake if you don't want it, Myka.  I'm not taking it back."    
  
Myka asked Helena if the lake is also where she should throw their future together.  
  
And she knew it was asinine.  Myka knew it was the most juvenile and asinine thing to say but she was angry and she was hurting and she wanted Helena to be angry and hurting, too.  She was sure Helena _was_ angry and hurting but Helena didn't look like she was angry or hurting.  Helena looked annoyed.  Perturbed.  Mildly offended.  But mostly she looked at Myka like she was a petulant little child come 'round to needlessly bother Helena again.  
  
Like the petulant little child Myka had always thought herself to be.  
  
Somehow this all culminated into a kiss because Helena told Myka that if all of this that had happened, that had resulted in her anger, meant so much more to her than their seven years together, then she could throw it, their friendship, their future, their whatever-the-hell they ever had, wherever she liked.  
  
Myka shoved the phone back into her pocket.  Told Helena goodbye.  Watched Helena's face melt into that hurt Myka had been waiting for.  
  
It was not as satisfying as Myka had thought it would be.  It was not satisfying at all.  But Myka felt stubborn, felt like she needed to be the greedy one for once.  The one getting everything she wanted.  The one setting the rules and making ultimatums and controlling the ebb and the flow of this _thing_ that was so soon to be thrown into the lake.  
  
Until Helena called her back.    
  
Helena called her back as she turned to walk away.  _Helena_ told _Myka_ to wait, approached Myka with some failed attempt at hidden urgency.  Myka, of course, waited and turned when Helena approached her and stayed when Helena said nothing more.  And Myka thought, even as Helena leaned into her, even as Helena's hands found her waist and Helena stood up on the tips of her toes and pressed her lips to Myka's lips and kissed Myka the same way she had kissed Myka that first time they had kissed, that night of her graduation, Myka thought about how easily, how quickly, how willingly she had given up the control.  
  
She had given it up to Helena.  _Entirely_ to Helena.    
  
Abigail was Myka's next thought because Abigail always knows.  Abigail knows everything and sees everything and predicts everything and understands Myka better than Myka even understands herself.  
  
Myka understood enough to know that she had to walk away from Helena and fast but when she pulled away from Helena, opened her eyes to Helena, she was face-to-face with her ring.  _Helena's_ ring.  
  
Helena was holding that ring up between her thumb and index finger.  Holding it up for Myka. To give _to_ Myka.  
  
Myka braced herself because she hadn't expected this.  She had been talking a lot of bullshit, playing the part of someone or something she didn't really know how to play.  Acting in a way she did not know how to back up.  She was not expecting Helena's ring to come off of Helena's finger.  
  
When Myka didn't move, when Myka didn't even breathe, Helena took Myka's hand in her hand, set Myka's ring in Myka's hand, closed her fingers tight around it, squeezed her own fingers tight around Myka's.  
  
And her last words to Myka that night, that month, that _year_ and into the next had been, "I guess you can throw that in the lake, too."  
  
***  
  
...it has been four months since they held hands.  
  
No words had been exchanged between them at Thanksgiving and that fact had not gone unnoticed by anyone present.  Helena would look at Myka.  Myka would not look at Helena.  Myka would look at Pete and Pete would arch a brow then look to Tracy and Tracy would look at Myka, look at their mother.  Myka's mother would turn to Ms. Jane and Ms. Jane would tilt her head curiously and expectantly in Helena's direction.  
  
Jeannie Jr. was entirely oblivious but that could be because the bulk of any words Helena thought to say were spoken quietly to Jeannie in sign language.  
  
Still, somehow, they managed to sit next to each other.  Myka is certain that between her mother and Ms. Jane, a plan had been devised and implemented quite successfully, to get Myka and Helena to sit next to one another.  
  
So when grace had been said (and this too was rare and Myka thinks it is also a part of the plan because when had they ever said grace?) and hands were joined around the table, Helena and Myka had been forced into...  
  
Not _forced_.  They were not forced.  Nor were they reluctant.    
  
Helena and Myka had been obligated to hold hands.  Set up by a cohort of family members who did not seem to quite understand why Myka and Helena had not spoken for two months, why they would continue not speaking for several more months after that.  
  
So they held hands through grace and Myka is also sure that Ms. Jane had dragged grace out, although Ms. Jane could not have predicted or even known that after five seconds of their holding hands, Helena would tighten her grip around Myka's hand.  Or that Myka would react by lifting her head just slightly, turning her eyes on Helena.  That Helena wouldn't smile or blink or do anything more than look back at Myka with sadness in her eyes and maybe a hint of regret that Myka was almost certain mirrored her very own expression.  
  
Ms. Jane could not have known that Myka would then tighten her grip on Helena's hand in response, press her lips together to tamper down whatever telling expression was on her face, try so very hard to swallow back that lump in her throat.  
  
Fail miserably.

So maybe Ms. Jane really was just _extra_ thankful that year.  Because there is no way she could have known this or that would happen.  
  
Myka had to look away but she slowly pulled her hand from Helena's tight grasp, curled her fingers so that the tips had come to rest against the inside of Helena's palm.  
  
And this too was an unspoken language, so much like Jeannie's signing, one they had silently spoken to each other a million times in the past.  
  
Helena allowed her fingers to relax, to spread apart, to open up to Myka's, and Myka's own fingers slid easily into place between Helena's before she tightened her grip again.  Before Helena, too, tightened her grip on Myka's hand.  
  
Myka's eyes found Helena's before they fell to Helena's lips, to the barely there hint of a smile that tugged at the corner of those lips, back to curious brown eyes.  
  
Grace had ended several very quiet seconds ago.  
  
Pete had been the one to clear his throat.  To declare his refusal to sit next to a left-handed Tracy Bering for yet another year of elbow hockey.  To pull Myka away from Helena and say, "Switch me spots," before she had even the slightest clue what he was going on about.  
  
The contact with Helena was lost.  The warmth and the want and the feelings that Myka knew damn well she should not have been feeling anymore, were not lost at all.  They lingered, in fact, into the night and so very long after that.  
  
Not a single word had been exchanged between them.  
  
***  
  
By Myka's sixteenth birthday, she has put so much of her time and her money and her sweat and even her blood (if you count the innumerable Category Five paper cuts) into transforming the bookstore that her mother tells her, "If you keep this up, your father might actually want it back."  
  
And Myka doesn't know if she's joking or if it is a genuine warning but she's almost certain that her father would not want the store back, despite it still being _his_ store.  Because Myka has been buying and accepting donated books in genres her father would never approve of, including children's books, youth books, young adult books.  Even a few in the more risqué category.  
  
Myka has painted the walls, opened up space for tables and chairs, actually dusted the place, managed to shelve every book that she can possibly shelve and sold several of the older surplus books on the internet with Abigail's help.  
  
She can only open on the weekends, when there is no homework, when there are no games, no plans to go to the city with Abigail.  But it works because people come in and they peruse and they buy, more so than they ever did before.    
  
Even when there are no people, Tracy will bring her friends from school to work on last-minute projects.  And Mrs. Donavon brings a fast-growing Claudia in to sit and read while she gets her hair done at the salon just next door.  And Abigail brings the twins in while Myka very much indulges in being able to have her friends, her _girlfriend_ there whenever she pleases.  
  
It's a bit of a hodge-podge, a treasure trove of books that Myka has only begun to start keeping track of as they quickly disappear off of the shelves. But it is Myka's hodge-podge now.  To do with whatever she has always wanted and she has always wanted to peddle books, all types of books, into the hands of others.  
  
And then there are the mystery boxes of donated books that have arrived in the mail consistently, twice a month since Christmas.  Not quite a mystery after Myka noticed that every book came from the same publishing company.  
  
The same publishing company whose CEO has a daughter that Myka just happens to know very well.  
  
A daughter with whom Myka has not actually spoken to for six months by the time she speaks to her again on her sixteenth birthday.  
  
***  
  
Myka is in the back of the store, almost buried in one of those donated boxes, reading at least five pages of every book she pulls out.  So she doesn't hear the bell on the door when it jingles to announce a new customer.  She also doesn't hear a six-year-old Claudia Donavon calling out her name until the young girl comes running to find her and is almost upon her.  
  
She whispers to Myka, "That one lady I don't like is here to see you."  
  
And Myka rolls her eyes, smiles and says, "Which one exactly?"  Because there have been a lot of them in this very bookstore, if Myka can recall.  A lot of ladies that Claudia "doesn't like" because she is shy and Myka can see that she likes to keep to herself when these lots of ladies give her attention.  But she is also adorable on so many levels.  She is especially adorable when she tries to glare at all of these ladies that she doesn't like, that like _her_ so very much.  
  
Claudia shrugs, "She's Claire's friend."  
  
On cue, the bell atop the counter rings.  
  
"I'll be right up!"  Myka calls, removing books from her lap, placing them back into the box.  "Just give me two..." she's standing, or attempting to stand and tripping, "two seconds!"  
  
Myka underestimates how very _not awake_ her legs are when she finally does manage to pull them out from under her.  She topples over, narrowly misses a shelf, lands on her back, has all the wind knocked out of her.    
  
Somehow three books still manage to fall on top of her.  
  
Claudia is hovering over her, covering her face.  Peeking at her between small, pudgy fingers.  
  
"You fell again," Claudia says flatly.  
  
"Yes," Myka sighs, closes her eyes against the pain, "I did."  
  
She hears Claudia groan followed by her whispering, "I'm going back up front to read my book."  And Myka hears her tiny feet shuffling across carpet, carrying her away to the front of the store, followed by not-as-tiny feet, wider steps across the carpet, stepping toward her.  
  
She opens her eyes to find Helena hovering over her, head tilted and with something like concern draped across her face.    
  
The sight does not help Myka catch her breath.  She closes her eyes again, prays it is a figment of her imagination.  She opens her eyes again.

Still there.  
  
Myka has never been _that_ lucky.  
  
"Are you all right?"  
  
It is the first time Helena has spoken to her in six months.  The first time she's heard anything of her voice since Thanksgiving.  
  
Myka is not quite all right.  She nods her head.  Opens her eyes again.    
  
Helena's expression is curious now.  An arched brow, a tiny smirk.  
  
"Do you," Helena starts, looking up and down Myka's frame then somewhere down the aisle and across the store, as if waiting for someone,  _anyone_ , else to volunteer, before she finishes, "need help?"  
  
The only help Myka thinks she needs in this moment would require a professional and several hours of aversion therapy because how can she still look up at this woman and still need to control her emotions?  Still need to be so methodical about her responses, about what she says to her, about what words she evokes _from_ her.  
  
Helena holds out her hand and Myka takes this moment as her opportunity to take control of what is happening.  
  
She shakes her head, sits up, pulls herself to her feet, stretches out her back.  
  
Helena winces as it pops.  
  
"That does not sound good," the older girl says and Myka shrugs, rubs the back of her neck and her shoulder before bringing her hand to her forehead and rubbing there, too.  
  
"It's fine," is all Myka offers the older girl before she turns and heads quickly, awkwardly, down the aisle, back toward the front of the store, then swiftly settles herself on a stool behind the counter.  She waits as Helena approaches from the opposite side.  "Is there um," Myka doesn't make eye contact, pushes her hair behind her ears, exhales, "something... that I can help you with?"  
  
Helena opens her mouth wordlessly, closes it again, looks down, looks to the right, looks everywhere before she opens her mouth again, "I just wanted to say... happy birthday."  The older girl sighs.  "That's all.  Really.  And to bring you something..."  
  
Myka's eyes are on Helena's hands, only now noticing the book she is practically clutching onto with white knuckles and red fingers.  This prompts Myka to look up at Helena and the older girl still isn't looking at her, she's looking down at the book in her grasp, that she holds against her chest, that she doesn't let go of.  
  
"Helena." Myka's voice seems to startle Helena and she looks up at Myka now with a small smile barely pulling at the corners of her mouth.  "You didn't have to get me anything."  
  
"No, I um," Helena nods, "I didn't but," still nodding, "I did.  Sort of."  
  
Myka sighs and looks down, pushes more hair behind her ears.  
  
"I needed to," Helena adds softly, finally setting the book down on the counter top in Myka's line of sight.  And Myka sets her hand on the book, another journal, and sighs.  
  
"Thank you...Helena."  Myka nods and looks up at Helena again.  "I actually just bought a new journal because mine was," Myka puffs out a soft laugh, " _pretty_ full."  
  
"Actually, Myka," Helena says, clears her throat, "that's my journal."  
  
Their eyes do meet now before Myka lets her eyes fall back to the journal before her and lifts the cover to reveal, in Helena's handwriting on a Post-It note:  
  
_I do hope you will understand.  
Yours, Helena_  
  
She flips through several pages after that to reveal more of Helena's handwriting.  The entire journal, filled with Helena's writing.  
  
Myka closes the book.  Sets her hand over it and catches Helena's eyes again, arches a brow.  
  
"Thanks," is all she can manage in this moment.  She looks over Helena's shoulder to where Claudia still sits, engrossed in a chapter book that she plucked from the shelf upon her arrival.  
  
"Myka, it's important to me," Helena says and Myka's eyes meet hers again.  "It's very important to me that you read it."  
  
Myka nods slowly.  "Okay."  Myka's voice is a whisper.  "I will."  
  
"Please, promise me you'll read it," Helena is pouting, her brows falling in that sad arch she tends to pull off so well.  That looks even more pitiful now than ever before.  
  
Myka shakes her head, "No, Helena."  She can hear the sharp inhale of breath that Helena takes, sees her step back.  Just the slightest step.  "I don't _owe_ you promises," is what Myka tells her, "I'll read it but I don't owe you promises."  
  
"I know, Myka," Helena leans into the counter, inhales deeply again, nods, "I know."  
  
Claudia is on her feet, approaching the counter with that chapter book under one arm, holding up a twenty dollar bill to Myka in her other hand.  "I think I'm ready to go," she says and looks up at Helena, narrows her eyes on the older girl.  
  
"Let me see that book," Myka says reaching down and Claudia sighs, hands the book to Myka.  It is a book she is familiar with, a book she herself read as a child even though it is intended for _much_ older kids.  But she has to check with Claudia, every time, because Claudia is like Myka in that she can read everything and she will read anything she can get her hands on.  Even if it isn't appropriate for her age. So Myka checks the book and she nods her approval, hands it back to Claudia and tells her, "Put your money in your pocket, Pipsqueak.  I'll walk you back to your mom."  
  
Claudia shrugs, shoves the twenty into her pocket and heads for the door.  
  
"I should probably... go."  Helena is turning to leave.  
  
"Wait!" Myka calls and both Helena and Claudia turn.  Myka sighs, "I mean, Claudia wait.  Do _not_ walk outside without me."  Myka scolds while rounding the counter.  She walks to an obviously deflated Helena and says, "And you, too.  Just wait here, okay?  I just need to walk Claudia over to her mom, can you... stay here for a minute?"  
  
Helena licks her lips, bites down on the lower one and nods.    
  
"Yeah," her voice is so soft, Myka doesn't hear her so much as her eyes watch her lips move, "I'll wait."  
  
Myka nods, "Okay, I'll be right back." Myka moves to the door, palms the top of Claudia's small head and gently leads her outside saying, "Let's go, Pip."  
  
"Do you like her?" Claudia whispers, glaring back at Helena before turning a skeptical stare on Myka.  
  
Myka's laugh is soft and her voice just as soft when she looks back to where Helena stands like a lost child in the middle of the store.  
  
She tells Claudia, "She's all right, I guess."  
  
***  
  
Myka is reaching for the journal, Helena's journal, when she says, "You should stay for dinner."  And she turns to Helena, a very apprehensive looking Helena, who is still not making very much eye contact with her, and she also says, "Mom and Jane are here and they will murder me if they find out you were here and I let you leave without making you say hello to them."  
  
"Oh," Helena twists her lips to the side and Myka watches her stance.  Her hands are clutching onto each other in the absence of the book they had previously been clutching onto.  Her shoulders are somewhat slumped, her head low.  Like she is trying to make herself as small as possible.  Even her voice is tiny.  Too soft.  Too weak.  
  
Myka walks to Helena, walks right up to her and lowers her head to get the older girl's attention.  Arches a brow when Helena looks up at her.  Steps back a bit when Helena reaches a hand into her own dark hair to push it from her face.    
  
"If you want me to, I just don't want to intrude," is what her tiny voice says next.  "I mean, I don't want to make Abigail feel uncomfortable or..."  
  
"It's just family," Myka interrupts her.  "Mom, Jane.  Pete, Tracy.  Me... and you."  
  
Helena sighs, biting her lip again.  
  
"Jeannie's not back in town until tomorrow," Myka adds. "But Pete and I are meeting up with Amanda later, to go see a movie.  Maybe go bowling..."  
  
"I just don't want to intrude," Helena repeats.  
  
"You're not," Myka says quietly.  "You won't be.  I'll be a third wheel with those two."  
  
"Only if you want me to be there."  Helena's eyes reach Myka's again and Myka is twisting her lips to the side as she shrugs.  
  
"I want you to be there," Myka nods.  "But mostly I don't want to be murdered by my mother and her girlfriend."  
  
Myka smiles when this makes Helena smile and it is a small thing, that smile on those lips, but it threatens Myka's resolve, her _control_.  The grasp that she has on this situation.  That tiny smile that swells her heart, that makes her want to forget everything that Helena has ever done, ever kept a secret, ever said or not said, that has gotten under Myka's skin.  
  
She wants to forget everything but Myka... Myka doesn't forget anything.  
  
***  
  
"She's right, you know," Ms. Jane is smiling, holding Helena into her, hugging her tightly, "we would have murdered her."  
  
Helena's smile is brighter now.  Genuine.  Happy.  She laughs at Ms. Jane's admission, smiles brighter when the woman lets her go to look her up and down.  To examine her.    
  
"You are so grown up, Helena."  
  
Myka's mother pulls Helena into her arms now and Myka moves into the living room to give the mothers space, drops herself on the couch next to Tracy, but watches and listens as Myka's mother kisses Helena's cheek.  She tells the older girl, "You've been away too long."  
  
Helena apologizes and Myka almost expects it, when Helena's eyes land on hers.  As if she is trying to extend that apology to Myka, too.  But Myka looks away and soon Pete is coming from the hallway, dropping himself down on the couch next to Myka, turning suddenly toward all of the noise in the kitchen before looking back at Myka with two raised brows.  
  
"Who invited the crypt keeper to dinner?"  He asks in a whisper.  
  
"I did," Myka sighs, "against my better judgment."  
  
"Well. At least you _recognize_ your mistakes now," Pete chuckles and when Myka hits his leg with the back of her hand, it is with little effort or force.  
  
"Knock it off," she warns.  
  
The elder Jeannie and Jane are keeping Helena fairly preoccupied with questions about how she's doing, how school is going, what she's been up to, and Pete, not wanting to be the lone wolf on the defensive side of Helena's presence, gets up to greet her with a too tight hug that has her feet off the ground and in the air, and squealing in a way that actually makes Myka laugh.  
  
Pete calls her little sister, clarifies that it's because she's so short, tells her he's missed her and Jeannie's silent, relentless squawking.  Hugs her again.  
  
Myka turns then to Tracy, who still sits with the remote in her hand, leaning against the arm of the couch, mindlessly flipping through television channels.    
  
"What's wrong with _you_?"  Myka swats at her.  
  
"God, Myka, nothing."  Tracy whines swatting back.  
  
"Don't be rude, Tracy," Myka points to the kitchen, "go say hello?"  
  
"Dude, she is practically their child, I don't greet _you_ every time you walk through the door, do I?"  
  
Myka glares at Tracy.  Says through gritted teeth, "Go say hi."  
  
"You're so annoying sometimes."  Tracy throws her hands in the air, stands, tosses the remote on the couch.  "This place is bad enough with two mothers here all the time, I don't need three."  
  
"Love you, too, Sister."  Myka rolls her eyes and swats Tracy's butt as she walks by.  
  
***  
  
Dinner conversation is carried mostly by Jeannie and by Jane.  Helena, Myka realizes, is trying to stay small and hidden but the two older women are so elated to have her there that they do not let up. And Myka had seen this coming because how many times had they asked her how Helena was doing, if she and Helena had talked, if Helena was okay or eating right or gaining weight, or any of the things that Myka didn't know because Myka didn't talk to Helena.  
  
In fact, the only way Myka knew anything about Helena was when Abigail had shown her a picture from a party that Helena appeared in that was on Helena's friend's profile page on some social media site that Myka had never heard of before.  
  
Abigail had told her then that she needed to get a computer.  And the internet.  Because how could she properly stalk her exes without either of those things.  
  
To which Myka had responded with, "She's not my ex."  And Abigail had smiled, laughed a little and said, "Oh right, your _future_ ex."  
  
They had fought over that, Myka and Abigail.  Well, more like bickered because Abigail brought up Helena more often these days than Myka thought of Helena and she was _trying_.  She was trying very hard not to think of Helena and it had been working because she would get angry at the older girl, at the things she had done, at the things she had never told Myka about, at whatever life she had gotten herself caught up in with boys nobody knows and women she never should have been involved with whenever she had been involved with them.    
  
The anger would help her want to forget about Helena and not think about Helena but Abigail would dig and dig and dig.  And of all the things that Myka loved about Abigail, the thing she loved most, her sense of humor, was also the thing she tended to hate most because she thought her jokes about Helena were okay. 

They were more like sharp daggers to Myka's heart and her ego and her intelligence.  Her resolve.  Her control.    
  
So they had bickered about Helena, on more than one occasion.  And on more than one occasion Abigail had cried about the thing she always claimed never bothered her.  The so-called inevitability of the two of them.  Of Myka and Helena.  
  
It didn't help that they, Helena and Myka, weren't together.  That they hadn't seen each other in months.  That they weren't talking and that even when they had seen each other, they hadn't talked.  None of that helped because Abigail had _seen_ them together when they were still on talking terms, she had seen them together anytime in the past three years at all, and that was enough, Abigail will say as she's crying, for her to know.  
  
On one occasion, Myka told Abigail that she didn't know _anything_.  And it was another asinine attack.  Another thing to say to cause anger and hurt in someone that wasn't herself.  Anger and hurt that would spiral into something that Myka knows damn well she should not allow anything to spiral into.  Because how had she ended up wearing the ring she bought for Helena two years ago?  How had she and Helena ended up not talking for six months?  How did that even begin?  
  
Spiraling.  
  
Abigail did not deserve the anger and the hurt but Abigail was less stubborn.  Much to Myka's fortune.  To Myka's _guilt-ridden_ fortune because she knows Abigail won't leave her so easily and maybe that's why she said it.  Maybe that's why she pushed it and tested her.  Maybe she just wanted that confirmation, that Abigail wouldn't leave.  And if so?  If that is all she wanted, her only motive for spiraling?  She received her confirmation.  
  
Abigail cried and she got mad and she stopped talking to Myka for one weekend but she did not break up with her.  She did not leave.  She did not return a ring, not that Abigail _had_ a ring, or stop talking to Myka for six months.    
  
_She_ apologized to Myka.  And Myka actually felt entitled to that apology because who had started that fight to begin with by always talking about Helena, bringing up Helena, joking about Helena?  
  
Myka had felt entitled to that apology.  On the surface anyway.  Somewhere deep inside her conscience, she knew Abigail had a point.  Somewhere deep inside of her heart, she knew Abigail was right because Abigail is right about so many things.  Abigail is right about everything.  Abigail predicts the future.  Abigail is practically clairvoyant.  
  
But for once Myka wanted to be right about something.  To feel right about something.  To have control over her own future.  
  
And Myka had certainly taken control.  
  
***  
  
Helena excuses herself halfway through dinner.  Goes to the restroom.  And Myka thinks of Abigail, her clairvoyance, when she predicts the onslaught of questions that will come from her mother, from Ms. Jane in three, then two, and one...  
  
"She's too skinny, and far too quiet," Ms. Jane is speaking softly to Jeannie, shaking her head.  "I don't like it, something is just not right with her."  
  
"I know," and Myka's mother turns her worried gaze on Myka, "does she not cook?  Does anyone in that house of hers cook?"  
  
"I don't think that girl has eaten anything since Thanksgiving," Ms. Jane says with a shake of her head.  
  
Myka rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, down to Pete who sits beside her.  And he has much the same expression on his face, turns to Myka and shakes his head.  
  
They both turn back to their still-gossipy mothers at once.  
  
"Just leave it alone," Myka says.  
  
"She looks _fine_ to me," Pete shrugs.  Myka turns her glare on him and he almost chokes on mashed potatoes trying to correct himself, "I didn't mean like _that_ , Mykes!  I just mean she looks _healthy_."  Myka continues to glare.  "What?  Is that not a good word to use?"  
  
"She is _not_ healthy," Myka's mother is shaking her head and turns to Ms. Jane, "we have to do something."  
  
"No," Myka groans covering her face, "you two, do _not_ meddle.  Leave her alone."  
  
"Leaving her alone is exactly what we will _not_ do," Myka's mother tells her.  
  
"Is she staying at her dad's house for spring break? In that god-awful pool house?"  Ms. Jane asks.  "Still all by herself?  Where the hell is Charles?"  
  
"New York," Myka groans.  "Where he mostly lives?"  
  
"Well he belongs _here_ ," Myka's mother argues.  "With his daughter.  Who has _no one_ to look after her."  
  
"She had a choice when she graduated high school," Myka says. "She chose to stay here."  
  
"I'm sorry but isn't she twenty going on twenty-one?"  Pete interjects.  "I'm pretty sure that makes her a grown ass adult."  
  
"Pete, that mouth," Ms. Jane scolds through gritted teeth and shaking her head.  
  
"She should stay here," Myka's mother suggests.  
  
"What, no!"  Myka shocks more than just herself with the protest.  Both her mother and Pete's mother look to her with raised brows and half-open mouths.    
  
"She's your best friend?"  it comes out more as a question when her mother says it.    
  
"She's not my..." Myka's hands are in the air, she stops herself.  She lowers her voice.  "Trust me, she does _not_ want to stay here.  Where would she even sleep?"  
  
"You have a trundle under your bed, Myka."  Her mother's look is still curious.    
  
"My room?!"  Myka covers her mouth again, leans back in her chair to see down the hallway, to see that Helena is still in the restroom.  She sits straight again.  Whisper-yells, "No!  Out of the question!"  
  
"Don't be so _rude_ , Myka," Tracy pipes up with a grin.  Myka narrows her glare on her little sister.  
  
"I know," Myka nods, "put her in Tracy's room.  Trace can have my trundle.  Or she can just sleep on the hardwood floor.  Or I'll sleep on my trundle, Pete can have my bed since everyone is moving in anyway."  
  
"Ophelia, that tone," Myka's mother says shaking her head.  "What is _wrong_ with you?"  
  
"Yeah, Mykes, I get the struggle but you're kind of freaking out."  Pete adds.  "Maybe you need to bring it down a notch?"  
  
"Don't tell me to calm down, Pete," Myka almost growls out in a whisper.  
  
"I didn't," Pete says sheepishly, "I said... bring it down... a notch?"  
  
Myka glares.  
  
"Man, Mykes, you're turning _red_."  Pete drops his fork onto his plate.  "Breathe, woman."  
  
"Myka, Sweetie, we should probably talk about this... later," Ms. Jane warns.  
  
"Yeah, you wouldn't want _Helena_ to overhear," Tracy smirks.  
  
"You don't understand," Myka's eyes are suddenly red and wet and burning and everyone is looking at her worried but Myka's doesn't _see_ it until she is angrily shaking her head and saying, "I cannot exist... in the same space... as that woman."  
  
Then silence.  And she _gets_ it now.  Because she hears soft breath behind her and she sees now that everyone's eyes are not exactly on her but above her, behind her, and she turns and there is Helena.  Helena is standing there, making herself small again, and her eyes too are wet and red and also probably burning.  
  
"Helena, I..." Myka stops speaking as Helena shakes her head.  
  
"I didn't want to intrude." Helena takes a step back, to nowhere, shakes her head.  "I'm sorry, the last thing I wanted to do was upset you..."  
  
"Helena," Myka is out of her seat, her mother is out of her seat, Ms. Jane is out of her seat.  And Myka's mother tells her to go to her room, to which Myka turns a disbelieving look on her mother and asks, "Are you seriously sending me to my room?"  
  
"Go. Into your room. Now, Ophelia." Her mother says again and points and she _is_ serious.  She is _very_ serious.  
  
"Just as I was getting a grip on everything."  Myka turns to Helena now.  "Everything was fine without you, Helena.  Everything has been _perfect_.  Everything was _okay_.  And you.  You just have to... with your _everything_."  
  
" _Myka_ _Ophelia_ ," her mother warns.  
  
Myka feels her hands ball into fists.  Feels her fists tightening.  Feels the tips of her fingernails as they press into her palm.  
  
Helena is crying silently, tears falling in streaks down her face, her head lowered until she raises it to meet Myka's eyes and says softly, under her breath again, "I'm sorry."  
  
And Myka feels entitled to this apology, too.  She feels entitled to it and she knows she shouldn't but she takes it and she goes.  She brushes past Helena unapologetic, goes to her room.  And she hears her mother and Ms. Jane moving to Helena in her wake.  She hears their coddling and their apologies and their "I don't know what's gotten into hers" and their "please don't go's" followed by all of their worries and all of the reasons they just cannot allow her to stay by herself in that pool house.  
  
Myka is in her room, shutting her door, leaning back into it, and bending forward, folding into herself, falling into a seated position behind that door and crying her eyes out.  Because Helena had shown up with her perfect face and her perfect hair and her beautiful shit storm, havoc-causing self and, in less than three hours, was already ruining Myka's life.  Myka's perfectly in-her-control life is about to fall completely out of her control because Helena Wells, after six months of nothing, just _had_ to come back.  
  
With her too skinny and her sad and her lonely.  
  
Myka moves to her bed where Helena's journal sits and she tosses the thing onto the floor, climbs into her bed, buries herself under covers.  
  
Myka cries herself to sleep.  
  
***  
  
Her mother is there not even twenty minutes later, waking her up.  
  
She tells Myka to sit up and she does.  They are quiet for a long time before her mother says, "You have to tell me something.  Eventually. About you. About Helena."  
  
And Myka does.  Myka tells her everything.  Or _almost_ everything.  As close to as many things as she possibly can without telling her absolutely everything.  She doesn't tell her about Vanessa Calder but she does tell her about Marcus, about the rest of her birthday.  About that day at the lake.  About their failed plan.  Not talking for six months.    
  
Seeing her again.  
  
"I love her," Myka cries.  
  
"I know you do, Ophelia," her mother nods.  
  
"She doesn't love me," Myka also cries.  "Or if she loves me she has a really stupid way of showing it because she refuses to be with me but she's with absolutely everyone else.  She loves everyone except me and I can't be near her because I want to be with her but I _need_ to be with someone who loves me.  And Abigail does.  Abigail always has."  
  
Her mother is quiet and thoughtful as she watches Myka.  She presses her lips together, exhales through her nose.  
  
"Do you," her mother is cautious, " _love_ Abigail?"  
  
Myka is quiet, staring down at the floor, staring down at her hands, looking back to her mother.  She nods and shrugs.  "I care about Abigail."  
  
Her mother arches a single brow but smiles and reaches a hand up to Myka's face, wipes at her tears with the backs of her fingers.  
  
"You know, Ophelia," her mother speaks softly, "love does not always have to lead to _romance_.  You can have love for your friends."  
  
Myka shakes her head, wants to roll her eyes, "This sounds like the beginnings of another _it's just a phase_ speech, Mom."  
  
Jeannie laughs softly, shakes her head, "No, Baby.  I think we both know that speech has no place in this household."  Myka smiles, her mother's hand still warm against her cheek before her mother's fingers are pushing hair behind Myka's ears, then falling into her own lap.  "What I mean to say is your love, these feelings of love that you have, don't always have to lead to a relationship."  
  
"I know." Myka's voice is quiet when she nods.  She shrugs a single shoulder.  "I _wanted_ to be with Abigail. I mean, I didn't want to at first because she's my friend and I don't want us to break up, to not be friends. But I wanted to be with Abigail.  We were practically together anyway."  
  
"I don't mean Abigail," her mother adds with a slight eye roll.  "I mean, yes Abigail, too.  But I mean with Helena.  You two have always been so close, you have always been such good friends.  Even when you were _practically_ together."  Myka's mother adjusts her seating on Myka's bed, turns to face forward and tilts her head into her shoulder in a sort of shrug.  "Maybe the way you feel with Abigail, the way you love her but don't want to stop being friends with her?  Maybe that's the way Helena feels toward you?  Maybe she doesn't actually _want_ to lose you?  Maybe that's why she's comfortable being with people who aren't you, Myka.  Preserving your friendship, preserving how close you two used to be."  
  
"She's already lost me, Mom," Myka sighs letting her head fall into her hands.  "And I don't know how to be her friend anymore.  I don't know how to be a good friend to her and not hurt Abigail in the process."  
  
"Then Myka, maybe we should take a break from dating _anyone_ for a while," her mother sighs.  "If you care about Abigail, maybe we need to take a break.  Since you care so much about Helena?  Maybe we need to put the breaks on any relationships.  Figure some things out.  You're only sixteen, Sweetheart.  You don't need to be this torn up over _love_.  You should be having _fun_."  
  
"Yeah."  Myka clears her throat and wipes at her nose.  "Maybe."  
  
They fall quiet and Myka feels her mother's hand against her back, rubbing soft, soothing circles before it is in Myka's hair again, pushing brown curls out of her face, and under her chin, prompting Myka to look up, to sit up straight.  
  
"Helena can stay with Jane," Myka's mother nods, "It's okay.  I understand.  I understand completely, Sweetheart, I do.  Helena can stay with Jane."  
  
Myka furrows her brows, "Mom, Jane practically lives here."  
  
"Myka, Helena is not in a good place," her mother is shaking her head now, "she is not okay.  She needs a family.  She needs friends.  She needs to be around people who love her and I understand that it is too much for you, I do, Sweetheart and that is okay.  I know now, I won't ask that of you.  But she needs a family and Jane is the closest thing to a mother that she has.  _We_ are the closest thing to a family that she has."  
  
Myka closes her eyes, shakes her head, "I know."  
  
"I won't ask much of you, Myka, I promise, but there is one thing you need to do.  That I _am_ asking of you and that you _will_ do."  Myka knows before her mother even asks it.  Myka knows just by the look on her mother's face.  
  
"I'll apologize."  
  
Jeannie nods, smiles softly and says, "Yes, Ophelia.  You will."  
  
***  
  
Helena is in Tracy's room with Tracy when Myka comes to the door, open just a crack, and listens as Tracy talks Helena's ear off in a very Tracy attempt at cheering the older girl up.  
  
"I wouldn't worry about it, H.  Give her a couple of days and a bag of Twizzlers and she'll be back to her usual compliant, book-nerdy self."  
  
Helena's laugh is soft and breathy.  She says, "Thank you, Tracy.  You are a good surrogate little sister."  
  
Myka pushes the door open and Tracy turns, stares quietly like a deer caught in headlights.  
  
"Out," Myka says, gesturing into the hallway.  
  
"Uh, except this is _my_ room?"  Tracy counters.  
  
" _Emma_."  It is a soft plea when Myka says it because she hasn't the energy to be angry anymore.  
  
Tracy turns back to Helena, sat on her bed, and pats the back of her hand.  "Just holler if she starts to get crazy."  
  
Myka closes the door behind Tracy when she goes.  Leans back into it. Watches Helena.  
  
Helena has her head down, she is fiddling with her hands in her lap from where she sits on Tracy's bed and when she looks up just slightly, Myka sees it well.    
  
The too skinny, the sad, the lonely.  She sees it and how it makes Helena look so unhealthy, how it must tear at her mother's heart, at Ms. Jane's heart.  How it tears at her heart now, too.  
  
Helena's eyes are red, getting redder.  They are wet and becoming wetter.  Right before Myka's eyes.  And it is when a tear falls, streaks down her face, over those sad pouting lips, that Myka moves to her.    
  
She is slow and cautious in her approach because Helena will run.  Like a gazelle in the wild, spooked by the sound of almost nothing at all, Helena will pull away and she will make herself smaller and she will run.  
  
So Myka sits on the bed slowly beside Helena, brings her hands to rest in her lap for the longest time before she lifts her left hand and slowly reaches to where Helena's hands fall in her own lap. Slowly sets her left hand over Helena's hands, still pulling at fingers and stretching skin and smoothing over the ridges on her fingernails.    
  
Helena's hands still with the touch and Myka laces her fingers with Helena's fingers, turns slightly to the older girl, opens her mouth to speak.  Inhales deeply and exhales.  
  
"You're not okay," she tells the older girl.  
  
And Helena sits straight, turns slightly to Myka, eyes still on their fingers as they move further together, as Myka's hand closes tightly around Helena's hand.    
  
Helena sighs, shakes her head in confirmation and it is a trigger.    
  
More tears fall down her cheeks, fall over their hands, against Myka's skin, into Helena's lap.  Myka sighs and she pulls her hand from Helena's hand to move her arm around Helena's shoulder, to pull Helena into her.  And it's effortless, the way Helena leans into her, how easily Helena's head falls into that space between her jaw and her shoulder, how _familiar_ Helena's breath against her neck feels.  
  
Myka presses her cheek further against the warmth of Helena's forehead.  Against Helena's temple.  She brings her other hand to Helena's hair over that temple and brushes it away. Palms Helena's cheek.  Takes in more of that warmth.  
  
Helena cries, sobs.  Myka cries, too, although quietly.  And they sit there, the both of them crying in Tracy's room, for several minutes before Myka makes Helena sit up, puts her hands on Helena's arms and tells her, "Let's go out."  
  
***  
  
Myka's mother is arching a curious brow at her when Myka leads Helena out of the room, into the living room, with a hand at Helena's waist and Myka doesn't realize where her hand is until her mother's eyes fall there and then back on hers.  
  
She moves it away quickly.  Reaches for her satchel that hangs by the door.  Asks Pete, "You still want to go see that movie?"  
  
Pete gives her an equally curious look.  As does Ms. Jane and Tracy from where they all sit together in the living room.  
  
"Yeah, I guess.  If you're still down, Amanda is already on her way there." Pete says with some caution, standing.  "See you moms later."  
  
"What about your cake?"  Jeannie's brows are furrowing.  
  
"Can we maybe," Myka looks at Helena, "do that later?"  Her eyes fall back on her mother and Jeannie smiles reluctantly and nods.  
  
"Sure, fine."  
  
"Have fun," Ms. Jane manages a small smirk.  
  
"Just don't stay out too late," Jeannie adds.  
  
"We won't," Myka tells them both over her shoulder as her hands absentmindedly find Helena's waist again and guide her out of the door, Pete trailing behind.  
  
***  
  
They split up in the movie theater, after Amanda tells Myka happy birthday and, aside from a curious glance in her direction, ignores Helena altogether.  Amanda pulls Pete away by his shirt, tells Myka over her shoulder that they might catch up after the movie.  And Myka leans into Helena and says softly, "They're just going to make out through the whole thing anyway."  
  
Helena smiles softly at that but says nothing, just gives Myka this look that Myka cannot decipher as anything more than fleeting amusement.  As quickly as it came, it is gone again and Helena's eyes are sad, her expression falling.  
  
Myka wants to take Helena's hand in hers, tells herself no.  Shoves her hands into her pockets and gestures with a tilt of her head.  
  
"Come on."  
  
***  
  
The theater is mostly empty.  Mostly empty because the theater is old and plays movies that have been out for a while.  Mostly empty because it isn't one of those new theaters with the reclining seats and the digital surround sound, so nobody really comes here anymore. Nobody that wants to be stuck sitting within ten seats or three rows of anyone else.  
  
But they come here because it is what they have always done, Pete and Myka.  Even Helena, when she would babysit Myka and Tracy, would bring them to this theater at times.  So Myka loves coming here because it reminds her of when she was a kid, before everything in life got complicated.  And Pete loves coming here because he can make out with girls with little to no audience.  
  
Myka doesn't watch the movie when it starts.  Not really.  What Myka does is glance out of the corner of her eye at Helena, at Helena's expression, at Helena's eyes that focus intently on the screen ahead.  On Helena's unsteady breathing, on the motion of her chest as she inhales and exhales.    
  
It isn't until Helena's eyes are on Myka's eyes in the dimly lit theater that Myka realizes she's been watching Helena for too long.  But she reaches for that control, again.  Shoves her theoretical hands into theoretical pockets and pushes away whatever feelings she might be having in this moment with words.  
  
"What happened?"  Myka's voice is a whisper, not that there is anyone in this theater besides them and Pete and Amanda, and three other people who might as well be a mile away.  
  
Helena's mouth falls slightly open at the question, her lips parting to speak as she shakes her head.  She closes her mouth again and turns away, stares back at the large screen ahead of them.  
  
"What has _been_ happening?  With you?"  
  
Helena licks her lips and turns back to Myka with teary eyes.  
  
"I broke up with Marcus," Helena says softly.  "Over Christmas break."  
  
Myka arches a brow but says nothing as she has nothing to say to that.  She didn't even known Helena had been dating Marcus.  After her birthday, she didn't even know Helena was still talking to Marcus.  
  
"He was being... an asshole, to put it lightly.  Sally has been nothing short of a four-letter-word to me ever since then.  And I'm pretty sure they're sleeping together now." For some reason, Helena smiles at that.  Myka narrows her eyes, shakes her head because she's never liked them and for good reason apparently.  "And Walter, well, he's _weird_ and _creepy_ and I try very hard not to be alone with him."  
  
"Are you still living in that house?"  
  
Helena nods.  
  
"Helena, why don't you move?  It's not like you can't afford to..."  
  
Helena shakes her head.  "My father cut me off."  
  
"What? Why? When?"  
  
Helena shrugs.  " _Also_ Christmas.  He was mad that I said no to New York and London.  He's _still_ mad that I'm not at a better school.  I told him I didn't want to leave because my friends are here.  He said fine.  My portion of the rent is paid up until summer and after that... I guess I have to make a final decision."  
  
Helena lets her voice trail off.  
  
"You need your own place, Helena.  Away from those people.  Away from your father's demands."  
  
"It's just a little bit of stress, Myka.  Part of becoming an adult, I suppose."  
  
"A little bit of stress?"  Myka shakes her head.  "No, Helena.  You need to find a job, move out on your own or..."  
  
"With school?"  Helena questions, she shakes her head. "I've been taking extra classes, you know, kind of like you have.  I work my ass off during the week so I don't have to be there, at that house.  So I can graduate early.  I come back to town on the weekends.  Holidays.  So I don't have to be there."  
  
"Helena," Myka sighs.    
  
"Anyway, now Daddy wants me to go to grad school in New York or London and I haven't wanted to because I have friends here but," Helena turns away again, drops her head into her hands then sits straight, "I don't really have friends here anymore so... I'm going to go.  Maybe take a year off and then go after that."  
  
"To London."  Myka says and it isn't a question because they've talked about it before.  Still Helena nods her confirmation.  
  
"Yes, London."  
  
Myka sits back in her seat, turns back to the large screen ahead of them and they are both quiet for a long time before Helena says, "It's funny, that we're both graduating this year."  
  
Myka turns back to Helena, watches Helena's sad eyes on hers until they move away, move back to the screen, down to her hands.  
  
"You do have friends here, Helena."  Their eyes meet again.  "You have family, too."    
  
Helena remains quiet, shakes her head.    
  
"Helena."  Myka is nodding, "You do."  And Myka reaches now.  She reaches for Helena's hand, slips her hand into Helena's, laces their fingers and squeezes tight.  She reaches to Helena with her words, says softly, "We may fight.  We may stop talking.  We may not see each other for six months.  But damn me if I could ever _actually_ stop caring about you, Helena."  
  
Helena is wiping away tears with her free hand, squeezing her hand tight around Myka's, crying _more_ when Myka leans into her ear and tells her, "I still care about you."  
  
That is enough for Helena.    
  
She leans into Myka, leans her head against Myka's shoulder and turns into Myka, buries her face into the fabric of Myka's shirt.  And Myka holds her again, wraps an arm around her as she cries, sobs, uncontrollably but softly, quietly in the dark of the theater.  
  
Myka kisses the top of her head.  Whispers a soft apology into her hair.  Tugs her closer.  
  
***  
  
"I don't want to intrude," Helena protests, shaking her head.  
  
"You're not intruding, Helena."  Myka pulls the older girl's hands into hers and tugs her through the door.  "This is what Mom and Jane want, you're not intruding."  
  
"I don't want to upset you," Helena adds in a whispered voice, stopping just inside the apartment.  "If it's not what you want."  
  
Myka shakes her head, "I'm not upset."  Helena arches a brow at Myka who then corrects, "Not _anymore_.  And Mom and Jane are right, you should be with family."  
  
Myka tugs again and Helena takes another step into the apartment, Myka shuts the door behind her.  
  
"Kids?  Are you back already?"  Myka's mother is stretching to see them from the couch in the living room.  Smiles as Helena follows Myka to where her mother and Ms. Jane sit, side-by-side on the love seat, watching a movie.  
  
"That was quick," Ms. Jane smirks.  "Where is Pete?"  
  
"Late night snack at the diner with Amanda," Myka smiles and shrugs.  
  
"Of course."  Ms. Jane nods, turning to Myka's mother.  And Jeannie gives Ms. Jane an expectant look, nods her head toward where Myka and Helena stand and Ms. Jane arches her brow, suddenly seems to remember herself.  "Oh, uh, Helena."  Ms. Jane stands to her feet, steps to Helena, "You know, what we talked about earlier still stands.  You're welcome at the house anytime."  
  
Helena nods, "Yes, Mrs. Lattimer... Ms. Jane."  
  
"We'd really love for you to stay tonight, Helena," Ms. Jane says softly.  
  
"Every night," Myka's mother speaks up from behind her and stands, walks to Ms. Jane's side.  "You know, to be around friends and family.  To sit down with us for dinner.  We don't... we just don't want you to be by yourself all of the time."  
  
"And it's only if you want," Ms. Jane amends.  " _When_ you want."  
  
"I um..." Helena hesitates and looks to Myka who can only manage a small smile at her.  "I just don't want to disrupt everyone's lives and... I don't want to be a problem.  Take up more space."  
  
"Nonsense," Ms. Jane interrupts and looks to Jeannie who nods at her, before turning back to Helena, "You can stay at the house tonight.  We can go get some of your things if you'd like?"  
  
"She can stay here," Myka speaks up.    
  
Jeannie arches a brow at her daughter and says, "Ophelia, after the production you put on earlier..."  
  
"No, it's fine."  Myka nods and turns to Helena, holding her hands out to gesture toward the older girl with her palms up, "Helena can have my bed and I'll take the trundle."  
  
"Myka," Helena begins, shaking her head.  
  
"How about Helena takes _Tracy's_ bed and your sister can sleep on your trundle," her mother corrects.  
  
"Either way is fine," Myka insists turning back to her mother, to Ms. Jane, and nods.  "As long as it's fine with Helena."  She turns back to the older girl. "You should stay."  
  
"I um," Helena clamps her lips shut, runs a hand through her hair and shrugs before shoving her hands into her back pockets and tilting her head to the side.  Her voice is soft again, barely there when she finally says, "Okay."  
  
Myka's smile is wide.  "Great."  
  
***

Helena is in the shower while Myka and her mother change out the sheets on Myka’s bed, pull the trundle out from beneath her bed and fix those covers, too.  
  
"One minute you don’t want her here at all," Jeannie says eying her daughter, "and the next you’re offering up your bed."  
  
Myka rolls her eyes as she helps her mother set the fitted sheet onto the trundle.  
  
"Should I be concerned?"  
  
"No, Mom."  Myka shakes her head.  "Just a change of heart, I guess.  Now that we’ve said more than two words to each other."  
  
"Hopefully not too big of a change."  Jeannie’s look to Myka is something of a warning.  "Because you and Abigail _are_ still…?"  
  
"Yes, Mom, we are."  
  
"I’m just saying, I’m surprised she wasn’t here this evening."

"I told you, she’s in Hawai’i with her family." They’re fixing the sheet atop the trundle bed now.  "They go every year for Spring break, Christmas, etcetera."  
  
"Sorry, I haven’t got your memory retention skills, Honey.  That must be nice."  
  
“She was born there.  Almost all of her extended family lives there.  I don’t think it’s all that exciting for her.”  
  
"Okay well." Jeannie tosses a blanket to Myka, turns to sit on Myka’s bed.  " _Myka_."    
  
Myka busies herself with the blanket, throwing it over the trundle, smoothing it out, paying as little attention to her mother as she possibly can because the conversation, when she uses Myka’s first name in that tone, is never not awkward or serious.  And Myka can only imagine what her mother is trying, with little success, to lead into at this moment.  
  
"You know that I love Helena, right?"  
  
"Obviously."  Myka smiles at her.  "You’re practically holding her hostage in our home."  
  
"Don’t be dramatic," Jeannie scolds playfully.  
  
Myka shrugs, lets out a soft laugh through her nose.  
  
"I love Helena and I love that you love Helena and I’m _sure_ she loves you, too.  I would," she pauses, "I _do_ support you both in so many ways but," Myka does stop what she’s doing now and slowly stands straight to watch her mother as she takes in a big breath, brows high, and continues, "you’re only sixteen and she’s twenty.  And you have Abigail, so I just really hope that you guys… you know… _wait_.  A little longer before…"  
  
"Mom!"  Myka interrupts.  "You are _not_ trying to have a sex talk with me right now."  
  
Jeannie doesn’t say anything but her eyes go wide and she makes a face like a playful grimace and Myka is shaking her head, laughing. _Dying_.  _Praying_ for death.  
  
"Okay. Mother. One." Myka holds up a single finger, still laughing. "I do _not_ need a sex talk.  I am a virgin and I’m not ready and that is the end of _that_ discussion. Two." Myka holds up two fingers now and she simply shakes her head because, "No."  
  
After she’s gotten that point across, she holds up a third finger and says, “Three.  _Waiting_ is exactly why this,” Myka is gesturing to her bed, to the trundle beside it, “has become such a _thing_ between us.  It’s all we ever do.  It’s all we have ever done.  We’re professionals.  I promise, you have _nothing_ to worry about, Mother.”  
  
"Well." Jeannie leans forward, resting her chin into the palm of her hand.  "You don’t have to be so defensive."  
  
" _You_ don’t have to be so _offensive_." And Myka is serious, despite the extremely amused look that she is giving her mother.  She is very serious.  "If and when I do eventually do, you know, _that_ , I will be sure to write you a full report on my experiences, complete with colorful pie charts and Venn diagrams."  
  
"Ugh, Ophelia. _No_." Now it is her mother’s turn to make a face, to shake her head, to stand up and _walk away_.  Myka watches her mother walk to her bedroom door, hands up in front of her in mock surrender.  "All I am saying is… don’t make me regret letting this happen."  And she points to Myka’s bed, to Myka’s trundle bed beside it.  
  
"Mom! That’s like telling Screech to keep his hands off of Kelly!  The problem is not a problem because it solves itself.  She’s not interested."  
  
"Well, I don’t know who those people are," Jeannie shrugs with her hands in the air.  "Maybe if you invited more of your friends over, I would know who they were."  
  
"I love you but you are _seconds_ away from having a pillow thrown at you."  
  
“I love you, too, but I _will_ ground you,” Jeannie teases in response.  
  
"Go."  Myka says playfully through gritted teeth.  
  
Jeannie laughs and nods, says with a playful scold, “Do _not_ have a good night, Ophelia.”  
  
She closes the door behind her as she goes, narrowly missing the pillow Myka has just thrown in her direction.  
  
But Myka is smiling.  She is smiling big and wide, grinning really, and shaking her head because _this_ is the relationship she has always wanted to have with her mother.  Even if her mother had been a little slow in arriving to this point.  Even if it had taken them fifteen years of grief and pain and turmoil.  
  
Yes, they had slowly but they had surely arrived.  
  
***  
  
Myka showers after Helena.  She makes sure to bring her clothes into the bathroom with her now.  And when she's out of the shower, Helena is already laying in her bed with the lights out, her back facing where Myka stands and watches her for a moment.  Wrapped up in her sheets, her blankets.  Wearing her clothes.  
  
She closes her bedroom door, it's entirely out of habit unless Abigail is there, and she crawls beneath the sheets on the trundle bed.  And that mattress has so rarely been used because she has so rarely had occasion for visitors to stay the night, so it is tough and, at first, uncomfortable.  But then she finds a spot that does wonders for her back, her back that she hasn't realized until now is still aching from her fall earlier.  
  
Her eyes close.  She hears the bed above and beside hers shift and a soft whisper of "happy birthday" from where Helena now rests, facing her direction.  
  
"Thank you and goodnight, Helena."  
  
***  
  
Myka doesn't fall asleep.  Can't fall asleep.    
  
She has spent an hour listening to Helena breathe.  Listening only to Helena's soft breath.  And she thinks to herself that this is a problem.  This is a very big problem.  
  
She gets out of the trundle and moves around until she finds Helena's journal, picked up from the floor by her mother and set atop her desk, and she finds her book light and returns to the trundle.  Buries herself back under the covers.  
  
She turns on the light, opens the book to that Post-It note.  Reads it again:  
  
_I do hope you will understand. Yours, Helena_  
  
Myka sighs.  Rolls her eyes.  Shakes her head.  Because those last two words do unexplainable things to her, to her belly, her gut.  Even after all this time of no talking, no seeing, no being close.  
  
_Especially_ after all this time.  
  
Myka closes her eyes tight, rubs them, opens them again.  Adjusts the journal above her, turns the page to more of Helena's too-perfect handwriting.  It is almost as if the words had been printed with a computer, that is how straight and neat her print handwriting appears.  
  
Myka reads:  
  
_I first knew Vanessa Calder when I was ten years old and she was nineteen years old, a study abroad student come to London for a year.  Much like you, she was the daughter of an old colleague of my father's and had been given what she would then call the luxury of staying in our home._  
  
_Away from the drab confinements of student housing, she was allowed far more freedoms than most students and my father would accommodate her in ways that were not all that appropriate.  Taking her out to dinner, to parties, buying her jewelry and dresses, covering all of her expenses.  Trips across Europe.  More than that, even._  
  
_In exchange for all of these things, she would play a nanny of sorts to me and Charles.  Mostly me, as Charles was a teenager then and did not feel the need to be minded after.  Made that fact very clear to both our father and Vanessa on numerous occasions._  
  
_But that was okay because I liked having her all to myself..._  
  
***  
  
_A ten-year-old Helena Wells is seated at the vanity in the guest bathroom of their home in London that temporarily belongs to a nineteen-year-old Vanessa Calder who reaches blindly from the shower, behind a curtain, to a nearby towel and drapes it around herself._  
  
_Helena, at ten, is curious and fascinated, looking over the items atop the vanity with attentive eyes, reaching for beautiful thing after beautiful thing with curious hands.  She finds the bottle of perfume that Vanessa wears, picks that up and holds it to her nose, smells it whilst closing her eyes._  
  
_"Mm, that smells pretty," Helena says softly._  
  
_"It's rude to go through people's things, you know."  Vanessa is emerging from that shower when Helena turns back to her, finds her smiling despite the reprimand._  
  
_"You have so many pretty things, Ness," Helena is watching Vanessa as she moves from the bathroom and into her bedroom.  "Did Daddy buy you all of these things?"_  
  
_"Some," Vanessa says from the other room, moving out of sight.  "The perfume is from my grandmother.  Don't come out just yet, okay?  I'm changing."_  
  
_"All right," Helena says turning back to the vanity, putting the perfume back in its place.  "Daddy won't let me wear perfume yet."_  
  
_"And why not?"  Vanessa's voice floats somewhere from inside her closet and Helena turns toward the door, shut to just a crack now, and leans back just the tiniest bit, to peak into Vanessa's bedroom._  
  
_"He says I'm too young," Helena says standing now, moving slowly to the door.  "He also said I'm too pretty for perfume.  That boys won't know what to do with themselves if I smell as beautiful as I look but I hardly believe that."_  
  
_Vanessa laughs at that and Helena sees her move across the room, dressed only in underwear, then quickly out of sight.  Helena's breath catches, she stops moving, stands perfectly still.  Doesn't look away from the now empty space._  
  
_"Your dad is definitely no stranger to charming phrases."  Vanessa moves back into sight and Helena stops breathing at the sight of her.  She is pulling open a drawer, pulling out a bra, and putting that bra on, facing slightly away from where Helena stands.  Breathless.  She still sees everything.  "Helena?"_  
  
_"Yes?"  Helena's voice is soft, she takes a step forward and stops again just beside the opening in the door._  
  
_"Are you okay in there?"  Vanessa's bra is on now and she moves toward the closet again, disappears out of sight.  "I'm almost done."_  
  
_"Yes, I'm all right," Helena breathes._ _She looks down at her own body, her own chest, or lack of one, she supposes, and pouts_  
  
_"What do you think we should do today?"_  
  
_"Go to the shops, I guess."  Helena doesn't care, not about what they do today, like everyday, as long as Vanessa is there, wearing her pretty perfume, and holding Helena's hand._  
  
_"Maybe we can find_ you _some pretty perfume."  Vanessa reappears now, pulling a flower-print dress over her head, moving her hair from beneath it once that dress is completely on.  "You know, so the boys won't know what to do with themselves?"_  
  
_Helena is holding her breath again, pressing her forehead against the door and the frame, watching through that opening in the door as Vanessa adjusts her dress in the mirror before her, pushes long blonde hair from her shoulders._  
  
_"Helena, Honey?"  Vanessa is calling for her, turns toward the bathroom and sees her there, watching.  Helena stops breathing again, swallows hard as Vanessa moves closer to her with a curious expression.  "Were you standing here this whole time?"_  
  
_She steps back as Vanessa pushes the bathroom door open and crosses her arms in front of her._  
  
_"I don't much care for boys," Helena says softly, breathing again.  "Nor what they do with themselves."_  
  
_Vanessa's smile is soft, her expression somewhat amused._  
  
_"You don't say."_  
  
***  
  
"Myka."  
  
She jumps, startled at the sound of Helena's voice as the older girl leans over the side of the bed to peer down at her.  
  
"Jesus Christ, Helena." Myka takes in a deep breath.  
  
"Please don't read that around me." Helena looks almost pained when she says this.  
  
"I thought you were asleep."  
  
Helena's lips fall into a frown, she lowers her eyes and shakes her head.  Says softly, "I can't."  
  
Myka sighs and closes the journal.  "Why give it to me if you don't want me to read it?  Why ask me to promise you..."  
  
"Just not around me, please, I," Helena licks her lips and sits up on the bed, sets her feet over the trundle below her, "it's personal and... I'm not proud of... so many things that I've thought and done."  
  
Myka sits up now, too, takes the book light off of the journal as she sets the book under her pillow, holds the light in her hands.  
  
"I didn't know you've known Ms. Calder for that long," she says softly. "That she used to watch you, in London, like you used to watch me."  
  
Helena smirks now and moves slowly off of Myka's bed and onto the trundle bed below, to sit beside Myka with her legs folded in front of her.  
  
"There are a lot of similarities." Helena nods running a hand through her hair.  Then she lowers her head, looks away.  "Many more differences."    
  
"Is the whole journal about her?"  
  
"I want you to understand, Myka," Helena says, "that I'm not... I wasn't trying to hurt you."  She shrugs now and shakes her head, eyes glistening with the moisture of unshed tears.  "That I wasn't lying to you about how I felt about you."  
  
"How you _felt_?  How you no longer feel about me?" Myka questions.  
  
Helena is quiet when her eyes meet Myka's again and she presses her lips together tight and sighs, shakes her head.  
  
"I don't feel much of anything anymore, Myka."  
  
Myka has always known Helena to be just a little bit too dramatic in her display of emotions but sitting with her now in the dark of her room, with only a tiny bulb to cast light on Helena's too skinny, too sad face, Myka can see that there are no theatrics.  Because Helena cannot fake the too skinny and she cannot fake this amount of sad.  She can't fake how tired she looks, she cannot fake the bags under her eyes, or the prominence of those cheek bones.  
  
And even if she could for a time, she could never do it for this long.  And she would never do it to Myka's mother, to Ms. Jane.  
  
Myka cuts off the book light and sets it on the floor beside the trundle, turns back to where Helena sits in complete darkness now, and reaches until she finds the older girl's wrist.  Tugs until Helena moves forward, closer, into Myka, and Myka pulls Helena into her, falls back against her pillow, brings Helena back with her.  
  
It is like no time has passed at all when Helena's arms wrap around Myka's abdomen, when Helena's head comes to rest over Myka's shoulder, in the crook of Myka's neck.  And Myka wraps her arm around Helena much tighter, pulls her in much closer, pushes her lips and her nose into the top of Helena's head, into hair to kiss her there, to inhale the scent of her.  That scent that makes the boys not know what to do with themselves.  Then rests her cheek there atop Helena's head, closes her eyes.  
  
And Myka wants to tell Helena so badly the words she's been wanting to tell Helena since before she arrived in the book store that afternoon.  She wants to tell her how much she misses her, how much she wants things to go back to the way they were, how much she still loves her, has always loved her, will _always_ love her.  
  
Instead Myka says nothing because to say anything would be losing control and she has already lost so much of that with Helena here, with Helena lying beside her, with Helena in her arms.  With Helena crying in her arms for the third time tonight.  
  
Myka reaches down for Helena's arm, wrapped over her waist and pulls that arm up, drapes Helena's arm over her shoulder, moves her own hand around Helena's back to pull her closer.  
  
"I'm sorry," Helena whispers into Myka's ear between sobs.  
  
"Why are you sorry?"  Myka asks in return.  
  
"I've ruined your birthday," Helena cries.  "I didn't want to do that.  I didn't mean to stay."  
  
Myka puffs out a soft laugh, moves slightly away from Helena, to see whatever she can see of the older girl. And it isn't much, what she sees, in the dark with only moon light through the window and her eyes that are slowly adjusting to the dark.  It isn't much at all, but she sees Helena's tear-soaked face and that pout and those sad sad eyebrows and she smiles, she shakes her head.  
  
"Who cares about my birthday, Helena," Myka says softly, pulls the older girl closer, moves her lips to Helena's ear.  "You came back.  You're here."  Myka presses her lips to Helena's ear and kisses gently.  Kisses again.  
  
"It hasn't been a year, yet."    
  
Myka rolls her eyes.  "Screw the year.  That plan was so stupid, Helena.  The stupidest thing you have ever suggested."  Helena is laughing softly in Myka's arms now, reaching to wipe away her own tears.  "You're supposed to be the adult here, _you're_ supposed to have all the brilliant ideas.  I should be crying in _your_ arms.  Scrawny though they may be."  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"I'm teasing, you know," Myka whispers, kisses her cheek.  
  
"I know."  
  
Myka wipes Helena's tears.  "You cry a lot, you know that?"  Myka teases further and Helena cries out a soft laugh.  "Are you sleepy yet or do you want me to talk more?"  
  
"Both," Helena sighs, sinking further into Myka's hold.  
  
"Okay," Myka smiles, "I'll keep talking until I bore you to sleep.  It'll probably be the best sleep you've had in _ages_."  Myka's fingers find their way into Helena's hair.  "How about that?"  
  
Helena nods, nuzzling closer to Myka and says in her small voice, "Get on with it then."  
  
"Once upon a time," Myka starts, "there was a little girl who knew a slightly older girl, and she loved her very _very_ much.  Despite everything.  And I mean _absolutely_ everything."  
  
Helena is already asleep.


	15. Sixteen & Twenty II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The road to much of the same thing lies ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The third part (and hopefully final for 16/20) will follow but not as immediately as the second part did.

Myka is up before Helena.  Smiles at the familiar feel of Helena wrapped around her. Kisses Helena's forehead before she slowly, gently, carefully peels herself away from the older girl.  
  
But she stops and leans over her, watches her for just a moment.  How peaceful she looks, the way she breathes, the pout of her lips, the furrow in her brows.    
  
Moody even in her sleep.  
  
Myka reaches to push Helena's hair from over her face, behind her ear. Cups her cheek for a moment before shaking her head and kissing that cheek.  
  
Helena doesn't stir.  
  
Myka pulls the journal from the pillow beneath Helena's head and stands, pulling a sheet and a blanket over Helena's exposed arms and legs.  And when she stands straight again she rolls her eyes and berates herself.  
  
"Myka," she says softly, out loud, "you are officially an idiot."  
  
Her hand reaches to her forehead, palms it as she sighs and walks out of the room.  
  
***  
  
The kitchen is only occupied by Myka's mother and Tracy this morning.  
  
"No Jane?"  Myka asks taking her seat across from her sister.  
  
"No Jane," her mother answers from the stove quietly.  Myka arches a brow when her mother does not turn around to greet her, looks to Tracy who only shakes her head.  
  
"Is... everything okay?"    
  
Now her mother does turn, greets her with a smile.  A bit forced if Myka had to guess but still mostly genuine.  
  
"Everything's fine," Jeannie tells Myka and nods.  "I've made some eggs and bacon, if you're hungry.  I'm afraid there are no amazing biscuits but you can toast yourself some bread."  Jeannie is pulling her apron off now, washing her hands and drying them on a towel.  
  
"Are you _sure_ you're okay, Mom?"  Myka questions again.  "Because you sound a little bitter about the biscuits."  
  
Jeannie sighs and turns to Myka, leans back against the counter and crosses her arms in front of her.  
  
"Do you want to know one of the things I love most about Jane, Myka?"  Her mother asks and Myka's look is skeptical because she's not entirely sure she _does_ want to know.  
  
"Only if it's rated G for _gag-free_..." Myka says carefully.  Her mother rolls her eyes, grabs a plate from the counter and moves to the stove to scoop some eggs and bacon onto it.  
  
"Jane and I have stopped talking in the past, for years at a time.  Kind of like you and Helena," Jeannie says softly, "as you may very well know."  
  
Myka looks to Tracy who arches a brow and shoves a forkful of eggs into her mouth.  
  
"But we were young and stupid."  Jeannie uses that exact phrase and moment to turn around and look at Myka.  "Kind of like you and Helena."  
  
"Oh." Myka clears her throat.  "So, this isn't about you and Jane?"  
  
Jeannie walks to Myka and sets the plate down in front of her, smiles down at her, runs her hand through Myka's curls.  "One thing I love about Jane now is how much she's grown.  How much we have _both_ grown.  That we can disagree, not see eye to eye, and take a much needed step away from one another."  
  
Myka is quiet as her mother goes to retrieve a fork for her.  
  
"She has her home, her life, her responsibilities," Jeannie goes on as she returns to Myka's side, "and I have mine.  I have _you_.  Your sister."  She sets the fork down on Myka's plate gently and falls quiet, watches Myka for a few moments before she speaks again.  "What I love most about Jane, Myka, is that she is honest and open and tells me, when there is a problem, that she needs to walk away.  But she also considers my feelings.  Tells me that she _will_ be back for me.  To be with me. Tells me _when_ she will be back."  Jeannie sits down in the chair beside Myka and leans her head into her hand and falls quiet again.  
  
"I'm slowly losing my appetite," Myka says cautiously, pulling Helena's journal into her arms, holding it closer to her chest.  
  
Jeannie smiles, rolls her eyes, turns away from Myka.  
  
"Jane thinks that I'm being too lenient with you."  Jeannie turns back to Myka then and Myka furrows her brows.  "When it comes to Helena."  
  
Instinctively, she wants to be offended.  To defend her mother.  To be upset with Jane, to question what _Jane's_ idea of leniency is, exactly.  But Myka stays quiet.  Waits for her mother to continue.  Which she does.  
  
"I haven't been the best mother to you," Jeannie sighs and lowers her head.  "I told her that, she _knows_ how I feel.  Like I need to make it up to you, like I'm trying to play catch up on years and years of missed conversations and time that I could have spent getting to know you."  She turns to Tracy, too.  "Getting to know the _both_ of you. _Teaching_ you.  Actually showing you that I love you."  
  
"Mom..."  
  
Jeannie's hands are on Myka's arm now, against Helena's journal.  Myka holds it tighter, instinctively.  It's not that she thinks her mom would take it.  She just feels the need to protect it.  
  
"You're sixteen years old and I feel like I'm _just_ getting to know you very well.  My own daughter."  
  
"If it helps, Mom," Myka nods, "you're doing a great job.  Without Dad.  You're a better mom."  
  
"Ophie's right, Mom," Tracy interjects.  "You're pretty awesome now.  Dad was a leech, sucked all the fun out of you.  Out of _everything_."  
  
"And we're better for it, too, I think."  Myka adds.  
  
"Well, _I_ am, anyway,"  Tracy smirks.  Myka glares at her little sister.  
  
"You are."  Jeannie nods.  "You are great kids.  Which is why I maybe give you two a bit more freedom than most.  I feel like I owe it to you.  Like I don't really have a right to discipline you when I was never much of a mother to you to begin with.  
  
Both Myka and Tracy remain quiet and Jeannie turns her gaze back on Myka.  
  
"Jane has asked me a lot of questions about your relationship with Helena.  Questions I don't know the answer to.  She's seen more of you two together than I have. She questioned my reasoning for allowing you two to share a room together."  
  
And now Myka really does want to say something.  To her mother, to Jane.  Because whose child was to be most trusted in a room with another girl?    
  
"I told you, Mom," Myka sighs, "Beauty and the Beast.  Our friendship isn't like that anymore."  
  
"Um, Beauty and the Beast hook up at the end of the movie."  Myka eyes Tracy again, shakes her head without saying a word.  
  
"I know," Jeannie says, nodding.  "I mean, you're _not_ a beast but also, I know that you have a good head on your shoulders.  I hope that when you do figure things out, you and Helena, that you take a step back, take time to consider everyone's feelings, and do the right thing.  Let everyone know where you stand.  When you'll be back. _If_ you'll be back."  
  
Myka nods slowly.  "Okay?  I don't really..."  
  
"She means you need to break up with Abigail before you and H get _engaged_ again."  Tracy is beaming now, even after Myka kicks her under the table.  "Mom, why are you speaking in code?  You know Myka's a little slow." And she makes a circling motion with her finger at her temple, crosses her eyes, laughs.  
  
"Don't be a brat."  Myka's eyes are wide as she scolds her sister.  
  
"Your sister is right, for once," Jeannie shrugs.  "It's not my job to get mixed in your affairs.  Your relationships are your own, Myka, in two more years you'll be an adult and what more will I possibly have to say then?  But your health, your well-being, both physical and mental, right _now_ , are my responsibility and, honestly, I think that's all Jane was trying to say before we... you know, got into it. She's worried about you and Helena, about the impact your relationship has had on one another.  On other people.  I see that now."  Jeannie's smile is soft.  "I may have gotten a bit too defensive for my part."  
  
Her mother lowers her head back into her hand and laughs softly.  
  
"I feel like a fool, honestly."  
  
"I'm sorry, Mom."  Myka turns away.  "That your first fight was about _my_ problems."  
  
"Oh no," Jeannie sits straight again, "no, Ophelia, that's not... please don't think..." her sigh is heavy.  "It is far from our first fight and... it's not your fault.  There is no fault.  Clearly I'm still really bad at this mothering thing, I just... I want you to know that if you need to talk, if you need advice or guidance or _help_ in any way, that I am here.  Helena, where she is..." Jeannie nods, "you don't have to ever be there.  And if you were, _b_ _efore_ , you don't have to ever be there again.  You never really have to be there because I'm here and Jane is here.  Think about our talk last night, okay?  That's all, really.  The same goes for you, too, Tracy."  
  
Tracy nods, Myka nods.  Their mother smiles, pats Myka's leg.  
  
"Okay, that's all."  And she's pushing her hair behind her ears, standing to her feet, says, "I think I should call Jane."    
  
Her hand falls to Myka's shoulder as she walks past and toward the hallway.  And Myka hears her greeting Helena good morning, turns in time to see her mother palming Helena's cheek.  
  
"Pete isn't here, so there's plenty of food lef for you."  Jeannie teases.  
  
"Thank you, Mrs. Bering."  
  
"Helena," Myka's mother smiles, "call me, Jeannie."  
  
Helena nods and corrects, "Jeannie."  
  
Myka's mother disappears into her room and Helena comes to the dining table, palms the top of Myka's head before taking a seat beside her, facing her.  
  
"Good morning, Tracy."  
  
"Morning, H."  
  
"You finally decided to wake up?" Myka teases and Helena puffs out a small laugh and nods.  
  
"Best sleep I've had in ages." Helena smirks.  
  
Myka laughs now, too.  "You're welcome."  
  
"My journal?"  Helena gestures to the book still clutched in Myka's arm.  
  
"Yeah," Myka says looking down at it, back up at Helena, "didn't actually get a chance to read anything while my mom was lecturing me."  
  
"So early in the morning?"  Helena yawns.  
  
"Right."  Myka scoots her plate across the table, moves it in front of Helena.  Pours her a glass of orange juice, too.  And Helena smiles, slowly blinks her thanks.  Myka is surprised when she actually takes a bite of the eggs.  
  
"And the lecture?"  
  
"Something... we should... maybe talk about.  Do you have lunch plans?"  
  
"I'm... probably going to head home."  
  
"So, you're _not_ going to stay hostage with us?"  
  
"I might come back this evening, I just need to get some clothes and regroup, I guess."  Helena takes another bite of eggs before she adds ketchup to them and cuts them up with her fork, slides the plate back over to Myka.  "Will you be here?"  
  
"Yeah, I'll be here."  
  
"Okay." Helena stands and points down the hall.  "I'm just going to go change and... yeah."  
  
"Yeah," Myka repeats.  "Okay."  
  
"Yeah!"  Tracy adds and both Myka and Helena narrow their eyes on her.  "You guys are being so awkward right now.  It's like a freaking train wreck I can't look away from.  I honestly liked it better when you never stopped kissing."  
  
"Trace, _be quiet_."  Myka throws a slice of bacon at her.  
  
Helena rounds the table and comes to stand behind Tracy, bends down to drop a kiss on the youngest Bering's head and tells her, "You're awful."  
  
This makes Tracy grin.  "Oh, thank you, H. That's touching."  
  
With a soft laugh and a shake of her head, Helena disappears down the hallway.  
  
***  
  
Myka has decided to take the day for herself.  So after walking Helena out to her car, telling her she'll see her later, hugging her goodbye, she takes the journal into her room, buries herself in blankets and sheets that smell just like Helena Wells, and sets to reading:  
  
 _As young as I was, I failed to understand why Charles had held so much animosity toward Vanessa.  Failed to reason that it might have more to do with just his being a rebellious teen who thought himself too old to be looked after.  I grew protective of Vanessa and it's silly but this, our very different relationships with this older woman in our lives, is the thing that started pulling me and Charles apart..._  
  
***  
  
 _"What_ is _that delicious smell?"_  
  
 _Helena is smiling behind a piece of toast as her dad enters their kitchen and walks to Vanessa's side, where she stands at the stove, and leans past her, eyes her culinary handiwork._  
  
 _"Ness's making American breakfast."  Helena announces._  
  
 _"American breakfast?"  Her father questions and Vanessa holds a finger to her lips, smiles into that finger._  
  
 _She tells Helena's father, "It's American because I'm making it.  Right, Honey?"  Vanessa turns to smile and wink at Helena and a young Helena Wells feels her cheeks burn, feels a familiar turn in her belly._  
  
 _She chews away at buttered and jellied toast to hide her grin._  
  
 _"What I'm smelling isn't American breakfast," Helena's father says leaning into Vanessa with his nose so very close to her neck that she leans back, puts a hand on his chest to push him away with a smile that Helena has never seen her smile before._  
  
 _Charles turns to Helena, narrows his eyes on her then approaches her where she sits on a stool at the counter nearby.  He leans in close to her, inhales, then steps back with his arms crossed._  
  
 _"Perfume, Georgie?"_  
  
 _Helena is quiet._  
  
 _"What have I told you about wearing perfume?  Make up?  Hm?"_  
  
 _"I don't..."  Helena lets her voice trail off._  
  
 _"You don't need it," Charles echoes much louder._  
  
 _"That's my fault," Vanessa speaks, matching Charles' volume, catching his attention.  "She was curious, so I let her try some of my perfume."_  
  
 _"Some?  She smells like she_ bathed _in it."_ _Charles sighs and turns back to Helena, "Go take a shower, Georgie, you aren't going to school smelling like that."_  
  
 _"Daddy, I've just_ had _a shower."_  
  
 _"And now you'll just have_ another _, and change into a fresh uniform."_  
  
 _"I'm going to be late for school."_  
  
 _"Next time remember our rules and you will_ not _be late."  And Charles says this while leaning into the counter just across from his daughter as she rolls her eyes and opens her mouth to protest._  
  
 _"Helena, Honey."  Vanessa's voice is soft and sweet and her eyes are on Helena before she is gesturing with a nod toward the hallway, out of the kitchen, and says, "Go on, I'll be up to help you in a minute."_  
  
 _Helena gives a dramatic sigh before she pushes herself off of her stool and heads out of the kitchen.  And she has her hands on the banister of the staircase when she hears Vanessa laughing softly, her father's voice speaking._  
  
 _Helena is ten. She is old enough to know not to spy but she is also old enough to know that Vanessa's laugh comes with Vanessa's smile and there is nothing that Helena loves more now than to see Vanessa smile.  To hear her laugh._  
  
 _Helena makes herself a quiet tiny thing in the shadow of the hallway, just barely hidden behind a bookshelf, when she peeks back into the kitchen.  To where Vanessa still stands by the stove, her back to it now.  To where her father stands just before Vanessa._  
  
 _It's too close, that is Helena's first thought.  And her cheeks are warm again but for entirely different reasons because she's wishing she were taller, even though she's not that much shorter than Vanessa.  And she's wishing she were older, even though she's not that much younger than Vanessa.  But she's also wishing she were her father and that is absolutely impossible._  
  
 _Charles' hands are on Vanessa's hips when she hears him say, "She's a pretty girl and that's already enough for me to worry about without her dressing herself up."_  
  
 _Vanessa says, "She is a_ very _pretty girl," and Helena's belly is dancing again, she's biting back a smile, "she's also a_ growing _girl and, eventually, you won't be able to stop her from dressing up.  Eventually," and Vanessa's voice is softer now, she puts two fingers against Charles' bicep and walks those fingers up his arm one by one, "she'll need to learn how to take care of herself.  As we women are wont to do." And that hand comes to rest on the shoulder of Charles just before Vanessa concludes with a much softer, "Mr. Wells."_  
  
 _Helena's father smiles at Vanessa.  "And I suppose you're going to be the one to teach her these womanly things?  Her mother now, are you?  Not even twenty."_  
  
 _At that, Vanessa turns away, turns back around to the stove and shrugs._  
  
 _"Age ain't nothing but a number," the older girl sighs._  
  
 _Charles moves in closer to Vanessa, presses himself into her back and moves his lips to her ear._  
  
 _"Helena adores you, like the older sister she has always wanted Charlie to be, but_ eventually _you are going to return to the states and she's going to be crushed."_  
  
 _Helena holds her breath as her father lowers his voice._  
  
 _"Don't make it any harder than it has to be."  He says this almost in a whisper, still loud enough for Helena to make out, and concludes with, "For the both of you."_  
  
 _He finally moves away from Vanessa, across the kitchen and out of sight.  And Vanessa turns her head to the side, her eyes are closed but when they open, they meet Helena's.  Vanessa smiles softly at Helena before moving to the sink to wash her hands._  
  
 _Helena disappears up the stairs, into her room, pulls open her drawers, opens her closet, begins to peel off her clothing._  
  
 _"Helena."  Helena is down to her tank top when there's a soft knock at the door and Vanessa is through it before Helena can respond.  Vanessa is by her side, smiling that soft smile, closing Helena's drawers, her closet door.  "Stay dressed, Honey."_  
  
 _"But Daddy..."_  
  
 _"Is already out the door and off to work, I'm not making you shower again just to be late to school."_  
  
 _Helena sighs and moves to pull her blouse back on but Vanessa's hands are one on her shoulder and the other holding the collar of her shirt down at the back, before Helena can get it on entirely._  
  
 _"Where did you get this bruise, Helena?"_  
  
 _"What bruise?"_  
  
 _Vanessa runs a finger over the back of her shoulder and where Helena is expecting pain, she only feels the warmth, then burning.   It sends a chills through her body, makes the tiny hairs on her arms stand on end._  
  
 _"Your shoulder."  Vanessa says running her fingers over it again.  "Did you fall?  At school?"_  
  
 _Helena turns now, moving away from Vanessa, putting her blouse on over the mark, moving her fingers to the buttons._  
  
 _"That's just Charlie," Helena says, lowering her eyes to where her fingers busy themselves.  "He didn't mean it."_  
  
 _At the last button, Helena looks up at Vanessa who watches her quietly before finally nodding._  
  
 _"All right."  Vanessa smiles again and moves toward Helena's bedroom door.  "Grab your book bag.  I'll meet you downstairs?"_  
  
 _Helena nods and Vanessa takes her leave._  
  
***  
  
"Myka!"  
  
Myka jumps, slams Helena's journal closed as Tracy swings her door wide open.    
  
"Jesus Christ, Trace!"  Myka picks up one of her pillows and launches it across the room from where she sits in bed.  Tracy catches it with little effort and sends it back to Myka.  
  
"Just making sure you're not in here doing the devil's bidding by touching yourself inappropriately," she smirks.  
  
" _What_ is _wrong_ with you?  How are you even _in_ this family?"  Myka sighs, shaking her head and flips through the journal to find the page she lost.    
  
"There is about a ninety-three percent chance that I'm either adopted or illegitimate."  Tracy is beaming.  
  
"I'm not going to argue with that," Myka's mother is smiling as she appears in the doorway and rests a hand over Tracy's shoulder.  Tracy looks up at her mother with some hint of suspicion and Myka laughs softly.  
  
"You're a little too confident in that response, Mom."  Tracy accuses.  
  
"Yes, well."  And that's where Myka's mother leaves that conversation.  
  
" _Anyway_ ," Tracy says slowly, pulling her eyes away from her mother to look back at Myka, "Mom and I are going shopping for a dress for me, for the Spring dance.  You  going?"  
  
"That godawful excuse for a lower classman prom?"  Myka questions, still flipping through pages of Helena's handwriting.  "Never in my life."  She smiles to herself reciting those words, turns an eye on her sister.  "No, thank you."  
  
"As if you're going to _actual_ prom.  I meant going _shopping_ but anyway!" Tracy rolls her eyes and leaves Myka's door saying, "Have fun writing about your sad life in your sad diary!"  
  
Myka's mother is rolling her eyes up now, sighing as Tracy heads out through the hallway.  
  
"Are you sure you don't want to come along?"  She asks of her daughter.  
  
Myka nods, turning back to the journal.  "I'm kind of into this book."  
  
"An old journal of yours?"  
  
"Helena's, actually."  When Myka's eyes meet her mother's, Jeannie is arching a brow, turning her head to the side with some curiosity, some skepticism.  "She _gave_ it to me.  For my birthday."  
  
"That _is_ interesting," Jeannie says softly.  
  
"I think it's supposed to make everything better," Myka responds just as quietly, turning back to the journal, finding her place again.  
  
"That's a mighty lofty goal, Sweetheart.  To accomplish with a journal."  
  
"Mom! I'm ready! Let's go!"  Tracy's impatience is floating from the living room and Myka's mother only responds with a shake of her head before turning back to Myka.  
  
"You know, when Jane and I were younger, in school together, we had a shared journal."  
  
"What?" Myka laughs, a huge smile across her face.  "Mom, why?"  
  
"It was easier than writing letters or passing notes in class," her mother explains, leaning into the door frame, crossing her arms in front of her.  "It didn't look like a journal, you know, it just looked like we were passing a notebook for class back and forth.  Except it was filled with our letters to each other, doodles we did in class, that sort of thing."  
  
"That's so adorable I think I might throw up." Myka puffs out another soft laugh.  "Really, Mom, that's cute.  Do you still have it?"  
  
"Sadly no."  Jeannie's expression is wistful, she's looking in Myka's direction but her eyes are drifting somewhere up and away from Myka who arches her brow now and smiles a soft smile at the way her mother looks so happy, so content, and _free_.  
  
"Were they love letters?"  Myka asks and this snaps Jeannie to attention, her cheeks seem to instantly flush as she stands straight and runs her hands down her abdomen, as if to smooth out the wrinkles in her top.  
  
"Um, I mean," Jeannie clears her throat and Myka's smile grows again, "I don't know about _love_ letters, they were very... affectionate, I suppose.  We cared... about one another, obviously.  Even then."  
  
"They were love letters." Myka nods and her mother rolls her eyes and shakes her head.  "That's a really cute idea, Mom.  A shared journal.   Maybe you and Jane should start another one.  Maybe it will help?"  
  
"Oh Jesus, Myka, we are much too old for journals and love letters and keeping secrets.  We just talk to each other now."  Jeannie waves her off.  "I will leave that to you young people."  
  
"Mom, you're both only in your, what, forties?" Myka shakes her head.  
  
"Much too old." Her mother nods.  "But maybe you and Helena could benefit from a shared journal.  Talking more.  Communication?"  
  
"I highly doubt that will help us..."  
  
" _MOM_!"  Tracy whines.  
  
"I'm _coming_!  Learn to have some patience!" She turns to Myka. "We're going to head to the city and maybe meet Jane for dinner later.  You and Helena are more than welcome to join if she's planning on being here this evening or...?"  
  
"I don't know, Mom.  She's like a groundhog right now.  She is probably _actually_ scared of her own shadow.  If she comes tonight, I'll just stay in and ready Tracy's room for her."  
  
"In any case, we will be back."  Jeannie moves into the hallway, "Well, _I'll_ be back.  I might," and she raises her voice now, "leave your sister in the city for good."  
  
"Great! Maybe I can get emancipated at the county courthouse while I'm there!"  
  
"Be good, Ophelia. Don't get into any trouble."  
  
"Mom, I'm not even planning on getting into any actual _clothes_."  
  
"Good girl."  
  
Jeannie leaves with Tracy and Myka returns to reading where she left off.  
  
***  
  
 _"Why do you smell like my mum?"  Wolly asks Helena when he sits beside her during the lunch hour._  
  
 _At school, Helena Wells has only one really very good friend, a boy named William whom she calls Wolly, a boy who was born the same day as her, who lives not very far at all away from her, who has been her best friend since they began primary school together.  All those years ago, an ten-year-old Helena will say._  
  
 _"Perfume." is Helena's only response but she smiles proudly and takes a single bite out of the one cracker she has been nibbling on since she sat down to wait on Wolly._  
  
 _"I thought you weren't allowed to..."_  
  
 _"Vanessa bought me my own perfume." Helena interrupts.  "It's a secret though, so don't tell my father. I was even meant to shower before school and Vanessa said I didn't really have to."_  
  
 _"Some nanny you have." Wolly smiles._  
  
 _"She's not a nanny."  Helena narrows her eyes on Wolly.  "She's a family friend.  She's just staying with us for school."_  
  
 _Wolly just nods and digs into his lunch._  
  
 _There is a girl in Helena's class who walks by where she sits with Wolly everyday and says hello and today is no different than any other day when Helena sees her approaching.  Long brown hair, longer than Vanessa's even, and curly but tied back into a pony tail with a bow._  
  
 _She smiles, says, "Hi Helena," like she does everyday and Helena smiles back at her and says, "Hi Maggie," like_ she _does everyday and usually Maggie will keep walking with her friends, to the table where they sit, far away from Helena.  But today Maggie stops and her smile grows and she leans in close to Helena and then her smile grows even more._  
  
 _"I like your perfume."  Maggie tells her and Helena's cheeks grow warm again, she smiles, too. She can't help but to smile._  
  
 _"Thank you." And Helena is momentarily lost in pretty amber eyes, in curly brunette bangs, in the lingering presence of a beautiful girl not all that much older than her._  
  
 _"Well bye." The pretty girl says and walks on._  
  
 _"Bye." Helena smiles after her and the girl looks over her shoulder, smiles back at Helena before sitting with her friends at the other end of the dining hall._  
  
 _"Why do you guys look at each other like that?" Wolly asks._  
  
 _"Like what?"_  
  
 _"Like you want to kiss her or something."_  
  
 _Helena smiles, turning to her friend and shrugs. "Maybe I do want to kiss her." She turns back to where the brunette girl sits still laughing with her friends. "Don't you?"_  
  
 _"No," Wolly laughs.  "That's disgusting."_  
  
 _"I don't think it's disgusting," Helena sighs taking another bite of her cracker and resting her chin in the palm of her hand.  "I think it's beautiful._ She's _beautiful."_

 _"What a dyke."_  
  
 _Helena and Wolly both turn to a group of boys snickering at the table behind them._  
  
 _"What did you say?" Helena questions coolly, calmly._  
  
 _"I didn't say anything," a slightly older boy says with a shrug. He turns back to his table of friends and they continue laughing, peering back at Helena. She hears that word several more times in many sentences.  Accompanied by several other phrases._  
  
She's such a dyke.  
  
Bloody carpet muncher.  
  
Lesbo.  
  
 _"Oh, bugger off!"  And Wolly is moving to stand as he says this, as the boys turn back around toward them, but Helena moves her hand to his arm and grasps.  She pulls him back._  
  
 _"No, Wolly," she says softly._  
  
 _"Do you hear what they're saying about you?"_  
  
 _"I don't care." Helena tugs on Wolly's arm again and he sits._  
  
 _"Listen to your lesbo girlfriend," one boy teases._  
  
 _"Right!" Another laughs and they turn back around again._  
  
 _"They're bloody idiots."  Helena remarks softly, then louder,  "Who ever heard of a lesbian with a boyfriend anyway?" Helena turns back to the boys with a smile and they shake their heads, turning around to continue talking about her._  
  
 _"I'm not hungry anymore," Wolly says standing and collecting his lunch.  And as he goes he hits one of the boys in the head with his food tray._  
  
 _Helena doesn't know if he does this on purpose or accidentally but when the other boy stands angrily, Wolly seems fully prepared for the reaction._  
  
 _And she tries to stop him, calls his name several times, but he doesn't seem to hear her.  Doesn't seem to_ want _to hear her._  
  
 _Food trays are dropped, there's a shoving match, words are exchanged.  Mostly about Helena, about_ what _she is, about what she said.  It's loud, the entire dining hall has turned to this scuffle, is cheering on the boys._  
  
 _Wolly is mostly winning by the time an adult arrives to pull them apart and whisk them away._  
  
 _Out on the play yard, Helena is by herself, leaning against a far wall, away from where most of the kids play, hidden in the shadows because Wolly still hasn't returned from the office and Helena hasn't got many other friends to speak of.  None that will hang out with her outside of her classroom anyway._  
  
 _So when she hears footsteps across gravel, then rocks, then grass, shee fully expects to see Wolly walking toward her, to their spot, where they stand and talk every day. But who she sees instead is Maggie and behind Maggie are Maggie's friends._  
  
 _They stay on the gravel while Maggie walks up to her, and Maggie steps up to her, gets right in her face._  
  
 _"Hi," Maggie says._  
  
 _"Hey," Helena responds, moving so her back is flush against the wall._  
  
 _Maggie turns back to her friends who are mostly quiet, eyes wide, smiles on their faces before turning back to Helena._  
  
 _"Those boys said you wanted to kiss me."_  
  
 _Helena shrugs but doesn't say anything and Maggie regards her for a long time with a soft smile and red cheeks before she leans in and places the tiniest peck of a kiss on Helena's lips._  
  
 _Before Helena can open her mouth to speak, Maggie is running away.  She is with her friends again.  They are giggling and laughing and walking away saying things that Helena cannot hear because the four least significant of her five senses have completely given way to the ghost of that touch.  To the touch of another set of lips on hers. For the first time in her very young life._  
  
 _And Maggie is looking back at her, smiling over her shoulder, with flushed red cheeks as they continue walking away._  
  
 _Helena doesn't see Wolly for the rest of the day but it isn't unusual because they're in different classes.  Who Helena does see is Vanessa, smiling and waving excitedly as Helena runs to her, throws her arms around her, buries herself into Vanessa's hug._  
  
 _"Such a big hug today," Vanessa says smiling, embracing Helena tighter.  "You must have had a good day."_  
  
 _"Just happy to see you again," Helena smiles, stepping back and slipping her hand into Vanessa's hand._  
  
 _"I'm happy to see you, too, Honey"_  
  
 _"Did you have a good school day?"  Helena asks Vanessa as they begin their walk home._  
  
 _"It was a bit hectic actually but it's all good now," Vanessa smiles down at Helena, drops a quick kiss to the top of her head.  "Now that I'm with you.  And guess what."_  
  
 _Helena doesn't want to guess anything right now.  She leans into Vanessa's side and wraps her arm around the older girl's waist as they continue walking.  Offers her only a curious hum in response._  
  
 _"Your dad's going to be late coming home tonight, so I thought you and I could have our own special dinner.  We can have whatever you want."_  
  
 _"Mexican!"_  
  
 _"Mexican?"_  
  
 _"Yes, I want those toasty things you made when you first came over.  With the round flat shells and beans and veggies."_  
  
 _"Tostadas?"_  
  
 _"Yes!  Those!  Please, Ness?"_  
  
 _"I thought you might choose something a bit more fancy than that," Vanessa laughs.  "But okay, I'll make you tostadas."_  
  
 _They stop by the grocer before heading home and Helena tells Vanessa about Wolly getting into a fight, about not having seen Wolly for the rest of the day or even after school.  But she doesn't tell Vanessa why he fought, what the boys had said, that it had been about her._  
  
 _Vanessa says she'll phone his mom later that evening to check on him. And that is that until dinner time arrives and they are quiet when Helena asks Vanessa what a dyke is, other than what she knows a dike to be._  
  
 _"You've heard that word at school, I'm guessing?"  Vanessa asks thoughtfully and Helena only nods.  "It's a derogatory word for a gay woman or a lesbian or..."_  
  
 _"And carpet muncher?  Is it the same thing?"_  
  
 _Vanessa's mouth falls wide open and she narrows her eyes on Helena.  "Yes," Vanessa says and adds cautiously, "Helena, Honey, did someone say these words to you at school?"_  
  
 _"And lesbo," she responds as confirmation._  
  
 _Vanessa sits back in her seat.  "Is that what the fight was about?  Wolly and the other boy?  He was sticking up for you?"_  
  
 _Helena nods silently._  
  
 _"I'll call Wolly's mom to check on him after we eat, okay?  I'll make sure she knows he was sticking up for you."_  
  
 _"I told him to ignore those boys, they're a bunch of prats."  Helena lowers her head when Vanessa scolds her softly but then Vanessa's hand is on Helena's cheek and she's lifting Helena's face to look up at her._  
  
 _"It's okay," Vanessa says softly, "if you have those sorts of feelings.  For other girls at school.  People are people, Helbug."_  
  
 _"No other girls at school.  Just Maggie," Helena says softly.  Then smiles, her cheeks growing warm, "She kissed me today."_  
  
 _Vanessa arches a brow, letting her hand fall back to her lap and smiles, "Did she?"_  
  
 _Helena nods._  
  
 _"Shouldn't all the kids in your school have cooties at your age?"  Vanessa teases._  
  
 _"Maggie most definitely does not have cooties."_  
  
 _"Obviously not," Vanessa winks at Helena._  
  
 _They are quiet for a moment before Vanessa asks how long those boys have been calling her names.  But Helena has only just heard them today.  She tells Vanessa she doesn't care, what they think.  Or what anyone thinks because at the end of the day, Maggie kissed her and not them._  
  
 _"You got the girl," Vanessa smiles._  
  
 _"Do you," Helena pauses to bite down on her lip before continuing, "like girls?"_  
  
 _Vanessa shakes her head, "Not romantically, no."_  
  
 _"Oh," Helena sighs, looks away._  
  
 _"I have an older sister," Vanessa continues, "and she's what is called bisexual.  She dates men and women."_  
  
 _"Both at once?"  Helena asks sounding intrigued and simultaneously appalled._  
  
 _"No," Vanessa laughs, "not at once."_  
  
 _"Oh."_  
  
 _"I probably shouldn't even be talking to you about this, your dad will kill me."_  
  
 _"I won't tell him," Helena shrugs taking a bite of her tostada._  
  
 _"You don't have to keep that a secret, you know," Vanessa smiles, "if you like Maggie.  That you kissed her."_  
  
 _"_ She _kissed_ me _," Helena says matter of factly.  "She liked my perfume."_  
  
 _"Well, that part about the perfume you're not supposed to own?  You can just keep to yourself," Vanessa is laughing again and Helena smiles, watches the older girl as they continue eating in silence.  Until a thought comes to her._  
  
 _"What does it mean, carpet muncher?"_  
  
 _Helena doesn't know why this makes Vanessa almost choke, go into a coughing fit, turn bright red.  Helena refills Vanessa's glass of water for her, hands it to her._  
  
 _"Thank you, Honey."  Vanessa takes the glass and drinks the whole thing down.  Slowly.  And when she's done, she says, "You know, maybe you should be having this conversation with your dad."_  
  
 _"If he hasn't told me by now he isn't ever going to tell me," Helena argues._  
  
 _"Yeah, I just don't think that's something you really need to know right now..."_  
  
 _There's a heavy knock at the door just then that gets their attention, followed by someone ringing the house ell several times._  
  
 _"Saved by the bell," Vanessa grins standing. Helena giggles as Vanessa heads toward the front door._  
  
 _Helena is sitting by herself for several minutes before she hears her brother's voice, and it's getting louder and louder._  
  
 _She quietly steps to the foyer and finds Vanessa there with her brother and two police officers._  
  
 _"Are you the mother, Ma'am?"_  
  
 _"No, I'm..."_  
  
 _"She's_ not _my mother!"  Charlie is yelling. "Less you think she gave birth to me when she was four.  Though I wouldn't put it past her to be that much of a whore."_  
  
 _"Charles, if you don't think for one second that I'll let them take you..."_  
  
 _"Professional courtesy, that's why you're here and not being taken in as a juvenile," one of the officers says.  "So keep your mouth shut and have a bit of respect for the lady."_  
  
 _"You know what, thank you, I'll make sure his dad talks to him."_  
  
 _They go then. Vanessa closes the door and Charlie is moving through the hall, toward Helena, he pushes her into the wall as he moves past her and into the kitchen._  
  
 _"Ouch!" Helena yelps. "Charlie, that hurt."_  
  
 _Vanessa is by her side now, placing a hand over her shoulder, rubbing the spot where her bruise is before she moves into the kitchen and Helena follows quietly._  
  
 _"I'm sorry but why do you think it's okay for you to be that rude to me, to your sister, and then come devour the food I've cooked?"_  
  
 _"This is my house, this is my food."_  
  
 _"It's Daddy's house," Helena corrects._  
  
 _"Helena, Honey, no."  Vanessa turns to scold before turning back to Charlie with her arms crossed. "She's right, this is your dad's house. It isn't your house."_  
  
 _"Do you see my father here right now?  When he's out of the house, I become the man of this house.  My house, my food."_  
  
 _"I bought the food, I cooked it for your sister. Since you are so goddamn adamant that I'm not here look after you, too, that you don't need someone to watch you, I'm sure you can cook your own food."_  
  
 _"My father_ pays _you, Whore.  Everything you buy is mine, too."_  
  
 _"You can't talk to her like that, Charlie!  I'm going to tell Daddy if you don't shut your mouth."_  
  
 _Charlie charges toward Helena but Vanessa steps in-between the two of them, arms crossed._  
  
 _"Lay another finger on her and so help me," Vanessa seethes._  
  
 _Charlie spits out a litany of swears at Vanessa, so many that Helena does not know the meaning of half of them.  And Vanessa is mostly quiet until he's done then tries reasoning with him, to calm him down. And even at ten, Helena knows there is no reasoning with Charles Junior.  There is only yelling and fighting until someone gives in and walks away._  
  
 _But Vanessa does not give in.  She raises her voice to match his and she's yelling at him for being a brat, for having to be brought home by the police, for being dumb enough to be caught smoking, for his disrespect to her, to his father, even his sister._  
  
 _Helena is his next target.  He calls_ her _the brat, spoiled, motherless, a bastard, a cunt.  All words Helena has heard before, all words she's sure will hear again.  And Helena is trying to help Vanessa, she's trying to say so many hurtful things to Charlie, too.  But then Vanessa turns around and she bends to Helena and she tells her, "Go!  To your room, now!"  And Helena doesn't understand.  Why Vanessa is mad at her, why Vanessa sends her away._  
  
 _Helena goes.  She cries and she turns and she runs away.  Through the hall, up the stairs, into her father's room where there is a phone.  Where she dials every number she can think to dial for him, starting with one of his offices and ending with his colleague's office.  And when she has him on the line, she cries out everything about Charlie, about him being brought home by the police, about his arguing with Vanessa, about Vanessa sending her to her room._  
  
 _For once her father doesn't just tell her to go to bed.  To close her door and let Charlie figure things out.  For once he tells her to go in her room, to lock the door, that he will be home as soon as possible.  That he is on his way._  
  
 _Helena climbs into her bed and the fighting dies down minutes later. She hears Charlie's steps on the stairs, in the hallway, going into his bedroom.  She hears his door slam, several things falling or flying before he finally turns on his music.  Loud.  Too loud._  
  
 _She buries herself under her covers, covers her ears, closes her eyes tight and she doesn't open them again until she feels the dip in her bed, until the covers are being pulled from over her.  And there is Vanessa, smiling down on her with tears in her eyes, reaching to Helena's hair, brushing her hand over it sweetly, touching the back of her hand to Helena's cheek._  
  
 _"I'm sorry, Honey," Vanessa says softly, "that I yelled at you.  I just..." she takes in a deep breath and shakes her head, "I didn't want you to hear all those things he was saying. I'm sorry."_  
  
 _Helena lays quietly for a moment, watching as tears fall down Vanessa's cheeks, then she is up, on her knees, and embracing Vanessa, resting her head on the older girl's shoulder.  Crying into that shoulder, into long blonde hair, sobbing._  
  
 _"I called my father," she says through tears.  "He's coming home."_  
  
 _"Good. I'm glad."  Vanessa pats Helena's back, hugs her tighter.  "How about you put some pajamas on, okay?  And get ready for bed."_  
  
 _Helena sits back and nods, says softly, "Okay."  Vanessa smiles and wipes her tears away._  
  
 _"I'll be downstairs, okay?  Waiting for your dad.  I'll come say goodnight to you in a bit."_  
  
 _Helena nods and Vanessa kisses her forehead, runs her hand over Helena's hair once again and leaves her room._  
  
 _Eventually the music dies down.  Eventually her father gets home.  Helena hears his voice and Vanessa's voice, traveling up the stairs and she leaves her room to sit on those stairs, just above where her father sits with a crying Vanessa.  Helena makes herself small and quiet and she listens as Vanessa vents to her father, about Charlie, the police, and mostly about her concerns for Helena._  
  
 _"He's hurting her," Vanessa tells her father.  "She has a bruise on the back of her shoulder the size of a baseball."_  
  
 _"So they play rough," Helena's father tries to excuse away because he has heard the same excuse from Helena that Vanessa heard that morning._  
  
 _"Do you think there is_ anything _at all about Charlie that says he likes to play with his little sister?  Is there anything at all about Helena that says she likes_ rough housing _?"_  
  
 _"She's not exactly a delicate flower," Charles argues with Vanessa._  
  
 _"He needs... someone to talk to."  Vanessa is wiping her tears away. "I can't put up with that kid but I don't want to leave Helena here with him alone."_  
  
 _"I'll talk to him."_  
  
 _"Mr. Wells," Vanessa's voice sounds pleading._ _"Charles."_  
  
 _"I will talk to him."_  
  
 _And Charles' hand is on Vanessa's face, wiping away tears, cupping her cheek.  It is the most affectionate Helena has ever seen her father, with anyone.  When he kisses her other cheek, when he kisses her forehead and then her lips._  
  
 _Vanessa is smiling, leaning her forehead into his, kissing him, too. And he whispers something to her that Helena cannot hear from where she sits and whatever it is, it makes Vanessa want to kiss Charles Senior_ _again because she does, several more times before she finally pushes him away and tells him to go._  
  
 _He stands and Helena runs back to her room, closes the door quietly as she hears her father's steps moving to her door and she sees the shadow of his steps just beneath the door before he moves away to knock on Charlie's door._  
  
 _There is more yelling then, her father at Charlie.  Charlie at her father.  About him smoking, about his attitude, about the way he treats his little sister, how he's supposed to be looking out for her.  And Charlie is yelling about the way their father treats him, he talks about "her", and Helena suspects that is Vanessa, as if she is their mother or trying to become their mother.  He calls her a whore for the umpteenth time tonight._  
  
 _The music is loud again after Charlie's door slams. Helena is back in her bed, back under her covers, eyes shut tight, fingers in her ears._  
  
 _In thirty minutes she is falling asleep, fingers slipping from her ears, turning onto her side but then there is that dip in her bed again and this time it isn't Vanessa.  Even at mine, Helena feels almost foolish to think it might be, but it isn't Vanessa._  
  
 _She opens her eyes when hands grab at her arms, her wrists.  And she is tugging them away, squirming, kicking, when a weight falls over her hips and a dull pain drives into her belly._  
  
 _She opens her mouth to scream but that scream is muffled by a hand, her wrists above her head now being held down by the other hand._  
  
 _Her eyes adjust to the dark, to find Charlie glaring down from above her and he's sitting on top of her with one knee digging into her abdomen._  
  
 _"I dare you to scream," he says in a whisper through gritted teeth._  
  
 _Helena doesn't try to scream but she cries._  
  
 _"Stop crying," he tells her._  
  
 _She can't stop crying but she clamps her lips shut tight and tries not to make any noise, even with Charlie's hand still clasped over her mouth._  
  
 _"I could kill you right now," he whispers down to her. "I could smother you to death with one hand.  No one would even know."_  
  
 _It's harder now for Helena not to make any noise, not to sob out loud. She wants to scream for her father, for Vanessa, but she knows Charlie is probably telling the truth. Charlie probably could kill her.  No one would know._  
  
 _"You. Are a spoiled little cunt.  And if you tell on me again," Charlie tightens his grip on her wrists, pushes his knee further into her belly, "I swear to God, I will come in here while you're sleeping and cut all your hair off.  To start."_  
  
 _Helena closes her eyes tight as Charlie leans in closer to her._  
  
 _"_ Just _to start.  So keep your bloody mouth shut."_  
  
 _Charlie shoves her further into the bed, pushes down on her entire body with all of his weight as he pushes himself off of her and stands at the edge of her bed.  And as he goes he grabs her covers, pulls them entirely off of her bed, drags them across the floor and leaves them at the door._  
  
 _Helena turns onto her side as the door closes behind him, curls into a ball, clutches at her belly.  She stays this way all night, crying, eyes wide open until she can no longer keep her eyes wide open._  
  
 _It isn't until the sun is rising that her eyelids fall heavy, that she finally lets them close, finally falls asleep._  
  
 _Her alarm goes off thirty minutes later and she jerks awake, wide awake, sits up in bed.  And like she had never stopped, the tears begin to fall again._  
  
 _She gets out of bed, steps through her covers, still on the ground, and opens her bedroom door.  Looks toward Charlie's door, still shut, before walking to her father's door. And she is about to knock when it opens wide and Vanessa is walking out with her back to Helena, saying words to her father._  
  
 _"Jesus Christ, Charles, I should have been up already.  Helena will be up any second." And that is when Vanessa turns, wrapped only in a sheet, to find that Helena is already up.  That Helena is standing before her with a hand still raised, prepared to knock on her father's door, until she lets it fall slowly to her side as her eyes trail down and then up Vanessa's mostly exposed form.  "Helena."_  
  
 _She doesn't know what to feel because she's hurting.  She still hurts. Her wrists hurt, her belly hurts, her hips hurt, her cheeks hurt.  And she's frightened.  She's more scared than she has ever been of Charlie in her ten years of life.  But also she wants to hug Vanessa and tell her everything, she wants Vanessa to hold her and kiss her cheeks and her forehead and tell her she will be okay.  Tell her everything will be all right because she's there and she'll stay and they will always be friends._  
  
 _They will be friends forever and ever and ever._  
  
 _"Helena, Honey, are you okay?"_  
  
 _"You spent the night with Daddy," Helena says and what she feels most now is pain.  On top of the hurt and the fright, she feels betrayal and heartache and an unexplainable pain because while Charlie had slipped into her bedroom last night, to pin her down, to spit obscenities in her face, to threaten her, Vanessa had been with her father.  Doing whatever they were doing. Making_ him _happy. Keeping_ him _company.  "Charlie's right."_  
  
 _"Helena?"_  
  
 _"You just want to replace our mom," Helena cries.  "She didn't care about us either. She didn't really love me either."_  
  
 _Vanessa is reaching for Helena now, grasps her arm, "Helena, I_ care _about you." She tugs Helena closer._  
  
 _"No."  Helena sobs.  "You're just here for my father." Helena pulls but Vanessa tightens her grip.  "You're just hear to make him happy."_  
  
 _Her father appears in the doorway but he is quiet, says nothing.  Looks away, as if he is actually ashamed._  
  
 _"Honey, come here," Vanessa pulls Helena into her, "I_ care _about you.  I_ adore _you, Helena."  And she wraps her free arm tight around Helena, holds her close as Helena falls into her and sobs.  "I'm sorry, I was going to tell you.  Eventually.  About your dad And I.  If it became serious..."_  
  
 _Helena doesn't say anything, just continues to cry into Vanessa's arms._  
  
 _"I'm sorry, Sweetheart.  I care about you. I'm here for you, too."  Helena tightens her hold on Vanessa.  "I love you, Helena."_  
  
 _"Helena," her father sighs, "Georgie, you need to calm down.  You need to get ready for school.  We can talk about this later."_  
  
 _"Charles, really?" Vanessa turns to him.  "Can't you give us the day?"_  
  
 _"She needs to keep up with her studies."  Charles argues.  "This isn't a reason to not go to school."_  
  
 _Vanessa sighs and whispers into Helena's ear, "Let's go, Honey."  And she stands when Helena moves back, takes her hand and pulls her into her room.  "I'll get her ready for school,"  is all she says to Charles before shutting the bedroom door._  
  
***  
  
Myka closes the journal and sighs.    
  
Debates reading any further.  After all of that.  Because trying to distance herself from these thoughts and these feelings is not working.  Trying to not feel Helena's pain is not working.  Trying not to think about Helena feeling all of this pain is _not working_.  
  
The apartment bell rings just then and Myka pulls herself out of bed and makes her way out of the apartment, down the steps into the bookstore, to the door.  
  
"Helena," she greets with a smile and the older girl turns to her with a tiny smile of her own, a suitcase by her side.  Myka's smile grows.  
  
"It's too quiet," Helena says, "at the pool house.  And I um," Helena lowers her head before she looks back up at Myka again, "I've really missed talking to you."  
  
Myka nods, "I've missed you, too.  I mean, _talking_ to you.  Like... we used to but... not exactly like that, I guess."  Myka rolls her eyes up to the sky and shakes her head.  "Sorry, I'm... come on."  
  
Myka brings Helena's suitcase upstairs and puts it in Tracy's bedroom where she and Helena set to replacing Tracy's bed sheets before returning to Myka's room where they sit side-by-side on her bed.  Myka pulling Helena's journal into her lap.  
  
"How... far are you?"  
  
"Ms. Calder and your father?" Myka suggests.  "After your brother... attacked you."  
  
"Which time?" is Helena's next question and Myka's mouth opens but she's quiet for a moment, trying to conjure up words to respond with.  
  
"The first time, I guess."  Myka presses her lips tightly together again.    
  
"Ah."  Helena nods and runs a nervous hand through her hair.    
  
"Vanessa took you to her room after that but," Myka sighs, "I stopped there. I just... it's a lot and I'm... I mean, I know it happened already but it makes me scared for you."  
  
"Well," Helena smiles, turning to Myka now, "I'm here.  So at the very least you know with quite a bit of certainty that I've survived.  So far."  
  
"So far?"    
  
"Well, with my luck.  With people."  Helena puffs out a soft laugh, that is barely a laugh at all, and she turns away from Myka.  "I can tell you what happened next.  I don't think I really wrote that much about it."  
  
"About you and Vanessa?  Were you only ten when you...when she...?"  
  
"No!" Helena turns back to Myka quickly.  "No, no.  Not _that_.  Not then.  That comes so much later, Myka."  
  
"Oh." And Myka cannot contain her relief. To know that the thing she already knew, about Helena and about Vanessa Calder, the thing that she had been dreading about reading so early on in Helena's life, was not just a page turn away.  "So what happened?  Why were you so upset with Vanessa?  You knew about her and your dad, right?  From the sounds of it, they weren't very careful."  
  
"She never came to my room that night," Helena says softly.  "Like she said she would.  To say goodnight."  
  
Myka's brows raise and she nods, recalling that portion of Helena's writing, word for word.  
   
"If she had, she would have found Charlie there.  Over me."  Helena lowers her head again.  "But she didn't.  She was with my father. All night.  They were... just in there with each other, without a care in the world."  
  
"How could she know?" Myka asks.  
  
"I know it isn't her fault," Helena sighs.  "I mean, I know that now.  But not when I was ten.  Not when I thought she was meant to be my friend.  To watch over me and protect me.  So, I was... mean to her."  
  
Helena sits further back on Myka's bed, to lean against the wall behind them, and Myka joins her, crosses her legs in front of her, leans in slightly closer to Helena.  
  
"I acted out.  To _be_ like Charlie because I thought Charlie was right about Vanessa trying to be our mother.  Even though I think, looking back on the very beginning, I would have loved it.  I really would have loved to have Vanessa in our family and maybe it would have helped.  But I didn't know.  I was young and all I knew was that my mother abandoned us and if Vanessa wanted to be my mother, then that meant she would eventually abandon us, too."  Helena takes in a deep breath.  "And Charlie was better when I didn't talk to Vanessa.  I was afraid of him but the more I acted like him, the better he tolerated me.  But Vanessa... became miserable. _We_ made her miserable.  She only stayed for my father, at first.  But then she couldn't stay anymore at all."  
  
Myka sighs, flipping through the journal as Helena turns to look at her with a sort of guilt in her eyes.  Like she's asking for Myka not to judge her.  Myka who isn't judging her so much as she is trying to find a way to go back into time and save this tiny Helena that is so full of hurt.  
  
"I was ten."  It seems to be Helena's plea for understanding and Myka turns to her and smiles, lifts her hand to touch the tips of her fingers just below Helena's chin.  
  
"I'm not judging you, Helena," Myka says softly and Helena watches her for a long time before she lowers her gaze and sits straight, moves her hand to Myka's hand at her chin and lowers them to her lap.  
  
"You aren't.  Not yet."  
  
Myka looks down at their hands together and she moves her fingers to tangle them with Helena's fingers, squeezes them tight.  
  
"Not _ever_."  
  
Helena shakes her head.  "Do not say that until you are done reading.  Don't say it like you've never been mad at me before.  Like I can't do any wrong.  Or haven't done anything wrong to you."  
  
"Helena, after this year, after last year?"  Myka shakes her head.  "I don't care.  I have missed you so much.  I don't care."  
  
"You _have_ to care," Helena urges, pulling her hand from Myka's.  "It's not okay for you to not care.  When you stop caring about how people treat you..." Helena pauses, shaking her head.  "It's not okay."  
  
Myka sighs and sets Helena's journal aside, pushes her own hair behind her ears.  "I care.  About myself. I just... care about you more."  
  
"No," Helena shakes her head again, laughs softly.  "No, Myka."  Helena stands and walks across Myka's room, leans against the chair at her desk, her back to Myka.  "This is not okay.  _This_ is what I don't want.  _You_ , putting me back on that pillar.  It's too much."  Helena stands straight and turns to Myka now.  
  
"Then what _do_ you want?  Helena?"  
  
Helena steps back to her and sits back down on the bed, turns to face Myka.  "A friend, Myka.  You have... _had_ become a best friend to me.  My closest friend.  And I really need our friendship right now.  I just need us to calm down and be friends.  I need someone who understands and..."  Helena turns away, faces forward, hands in her lap.  "I just need you to keep reading."  
  
Myka scoots to the edge of the bed, sits quietly before turning slightly to Helena.  
  
"Were you ever... _really_ in love with me?"  
  
The question gets Helena's immediate attention and the look that takes over her face, when she inhales, exhales... when she moves slightly closer to Myka... the look is sad and guilty and anxious all at once.  Myka expects to hear what she has always assumed.  What she has always thought to know since she found out about Helena and Vanessa, Helena and Marcus.  She expects to hear Helena admit to never loving her at all.  To only loving the attention and nothing more.  To loving the affection and nothing more.  To loving the touch and the feel and the warmth and the sensation but nothing more.  
  
But even as Helena's hand pushes back Myka's hair, away from her face and combs through the length of brown curls, even as Helena leans in close to Myka and smiles a sad sort of smile and breathes out a sigh so close to Myka that she can smell a sweetness on Helena's breath and feel warm air against her own lips, Myka knows she has been wrong.  Myka knows, Myka _remembers_ , how true this thing is for Helena.  As true for Helena as it is for her.  
  
"Myka," Helena leans her forehead against Myka's and closes her eyes, "I have kept many things from you for many reasons that I thought were for your own good.  Things that have come back to me, to _us_.  Things that maybe I should have told you sooner than I planned to.  Things you were ready to hear a lot sooner than I had given you credit for."  She breathes.  "If you were ready then... ready enough to kiss me the way that you do?  You were certainly ready to know.  _A lot_ of things.  But I have never," and she shakes her head now, opens her eyes and moves slightly away from Myka, "I have never lied to you.  Not about anything.  Especially not that."  
  
"Last year," Myka says softly, "all those times we spent together?  Were you with someone else then, too?"  
  
It's the thing Myka has most wanted to know.  To ask of Helena.  
  
"There were times, early on in the summer, that Marcus and I were together."  Helena admits.  "When I was trying to figure things out, to forget... but the time you and I spent together, with Tracy, after what your father did to you, going to the movies, the diner, at the lake?"  Helena shakes her head.  "There was no one but you, Myka.  It was too easy, to want to be with no one but you."  
  
They are quiet.  For so long.  Then Helena holds up a finger and stands, heads out of the door and asks Myka to stay put. She returns less than a minute later with a small gift box, sits on the bed beside Myka again and shows it to her.  
  
"Helena," Myka laughs.  "I gave you that for your birthday last year.  You still haven't opened it?"  
  
"Things were very crazy then," Helena smiles, "I'm sorry to say that I forgot you had even given me a gift until I found it in Sally's car sometime before Thanksgiving."  
  
"She took it from you?"  
  
Helena shrugs, "It wouldn't be the first thing. Anyway."  Helena hands the gift to Myka.  "I meant to give it back to you at Thanksgiving but had left it behind."  
  
"Give it back?"  Myka asks. "Why?"  
  
Helena's expression falls to confusion, she shrugs.  "For honesty?  For trust?  To start our friendship anew?  All things considered, Myka..." Helena lets her voice fall, too.    
  
"Helena," Myka pushes the box back toward the older girl, "just open it." Helena is hesitant.  "All this time and you've just been hanging onto it, waiting to give it back to me?"  
  
"I thought you hated me."  
  
"Helena, you're the one who gave me your ring back."  Myka wants to laugh at the absurdity.  "Who do you think hates who?"  
  
"You were really angry that night, Myka."  Helena's voice is soft as she pulls the gift box back into her lap.  "Kind of like you are now."  
  
"I'm not angry," Myka says turning away, pushing her hands through her hair.  When she turns back to Helena, the older girl's look is skeptical.  "I'm a little annoyed."  Helena arches a brow. "A _lot_ annoyed... but not angry."  
  
Helena is lowering her head again and Myka tilts her head back, heaves out a large sigh.  
  
"Just open it."  She sits straight then leans into Helena, playfully rests her head on Helena's shoulder.  "I don't want to argue," she whines, "I don't want to deal with awkward silences and days or weeks or months of not talking." Myka sits up and furrows her brows at the older girl.  "Open it."  
  
"Okay."  
  
Helena does.  And she does this slowly, purposely, and she smiles at Myka as she meticulously removes paper.  Grins when Myka glares at her.  
  
"Helena Wells."  Myka is scolding her and she tears the paper away quickly now, her smile softening and falling almost entirely as she lifts a jewelry box up and turns to Myka with some anticipation.  
  
"Myka Bering."  Helena smirks.  
  
" _Open it_." Myka urges.  Helena opens the box, her smile widening again.  
  
Inside there is a necklace with a locket at the end and Helena pulls it gently away from the box, sets that box down on the bed beside her and holds the necklace up by the chain, to dangle between her and Myka.  
  
"This," Helena says softly, her eyes first on the necklace and then on Myka, "is beautiful, Myka."  And she slowly, gently drops it into her open palm, touches the locket.  
  
"Now, open _that_ ," Myka commands with a small smile on her face.  
  
Helena opens the locket and inside there is a tiny photo of her and Myka.  It is close up, hardly recognizable, but Helena _does_ recognize it.  A photo from one very random day by Helena's pool last summer, just before that time they'd spent at the lake, when Myka had been so frivolously taking photos of them laying in the grass together.  And in it, Helena is kissing Myka's cheek, Myka is grinning wide.  
  
It is everything about them, about their friendship, their relationship to one another, everything they know of each other when they are with each other, it is everything that they are, all wrapped up into one very tiny picture in one very tiny locket that rests now in Helena's palm. 

But it is everything without the sometimes pain and confusion, without the misunderstandings and the occasional arguments.  Without the so many, too many, emotions.  It is just _them_.  
   
Helena doesn't speak as her eyes dance over the gold chain, the locket, the tiny picture within it.  Those eyes move up to Myka, to Myka's eyes, even down to Myka's lips before finding Myka's eyes again but the look, that expression, is pained and filled with something that Myka cannot exactly pinpoint.  It feels like regret or remorse or guilt.    
  
Whatever it is, it is definitely sad.  It is definitely not a good feeling.  A feeling that one usually has when contemplating their proximity to someone they have so often, in the past, claimed to love.  
  
So Myka takes control. She takes control because she sees Helena watching her, she sees Helena's eyes move back to her lips and her eyes move to Helena's lips and she sees there is a struggle there for Helena, she bites back her own struggle and she takes control.    
  
The tips of her fingers brush Helena's as she picks up the locket, the chain, and then undoes the clasp.  Before Helena can think of any words to say, Myka is reaching over her shoulders, around her neck, beneath hair that she pushes out of the way with preoccupied hands.  And Helena gets the clue, she turns slightly away from Myka, she lifts her own hair up high, turns even more slightly away from Myka.  
  
Myka redoes the clasp on the necklace, now that she can see where her hands are moving, how the clasp is positioned.  She redoes the clasp then gently straightens the necklace around Helena's neck, the pads of her fingers moving ever so lightly across skin, through the wisps of tiny baby curls of Helena's hair.  And she let's her fingers, the pads of her fingers, move even more lightly down that chain that falls over Helena's shoulder, over the exposed skin of a V-neck top, over Helena's chest.  
  
And when Helena turns back to Myka, takes in a deep inhale, leans her weight against the one arm she has resting against the bed, Myka begs herself to stay in control.  
  
Her hands fall to her lap, her eyes fall over the locket then rise to meet Helena's and they are both smiling the same soft smile, Helena reaching up to grasp the locket that now sits falling into the crevice of her breasts, just over her heart, and Myka moving now-sweaty hands through brown curls atop her head.  
  
"So..." Myka starts, trying now to control her own breathing.  
  
"Let's make dinner."  Helena offers, near breathless.  
  
Myka nods, smiles.  "Okay."  
  
They make dinner.  Together.  Just the two of them.  Moving through the kitchen near one another, one behind the other, beside each other, often apart, too.    
  
And when they sit down to eat, it is across from each other.  At opposite ends of the table, but they talk and they laugh and they do as much making up as Myka thinks they can possibly stand to do before it is so late that everyone else, the mothers and Tracy, eventually return home.    
  
They say goodnight then.  Helena to Tracy's room and Myka to her own.  But when they say goodnight, it is too quiet and too close.  It is almost entirely out of Myka's control, the way she leans into Helena.  How she gravitates to Helena.  How she cannot escape that pull of Helena Wells.    
  
It is almost entirely out of Myka's control but Helena turns away, when Myka only narrowly resists the urge to kiss her.  Helena turns away and Myka is so close, leaning into her where they stand just barely hidden, just barely through Tracy's door.  Myka is so close that her breath hits Helena's neck and she can see the older girl's breath catch, she can feel the shudder that runs through every inch of her, she can see the hint of a smile that pulls into Helena's cheeks, the way she shuts her eyes so very tight.  
  
Myka breathes another sigh against that neck before she says goodnight.  Before she then, too, says Helena's name and Helena responds in kind, with a breathless goodnight.    
  
Myka grips at that control.  Almost entirely out of her hands.  She grips it and she turns and she heads to her room that she now shares very thankfully, very _very_ thankfully, with her little sister.  
  
***  
  
 _Vanessa makes a still-crying Helena sit on her bed while she showers and dresses in the bathroom.  Door closed.  By the time she is done, Helena's father has left for work.  Vanessa tells her they won't be going to school. They're going to stay in their pajamas and do nothing at all except spend time together.  And that is exactly what they do that day._  
  
 _A tiny Helena curls into Vanessa's side on her bed and they watch mindless television, cheesy movies, eat junk food, and eventually close their eyes._  
  
 _Helena doesn't sleep.  She moves her head over Vanessa's chest and rests her ear over Vanessa's heart, listens as her heart beats slowly, peacefully into her ear.  Closes her eyes as her head rises and falls with every breath that Vanessa takes.  And when she finally sits up, it is only to take in the vision of Vanessa, to watch that chest rise and fall, to stare at the dip in her neck, to see the way her head tilts to the side.  The way her lips press together in her sleep before falling slightly open again._  
  
 _A tiny Helena leans in over Vanessa, leans in close to the older girl and she holds her breath.  She holds her breath and she closes her eyes as she leans closer, swallows, presses her lips to those sleeping lips._  
  
 _All she knows of a kiss is what she learned in that kiss from the previous day, with Maggie on the play yard, in the shadows of a building.  And she mimics that kiss, lingers so long with her lips against the older girl's lips that she is almost forgets to breathe.  Takes in a deep breath through her nose, exhales against soft sleeping lips as she pulls slowly away._  
  
 _She opens her eyes and they are immediately met by wide open blue eyes and furrowing brows._  
  
 _"Helena."  Vanessa's voice is soft and she sits up slowly, forcing a quiet and wide-eyed Helena to sit back on the bed.  Vanessa is quiet too, she lowers her eyes, lowers her head to her hands, shakes her head as blonde hair falls over her shoulders, down her back.  "Helena, that's not..."_  
  
 _"I'm sorry," Helena's tiny voice says softly.  "I'm sorry."_  
  
 _And Vanessa looks up, opens her mouth to speak but Helena is off of the bed, she is moving quickly out the door, shutting it behind her. Running to her room, where her covers are still all over the floor.  And she hears Vanessa calling out for her, ignores the calls.  Locks her bedroom door.  Locks Vanessa out._  
  
 _"Helena, Honey," Vanessa is tapping on her door as Helena pulls her covers back onto her bed, buries herself beneath them.  "Please unlock your door. I'm not mad.  I promise, Helbug, I am not upset."_  
  
 _Helena remains quiet._  
  
 _"Helena?"_  
  
 _She says nothing.  She cries.  Quietly.  Closes her eyes.  Pulls the covers further over her head._  
  
 _Eventually, for a short while anyway, she falls asleep.  
  
_ ***

Something about Helena has changed, Myka notices.  Tracy notices, too.  Even Pete notices.  
  
They see, finally, what their mother's had seen in the older girl.  Aside from the too skinny and the sad.  She is quieter, even when Jeannie Jr. comes home.  It becomes apparent to Myka very early on that Helena prefers signing with Jeannie Jr. over talking to anyone else because signing is easier for her than talking out loud.  So she'll sign to Myka here and there, much more slowly than she does with Jeannie, because maybe she just isn't in the mood.  Maybe she can't find her voice.  Maybe there are words she just can't bring herself to say out loud.  
  
She is also distant.  Myka notices this more than anyone else because more than anyone else, she has always been close to Helena and now Helena doesn't initiate any physical contact with Myka.  She keeps her distance.  And when Myka comes close to her, as she does when they occasionally go on walks, when they go to the movies, when they have dinner as a family, Helena will put space between them.  
  
She will sit between Tracy and Jeannie Jr.  Or Jeannie Jr. and Pete. She will avoid eye contact with Myka if her gaze lingers too long.  She won't step into Myka's room without being asked or led there, she won't even walk past her bedroom door if it is open.  
  
So something about Helena has definitely changed but she tries to have fun.  Myka can see that much.  She smiles when everyone is laughing, she offers to drive Tracy to her friends' houses occasionally.  She helps around the house, with the dishes, with laundry, with tidying up.  
  
She even helps Myka in the bookstore.  And they do talk when they're alone.  Like friends who have been friends for years but are just now beginning to have so many things in common.  Helena will ask Myka where she is in the journal and Myka will tell her she hasn't read in a while.  
  
Helena teases her with gentle uncertainty because Myka can read a book in hours.  The journal has already taken her half a week.  Myka reminds her that it isn't just a book.  It is more than just that and she finds herself becoming overwhelmed by it. By everything that Helena has to say within it.  
  
So she puts it down.  To enjoy the Helena she has now.  To indulge in the occasional smile that graces that face.  To hear bits and pieces of her past directly from that mouth.  That precious little mouth, she'll joke, that once snuck a kiss from a girl who was much too old for her tiny little heart.  
  
They are seated in the bookstore, side by side behind the counter, when Helena is blushing at that, hiding her face in her hands.  Telling Myka how she locked herself in her room all day. How she only came out when she had to pee really badly and Vanessa had been waiting for her, tried to hold onto her, hug her tight, so she couldn't run away again, not realizing that Helena had to _go_.  
  
"Did you make it?"  Myka asks laughing.    
  
"Of course I made it," Helena rolls her eyes, pushing back her hair.  "Narrowly."  And Myka laughs until tears are falling from her face and Helena is smiling, watching Myka with some amusement.  "I'm glad you can manage such joy at ten-year-old-me's expense," Helena chuckles.  
  
Myka sighs, wipes at her eyes.  "I'm sorry, Helena, but I can just picture it.  I'm sorry."  
  
"I know, we laugh about it now, too."  
  
Myka leans into the counter now, turns to Helena, still smiling, and questions her "we" and her "now".  Asks how long it has been since "we", how long ago was "now".  
  
Helena lowers her head and tucks more hair behind her ears.  "I saw her last weekend," Helena admits. "She lives in the city, actually. Not far from me."  
  
"Why?"  
  
"I was... having a hard time.  With Marcus.  And Sally."  Helena sighs and sits up straight.  "I stayed with Vanessa.  I needed someone to talk to."  
  
"Uh-huh..."  Myka sits straight, too, casting a suspicious eye on Helena.  
  
"It's not like what you would think, Myka," Helena sighs.  "Not anymore.  Our friendship is very... fragile.  Not the same.  It is very precarious.  And," Helena lowers her head, "she's engaged now.  To this really handsome guy who is super nice and treats her well.  Who is her age.”  Helena glances to Myka with a small smile.  "She's moving this summer.  To be with him."  
  
Myka's immediate feeling is relief because _there_ goes the competition but some worry creeps in, the longer she watches Helena beside her.  The longer she realizes this too has something to do with the too skinny and the sad.  And especially the lonely.    
  
"Is that why you came back?"  She asks of Helena.  "Before summer.  Before she leaves?"  
  
"Would you feel slighted if I said yes?"  Helena asks in return.    
  
Myka _wants_ to feel slighted.  She does.  It is her first instinct, to feel just that.  But if she's being honest with herself, she is relieved.  Mostly relieved.  And that relief is what is most important to her.  It is the most important thing to her, about having Helena back.  Especially in her state, in her skinny and sad and lonely and quiet and distancing state.  
  
"She is the one who suggested I come back," Helena goes on when Myka doesn't answer.  "She has been suggesting it for months.  Since my dad cut me off."  
  
"I'm surprised she didn't want to keep you all to herself," Myka scoffs just under her breath.  
  
"It isn't like that, Myka," Helena shakes her head.  "Not even remotely."  
  
Myka then, being bold, leans into Helena and cocks her head to the side.  Asks the older girl, "Then what is it like?"    
  
"We had one night.  That's all.  One night and she's been beating herself up about it ever since then." Helena says softly, her eyes wandering off to some invisible force above and beyond where Myka sits.  "Just... keep reading," is all she says before her eyes find Myka's again.  
  
Myka nods her understanding and smiles, her eyes falling down to Helena's neck.  To the gold chain that hangs there and disappears below the front of Helena's shirt.  
  
When her eyes meet Helena's again, the look she finds is one that has been absent from those eyes for quite some time.  Too long of a time.  A look that Myka had taken for granted in the previous year and of late has been so fleeting.  So rare.  
  
Longing, Myka thinks.  Desire even.  
  
Myka leans further into the counter, still turned slightly to Helena, and she signs now, to the other girl, "Thank you.  For giving me your trust."  And she means the journal, of course. Helena's story, her _life_.  Her secrets.  
  
Helena signs back, "Thank you, for giving me _yours_."  
  
***  
  
 _On Vanessa's birthday, she takes Helena to the zoo.  Helena, being as Charles prefers her to be, tells Vanessa that she is too old for such juvenile entertainment as watching caged animals toil around in their own feces._  
  
 _Helena specifically uses the word feces to prove that point about her age._  
  
 _After one hour of complaints, Vanessa takes Helena home and the second they are through the door, Vanessa tells Helena to drop the act.  That Charles is nowhere near them.  That she is tired and she is done and all she wants is for Helena to drop it.  That all Vanessa wants from Helena is one final week spent with the sweet little girl she used to know._  
  
 _"Today is my birthday, you know," Vanessa tells Helena with wet eyes as she makes her sit on the couch and sits down beside her._  
  
 _Helena hadn't known.  Or she had at some point but she had since forgotten because she hadn't spent much time being close to Vanessa or outwardly caring about Vanessa.  She had spent most of her time pretending not to like Vanessa.  And maybe all of the pretending had turned to not-quite-pretending after so many months._

 _Either way, she thinks, she had forgotten about Vanessa's birthday._  
  
 _"Helena, I um," Vanessa is not looking at her but as far away from her as possible until she says, "I'm moving back to the states.  Next week.”_  
  
 _Only then does she look at Helena and Helena's resolve immediately crumbles.  The act is immediately dropped._  
  
 _"What?  Why?"_  
  
 _"It's just time."  Vanessa shrugs.  "My school year is ending and I want to be home.”_  
  
 _"But I thought you'd stay through summer.  You said you'd stay through summer."  Helena's tiny voice is already breaking._  
  
 _Vanessa shakes her head, "I can't. Not like this.  I'm sorry, Honey.  I thought we'd have a lot of fun but it hasn't been very fun at all.  Not for me or you.  Certainly not for Charlie."_  
  
 _"What about Daddy?  You'd stay for him, right?"  And it is almost accusatory but Vanessa simply smiles._  
  
 _"I'm sorry, Helbug."_  
  
 _"I'll act better, I promise, Vanessa.  I'll be nicer. Can't you stay?"_  
  
 _"You could have been nicer, Helena.  We are so far past that point now.  But I want you to know I'm not mad at you.  You need to know that I understand why you've been acting this way.  I didn't understand for a long while but now I do."_  
  
 _Helena is quiet._  
  
 _"Just give me one more good week, Helena.  And you don't have to be afraid of Charles, he won't be here."_  
  
 _"Where will he be?"_  
  
 _"Away."  Vanessa smiles.  "A parting gift from your dad, a reprieve for you.  He is away for the rest of summer."_  
  
 _"So you can stay all summer!  If he's not here, you can stay. I promise I'll be good."_  
  
 _But Vanessa is shaking her head and Helena begins to cry._  
  
 _"Please don't leave me, Ness.  I'm sorry.  I'll be better.  I won't be sour, I won't be mean with Charlie gone!"_  
  
 _"Come here, Bug."  Vanessa pulls Helena into her until she is leaning back into her arms and Vanessa's cheek rests against the top of her head before she turns to put a kiss there, turns back away.  "I love you, you know that right?"_  
  
 _"You wouldn't leave me if you loved me," Helena cries.  "My mother didn't love me and she left me.  You wouldn't leave, Ness.  If you really did.”_  
  
 _Vanessa makes Helena face her._  
  
 _“That’s not how things work, Helena.  People leave the people they love all the time.  I left the people I love, people who love me, too, to be here.  To be with you.  And I am not your mother, Helena.  I am not abandoning you.  Just going home.  To see my family.  My friends."_  
  
 _“The people you love?  The people who love you, too?"  Helena suggests._  
  
 _"Yes," Vanessa sighs, pulling Helena into her again and nodding.  "People who love me."_  
  
 _Helena sobs.  She wraps her tiny arms around Vanessa and she sobs. And she is crying for so long, so hard, that she can barely say anything, only says a squeak of a thing, when she finally says, "He said he can kill me."_  
  
 _And this makes Vanessa draw away from Helena quickly._  
  
 _"What?"_  
  
 _"Charlie, that night you were with Daddy, he came into my room and he held me down and he covered my mouth," Helena sobs her confession, speaking in a rush of words that seem to horrify Vanessa more and more as each new word vocalizes itself.  "He said he could smother me and no one would know.  You wouldn't even know if he did, you were too preoccupied doing what you were doing.  With my father.  You wouldn't have even known."_  
  
 _"Helena..."_  
  
 _"You wouldn't have even known, Ness!  I couldn't even yell!  No one would hear me..."_  
  
 _Vanessa says absolutely nothing as she pulls Helena back into her.  Holds her close.  Doesn't let go until Helena's father comes through the door almost an hour later and Helena is asleep in her arms, waking up at the sound of the door closing.  Until he asks what's wrong now, until Vanessa sends Helena upstairs to Vanessa's room to wait for her._  
  
 _Helena is on the stairs again as Vanessa argues with Charles Sr. and tells him "I told you" and "this isn't okay" and “just let me take her with me for the summer, please, my parents would love to have her.”_  
  
 _But Charles is stubborn and resistant and insistent on top of all those things, too._  
  
 _He tells Vanessa that they're kids and they say things they don't actually mean, that if Helena felt scared,_ actually _scared, she would have surely told him, and there is no way he's letting her go to the states.  Not without him.  Not with Vanessa. Not to live in some small crappy town in the middle of nowhere, where every fool on every street corner probably owns a gun that he is too stupid to operate.  And far too anxious to use._  
  
 _It ends with Vanessa leaving in a huff and Helena retreating from her spot on the steps, where she usually sits and makes herself tiny and eaves drops on the things that are being said about her and about absolutely everything else._  
  
 _She runs, closes the door to Vanessa’s room, buries herself under Vanessa’s down comforter, closes her eyes._  
  
 _“I know you’re awake,” Vanessa says sweetly and she lays down beside her.  Helena is awake, of course.  She pulls the blanket from over her head, turns to look at Vanessa.  Waits.  “Come here.” Vanessa tells her, tugs on her, pulls her closer into her arms.  She leans her forehead against the side of Helena’s head and after that there is only breathing.  Soft breath and quiet tears, a tender kiss to the top of Helena’s head._  
  
 _“I’ll be better,” Helena says, turning and stretching her neck to see Vanessa who is now propped up on an elbow beside her.  She reaches and touches a small, not too small but definitely smaller, hand to Vanessa's cheek.  “I promise.”_  
  
 _Helena keeps her promise.  She is better.  And it helps that Charlie is gone.  Helena doesn’t know where.  Doesn’t ask because she doesn’t care.  It is the most freeing time she has spent in her home in her entire young life.  With Vanessa is the bonus because she is happy and she has all of Vanessa’s time and even her dad doesn’t take Vanessa’s time away from her.  Even her dad disappears, mostly, for a week._  
  
 _But then it is time for Vanessa to leave.  She has already packed and shipped so many of her things and Helena, with every single package that gets shipped, has begged her not to go._  
  
 _“I’ll visit you, Helbug, okay?”_  
  
 _“It’s not enough,” Helena is crying.  She has already cried enough for her dad to allow her to stay up way too late on Vanessa’s last day.  And Vanessa stays with her, in her room, laying beside her in her bed, until her eyes fall heavy, until she is so tired that the only thing she feels, before her eyes close entirely, is Vanessa’s soft lips against her forehead, against her cheek._  
  
 _And there is Vanessa’s soft voice, sweet and soothing and calm and gentle, in her ear, saying, “Goodnight, little Helbug.” Vanessa kisses the bridge of her nose.  “I love you.”_  
  
 _“Love you, too.”  Helena can hardly say the words before she gives in to the pull of sleep._  
  
 _Vanessa is gone by the time Helena wakes up the next morning.  She is inconsolable for hours.  Does not stop crying for days.  Spends several weeks being sad when she finds little things that Vanessa has left behind in her room._  
  
 _She is this way for a month and a half into summer before she gets a letter from Vanessa, before she is happy again, before Wolly manages to convince her to_ play _again._  
  
 _By the time school starts up and her eleventh birthday is on the horizon, Helena is okay.  She is better.  Even when Charlie returns, she is happy because she is distracted.  By school, by her best friend, by the many more friends she seems to make that year._  
  
 _And especially by Maggie, the girl who, from time to time, will set a kiss to her lips in the shadow of a building, then run giggling to her friends about how very much she loves Helena Wells.  That so-brave girl who stands up to all of the older boys._  
  
***  
  
Spring break ends too quickly.  
  
Myka has lost track of time.  Not a difficult thing to do, she decides, with Helena Wells in such close proximity.    
  
It isn’t until the Saturday night before school begins that Myka really remembers what day it is.  And only then because a number of things happen to remind Myka of the reality in which she truly lives.  
  
First.  
  
 _Everyone is at the table tonight._    
  
The Berings, the Lattimers, one Wells.  And tonight, Myka does not know why, Helena sits between her and Jeannie Jr. and not as far away from her as she can.  Not between Jeannie Jr. and Tracy or Pete and Ms. Jane.  
  
There’s nothing particularly special about this dinner, aside from the fact that it is the first they have had in a long time, perhaps since Myka’s fifteenth birthday, where they are all seated at the table together.  So Myka thinks maybe this is what prompts Helena to say what she says when she calls everyone’s attention.  
  
“I just wanted to say thank you.”  She’s nodding and her eyes are on Myka’s mother, then Ms. Jane.  “For letting me stay this week.  It has been such a pleasure.  I’ve forgotten how much I missed everyone.  I, um,” Helena laughs softly, “I’m sorry that I ever took you all for granted.”  
  
“Sweetheart, you’re fine,” Myka’s mother tells her.  “You’re welcome back anytime.”  
  
“Every single weekend,” Ms. Jane adds with a nod.  “Even during the week, if you just want to get away.  It’s not too far.  You could take the train.”  
  
“I could pick you up,” Myka adds with a smile.  
  
“When you get your driver’s license,” Jeannie adds with a bit of authority.  
  
“A couple weeks,” Myka says waving her mother off.  
  
“I appreciate it,” Helena nods at Myka.  “I appreciate everything.”  
  
“You’re part of this family, Helena,” Ms. Jane says.  “We just want you to know that.”  
  
“Yes,” Pete starts, “because why have one sister when you can have _four_?”    
  
“Why have one _lesbian_ when you can have four?”  Tracy adds.  
  
“Tracy Emmanuelle!” At least three voices scold.  
  
“What?  Jesus Christ, it’s only a joke!”  She sinks into her chair.  “Tough crowd out there tonight folks.”

"You know, three of the four so-called lesbians at this table have had boyfriends and husbands."  It is a rare speaking moment for Jeannie Jr., who definitely has her hearing aid on because to read all of these lips and sign all of these conversations is just beyond her current efforts.

"Four out of four," Tracy adds gesturing to Myka with a nod of her head.  "I'm pretty sure Teddy counts as a husband to Ophie."  
  
Myka throws a piece of her corn at her little sister.  
  
“Ophelia.”  Their mother scolds.  
  
“Yes, _Ophelia_ ,” Tracy echoes, “try that again.”  
  
Myka does try again and the kernel of corn that she throws lands easily into Tracy’s drink.  There is a whoop of hoorah and then a quiet scolding from Myka’s mother before the dinner conversation turns back to everything that it was.  
  
This, Myka thinks, is an unbelievable hodge podge sort of family that grows less disbelieving to Myka with each passing day.  
  
Second.  
  
 _Abigail is back._  
  
She calls Myka’s house phone the second she’s home.  She wants to come over to see Myka and is extremely anxious to do so.  Myka tells her _tomorrow_.  In the afternoon.  But not tonight.  It’s too late, the mothers want family time, Abigail herself must be very tired.  
  
It isn’t entirely untrue.  
  
And Myka thinks, only for a second, about Helena’s admission to her earlier in the week.  About Helena telling her she has never lied to her.  About how Myka could not ever make that same admission to Abigail.  
  
It would simply be another lie.  
  
But Abigail relents, eventually.  She still manages to keep Myka on the phone for one hour after dinner.  She still manages to preoccupy Myka’s time as Helena, for the first time that Myka can recall that week, stops in her doorway for just a second before proceeding to Tracy’s room upon realizing Myka is busy.  
  
When finally Myka is free from the details of Abigail’s sardonic recap of having to spend a week holed up with her family in Hawai’i, of all places, Myka returns the cordless phone to its home in the living room and proceeds to Tracy’s door.  
  
Third.  
  
 _Helena is packing._  
  
“I lost track,” Myka says and this makes Helena jump when she turns, makes her grasp at her heart when she sees Myka in the doorway, a smile on her face.  “Sorry.”  
  
“A little warning.”  Helena turns back to the arduous task of getting her too-full suitcase to close before becoming frustrated and flipping the thing open again, throwing a handful of clothes out and across the floor.  
  
“Hey.”  Myka’s voice is soft as she comes to kneel across from Helena, picks up Helena’s clothes and begins to fold each item again.  Helena just sits before her, a nervous hand grasping at the locket over her heart, fingering the mechanism to open it, then shutting it again.  She is biting down on her lower lip, looking across the room, away from Myka as she gently places Helena’s clothes back into her suitcase.  “You okay?”  
  
Helena shakes her head then lowers it to stare at the contents of her suitcase.  
  
“I don’t really want to go back,” Helena sighs.  
  
“Then stay here.”    
  
“I can _not_ stay here.”  Helena puffs out an amused laugh.  
  
“Move home.”  Myka suggests next.    
  
Helena’s eyes are on hers now and she shakes her head, shrugs.  
  
“Daddy’s selling the house.”  
  
Myka’s eyes are wide and Helena looks away again.  
  
“I have to move out this summer.  _Somewhere_.”  
  
“If you tell your dad your intentions, of returning to London for school, won’t he help you?”  
  
“I’d rather not rely on him.  I’d rather not give him the satisfaction of thinking me so pliable when cut off from _his_ money.”  
  
“There’s always Jane’s.”  Myka lowers her eyes to fold more of Helena’s discarded clothes, sets them atop the growing pile in her suitcase.  
  
“I’d rather deal with living _here_ than try to cope living with _Peter_.”  Myka eyes her again and the look she gives Helena is somewhat accusing.  “I don’t mean it like that, Myka.  I mean it in the way you _know_ I mean.  Because things have been good,” Helena nods, “they’ve been really good between us.  As friends.  Being friends.  _Just_ friends.”  
  
Myka sets the last of Helena’s clothes into her suitcase.  “Is this all of it?”  She asks and Helena looks down, nods and sighs.  
  
“Yes,” she says softly.  “That is all of it.”  
  
“Okay.”  Myka closes the suitcase and kneels on top of it, pushes all of her body weight into it.  “Some help?”    
  
Nothing.  
  
Myka looks up at Helena, the older girl looking down at her suitcase, at the way Myka pushes her knee into it, the way she sits over it and drives all of her weight into it.    
  
Helena does not look away.  
  
“Helena?”  Myka calls again.    
  
When the older girl remains quiet, Myka brings her hand to just below Helena’s chin and lifts her gaze.  
  
“They can’t hurt you.”  Myka says softly.  “Not from jail.  Charles Junior, Leo, whoever you’re thinking about.”  
  
“He writes home.”  Helena nods.  “Says he’s sorry.  For everything.  Says he's sober.”  
  
Myka moves her hand to palm Helena’s cheek and Helena lets her eyes close as she turns further into that touch.  Myka pulls, gently, and leans in slowly, until they are close and even closer, until her lips are near Helena’s ear.  
  
“He can’t hurt you.”  
  
Her thumb glides gently across Helena’s temple and the older girl sighs, gives one single nod.  Myka sets her lips to Helena’s ear, lets them linger there for several moments before kissing it gently.  
  
When she sits straight, she smiles at Helena whose eyes are closed, who still tugs at the gold chain around her neck and flips the locket open once more before closing it again.  
  
“So,” Helena opens her eyes to Myka’s smile, “are you going to help me or what?”  
  
Helena puts her weight onto the suitcase now, too, and Myka zips it with ease.  
  
“Thank you,” Helena’s voice is soft as she leans her forehead against Myka’s forehead and steadies herself, tries to steady her breathing.  
  
“Anytime.”    
  
And Myka is close to losing her control, she is on the edge of it, leaning out over that ledge, spreading her arms wide, falling forward against air, preparing to fly when her lips brush Helena’s lips.  But Helena turns away and Myka closes her eyes, presses her nose gently into Helena’s cheek while reaching to palm her other cheek once more.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Myka says softly.  “You’re trying so hard.  And I am not trying at all.  Whatever it is we are trying not to do.”  
  
Helena shakes her head and sits back as Myka lets her hand fall, as Myka sits back, too.  
  
“You’re all set.”  
  
“Thank you.” Helena stands and moves to sit on Tracy’s bed.  “Myka, I noticed… that you haven’t been using your phone.”  
  
“That’s because she doesn’t have it anymore.”  
  
Both Helena and Myka look to the doorway where Tracy now stands with a devilish grin on her face.  
  
“Tracy.”  Myka lowers her head into her hand, annoyed, “how long have you been standing there?”  
  
“Long enough to know Mom was right,” Tracy beams coming into the room, heading to her closet.  “I just came to get some pajamas for Jeannie Jr.  Since apparently it’s a sleepover party now.”  
  
“Where’s your phone?”  Helena asks with an arched brow.  
  
“The lake.”  Tracy turns back to them with clothes in hand now.  “Where she threw it last year.”  
  
Helena’s expression when she turns back to Myka isn’t exactly what Myka expects.  There is a smile pulling at her lips and she shakes her head, rolls her eyes just a bit before standing again.  
  
“Okay,” Helena nods, approaching Tracy.  She puts her hands on the young girl’s shoulders, turns her around and pushes her out of the door.  “Goodnight, Tracy.”  
  
“Night, sister in-law!” she sing-songs out the door as Helena closes it behind her.    
  
Myka stands now, too, and walks to Helena before the older girl turns entirely around.  She stands silently in front of Helena.  Helena's back to the door.  
  
“Sorry about the phone.”  Myka twists her lips to the side as the guilt tugs gently in her gut.  “Abigail… she was tired of seeing your name pop up whenever I called her.”  
  
“So  _she_ threw it into the lake then?”  Helena asks crossing her arms in front of her.  
  
“I let her.”  Myka nods.  Helena looks away again, smiling, incredulous.  Myka brings a hand to touch Helena’s waist.  “Sorry.”  
  
Helena shakes her head.  “It’s no big deal.  I just wish I could give you another one.”  
  
“For my mom’s benefit?”  Myka asks with a smile.  “Or for yours?”  
  
“Your mother, of course,” Helena says narrowing her eyes on Myka.  
  
“Why did you shut the door?”  Myka asks stepping closer to Helena, hand still on her waist, bringing her other hand to lay flat against the door behind Helena.  
  
“I love Tracy but she’s nosey.”  Helena lowers her voice to a whisper.  “I just… wanted to say goodbye to you.”  
  
“Okay?”    
  
Helena reaches up to Myka’s arm beside her and tugs it away from the door, pulls it down.    
  
“Don’t do that,” she tells Myka, “it’s very threatening.  Even from you.  Even for someone who isn’t _me_.”    
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
She moves Myka’s hand to the other side of her waist, sets both of her hands over Myka’s and moves them around her, to the small of her back.  
  
Myka’s brows rise slowly.  
  
Helena moves her own arms up, around Myka’s neck, pulls her closer, rests her forehead back against Myka’s.  It only requires Myka to bend down to her just a little.  For Helena to straighten her stance just a little, too.  
  
“No kissing,” she says softly.  
  
“Okay,” Myka nods.  
  
“I mean it,” Helena clears her throat.  “I do.”  
  
“I have a girlfriend anyway.”  
  
“Forget it,” Helena begins to pull away, to push Myka away.  
  
“Can we not?”  Myka asks, pulling Helena back into her.  “Forget it, I mean.  Whatever _it_ is you’re doing.”  
  
Helena lets out a soft groan.  
  
“I’m _sorry_.”  
  
“Don’t make me change my mind about this.”  
  
“Sorry,” Myka smiles.  
  
“That smile.”  Helena closes her eyes, sets her cheek against Myka’s cheek, pulls her into a hug.  "I love that smile."  She pauses.  "That you smile, when know you're in trouble with me."  She inhales deeply then exhales.  Repeats.  Myka matches her breathing, closes her own eyes as she pulls Helena closer to her, moves her arms further around the older girl’s back.  Helena moves her arms from over Myka’s shoulders, runs her hands down the curves of Myka’s arms, over ever-growing muscle mass.  “These arms.”  Myka holds her tighter, more securely.  "How is this even possible?"  
  
“You’ve been distant,” Myka speaks softly.  
  
“No more than the past six months,” Helena smiles.  
  
“I guess I shouldn’t complain.”  
  
“No,” Helena shakes her head, “you should not.”  
  
Helena sighs again, moves to touch her other cheek against _Myka's_ other cheek.  
  
“A week of this,” Helena shakes her head again.  “Would have been impossible.”  Helena presses her cheek further into Myka's.  "I thought I didn't really want this anymore."  
  
"Surprise," Myka whispers softly.  
  
"Hush."  
  
“And at what point do we actually say goodbye?”  Myka teases, her grasp on Helena still very secure.  
  
“When I’m good and ready.”  Helena moves to set her eyelid against Myka’s cheek.  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Yeah,” Helena smiles.  More of her features brushing gently over and against Myka’s.  
  
“Which will be?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Helena breathes, “maybe never.”  
  
“That’s a problem, you see, because I have…”  
  
“A girlfriend.”  Helena pulls away abruptly.  “I know.”  She reaches her hands to Myka’s arms and pushes them gently away from her.  “I know.”  
  
Helena slips away from Myka, picks her suitcase up from the center of the floor and moves it somewhere out of the way.  
  
“I’m going to go to bed,” Helena says quietly.  
  
“Okay,” Myka nods.  And she moves quickly to Helena, embraces the smaller but older girl in her arms, holds her tight, kisses her cheek, whispers into her ear, “Goodnight, Helena.”  
  
Helena returns that embrace, “Goodnight, Myka.”  
  
***  
  
Everyone in the house wakes up to the scream except for Tracy and Jeannie Jr.  Everyone, except Tracy and Jeannie Jr., is at the door to Tracy’s room.  Myka is there first.  Pete right behind her and shortly thereafter her mother and Ms. Jane are rushing from the master bedroom, pulling robes around them, asking what’s wrong.  
  
Myka opens the door to find Helena thrashing, fighting, against covers, against her pillow, against nothing at all.  She is kicking and swinging and yelling and crying out.  
  
“Jesus,” Myka hears from her mother.  
  
“I’ve got her,” Myka says, already moving to Helena’s side.  “Helena.”  Myka only touches her hand to Helena’s forehead as the older girl continues to thrash.  “Helena, it’s Myka,” she says a little louder.  
  
The thrashing becomes less so but the older girl sobs and twists and turns, entangled in bedsheets.  Myka turns back to see her mother and Jane and Pete, standing wide-eyed in the doorway before turning back to Helena and moving closer to the older girl, setting both of her hands against Helena’s cheeks.  
  
“Shhh,” she hushes, runs her fingers through Helena’s hair.  “It’s okay.  You’re okay.”    
  
“Myka.”  
  
“Helena.”  Myka untangles Helena’s limbs from the sheets, pulls the blanket back up over here exposed legs, climbs into the bed beside her.  “It’s me.”  
  
“He’s here,” Helena sobs.  “I saw him.  He’s here.”  
  
“Nobody is here, Helena,” Myka says softly, stroking her hair again, brushing her fingers down Helena's cheek, across her jaw line in an attempt to sooth the older girl, “no one is here except for you and me.”  
  
Helena turns into her, grasps at her shirt, buries her face into Myka’s shoulder.  
  
“I _saw_ him.”    
  
“It was a dream,” Myka tells her.  “Just a very bad dream.”  Myka kisses her forehead, moves her fingers through Helena’s hair more.  Turns back to where her family still stands in the door of Tracy’s bedroom and waves them off.  “I’ve got her.  Go to bed.”  
  
She lays down beside Helena, wraps her arms around her, pulls her in close to her.  
  
“I’ve got you, Helena.  There’s no one here except for you and me.”  
  
Helena’s only response is a loud sob.  It sounds almost pained, she clutches onto Myka, wraps her arms around Myka’s waist.  
  
“It was just a bad dream,” Myka whispers to her.  
  
It takes fifteen minutes for Helena to calm down, for her breathing to even out, for her grip on Myka to soften, to relax, to fall completely away.  And Myka wonders if Helena had ever even been awake.  
  
She gets her answer in the morning, when Helena awakens in her arms and turns to her with a curious look, with absolute confusion.  
  
“You had a bit of a rough night,” Myka tells her.  And she can almost see the knowing look set in behind those sad brown eyes as Helena finally nods and then moves closer to Myka, rests her head against Myka’s shoulder.  
  
They stay that way, in bed together again, drifting in and out of sleep, until the early afternoon.

Until it is time for Helena to leave all over again.

 


	16. Sixteen & Twenty III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helena and Myka do their little dance. Always. Forever. With angst and fluff and angst and fluff. And plot? I'm not too sure about that but there is definitely angst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finally finished this chapter. Jesus Christ, someone hold me. I think I just... with the intensity... and the everything... I am about as exhausted as Helena in this chapter, with this chapter. I am as lost as Myka in this chapter, too. 
> 
> But it did work out almost exactly the way I had wanted. It does tell the story that I intended to tell. It just took almost one month to get there. One day shy of one month for this update to get to where it needed to be and I am fresh out of fucks to give on grammar, on misspellings, on disappearing quotations and incorrect usages of words but in due time, I will go back and I will fix everything.
> 
> I hope it was worth the wait.
> 
>  **TW for not quite suicidal thoughts or attempts but the shadows are there. Also, there is death. And sex. And em-dashes.** Thanks to Nutty  & Appy & the Twitter-based grammar class I occasionally enroll in with them and others. Also, some theme influence from one of hermitstull/mfangeleeta's lovely Vodka series.

_At twelve years old, Helena’s body catches up with her brain. And whatever her father had said or thought of her beauty *before* becomes a fraction of the things he has to say and think about Helena’s beauty *now* because boys are an issue for him. His daughter potentially being taken advantage of is an issue for him._

_Ironically, Helena finds, his son taking advantage of other people’s daughters is not so much of an issue._

_But Helena has learned how to hold her own, around her brother, around boys, around men, around girls, too. Around, at least, the one girl she likes enough to call her girlfriend._

_Helena, at twelve, isn’t hiding in the shadows of buildings on play yards anymore and Maggie, at twelve and a half, isn’t ducking into those shadows to kiss her and run back to her friends giggling anymore._

_They are in the halls, together, talking with their friends, holding hands, drawing the attention of curious peers, setting a standard that not quite everyone can agree with but no one says a thing about._

_And Helena is happy. With Maggie, with the occasional letters from Vanessa, with the fact that her brother mostly pretends as though she doesn’t exist. She is happy._

_She is happy until one day Charlie is expelled from school. Charlie could not care less but Helena cares because he isn’t just expelled for truancy or fighting or any other normal thing for which any other normal brother might be expelled from school._

_Charlie is expelled for assaulting a girl on campus._

_Helena almost expects Charlie to be sent away again, to actually be punished by their father for what he has done. What he has probably done many times before and only just now been caught for, but he isn’t punished. In fact, he isn’t even truly expelled. Because expulsion doesn’t just sully his school record or his chances for attending a good university or his very credibility as a person._

_Expulsion sullies the entire Wells name. The exact name shared also by their father. By their father who is seeking a promotion in a well known company. Who is offered that promotion._

_He takes that promotion, and that job, and he donates money to that school, toward Charlie’s expulsion. Toward Charlie’s_ conditional _type of expulsion that mysteriously disappears from any and all record. And he “donates” money to the girl’s family, so long as they never speak on the matter again. It works because they have five kids and they need it, so much so, that they are almost thankful, that they almost entirely ignore the girl who had once been assaulted. Almost entirely forget that she had ever actually been assaulted._

_And they are sizable, these donations, but neither of those donations, if offered to Helena, would have been worth the move they must make, from London to the States, to some state, to some small town in that state that is hardly anywhere near Los Angeles or New York City or even Chicago or Orlando.  Helena would take Atlanta.  Helena would even take_ Seattle.

 _To say the least, Helena will tell her father, this is_ not _okay._

_But it is only “not okay” until Helena finds out they are moving to a town with familiar faces._

_They'll be close to where Vanessa Calder lives and attends school and will soon begin substitute teaching. Because her father can work out of the office in the city nearest Vanessa, he can see Vanessa and Helena can spend time with Vanessa.  And it is far enough away from big city life that maybe, just maybe, Charles Junior will stay out of trouble._

_Helena doubts that._

_And Charles Senior further tries to convince Helena of her own impending happiness by telling her, “Vanessa may become your teacher, eventually.”_

_It is enough, Helena decides. She will go. Reluctantly. Dramatically. She will go._

_When she says goodbye to Maggie, it might as well be with the back of her hand draped over her forehead. And when Maggie cries, Helena lifts her chin and presses tiny lips to tiny lips, (nothing more than that because that is a kiss as far as her tiny lips are concerned) and she tells Maggie, “I will love you forever, Magdalena Shaw.”_

_And she does, Helena, still love Magdalena. Even if her love is based solely on nostalgia, on the memories of being so young and so carefree about life and love and relationships. Even if it is just_ that _, the simplicity, which she loves most about Magdalena. She does still, somehow, love that girl._

_Still, even, to this very day._

***

Myka sees him coming from across the street. She sees him before he ever steps foot into the street, before he is almost hit by a passing car as he leans, stumbles, almost trips on his unsteady legs. Almost face plants into the asphalt.

She sees him because she has anticipated this moment, worried about this moment, calculated the plausibility of this moment happening all the while never believing it would ever happen but today, finally, it is happening.

It is not even one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and it is happening.

“Claudia.” The small girl looks up from her book, from where she sits at a table toward the front of the store. “Go upstairs.”

“Upstairs? But I don’t…”

“Upstairs, please. _Now_.”

Little Claudia does not try to argue with that tone and she hurries to the stairs, up the stairs, lingers there a moment as _he_ pushes his way through the door, triggers the bell.

“Upstairs.” Myka points but it’s unnecessary. The second Claudia sees him come through the door, she is moving as fast as her tiny little legs will carry her up those steps and she is through the door before the bookstore door closes behind _him_.

He’s standing, shifting, _looking_ everywhere, at everything, then steps forward. Slowly. Taps at a lower bookshelf that wasn’t there last year. Slides his finger along the top of it as if to check for dust.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” Myka forces her voice to sound confident, swallows back this sudden urge to flee directly through the storefront window. “You’re not supposed to be within two hundred yards of here.”

She reaches for a canister of mace that is hidden just beneath the counter. Courtsey of one very cautious, very wary, Helena Wells.

“This is my store,” he says pointing at himself and even this action is unsteady, as if he has no control over his own hand as he shoves the tip of his finger into his chest. “It’s in my name. It is my business.”

He is moving forward again, toward the counter, toward Myka. She grips the canister of mace, now in her lap, but she does not move from her stool. Cannot bring herself to move at all.

“You’d do well to remember that, young lady.”

Myka smells the alcohol before he makes it anywhere near the counter. She hopes it is alcohol that she smells but the closer he gets, the closer to _her_ that he comes, the more questionable that odor becomes.

It is so strong, so distracting, so effective, that Myka doesn’t see her mother and Jane on the stairs, doesn’t notice them at all until Jane is calling her father out.

“Warren.” He turns toward them and Myka is surprised he doesn’t fall over. Jane tells him, “Step away from her.”

“Step away from her?” He questions. “ _My_ daughter? You’re telling me to step away from my own daughter? I can’t talk to my own blood?”

Jane is quiet, Myka’s mother moves to stand behind her. Peers out at her husband, her _former_ husband, over Jane’s shoulder.

“You’ve got a lotta nerve coming in here, trying to take my family, Jane.”

“Now she’s your daughter?” Jane asks and she’s moving off of the stairs, moving closer to _him_. “ _Now_ you want to be her father?”

“I’ve always been her father,” is his response. “All I have ever done is try to _father_ her. To guide her. To discipline her. To make her a better person, like a father is supposed to do. But you… with your…” he’s shaking his head, waving his hand around haphazardly at Jane, and takes a step in her direction. He raises his voice. “This isn’t your family. This is _my_ family. And maybe if you had taken better care of your husband, maybe if you had kept him alive, you wouldn’t feel a need to steal my wife…”

“Get out.” Jane is moving toward him fast as she says this, she stops right in front of him, right in his face, and glares, almost growls. Her hands moving into fists, her eyes narrowing on Myka’s dad. On the man who suddenly claims the title of her dad. “You have five seconds to leave this building of your own accord before I _help_ you leave this building.”

He leaves. Myka doesn’t know why but her father is nothing in Jane’s shadow, has always been nothing when faced with her. So he leaves, not silently but he goes, out the door, down the street, away from this place and when he’s gone Myka sees it more clearly, how shaken up she is. How shaken up her mother is, too, when she comes to Myka’s side and brushes her fingers through her curls and asks her if she’s all right and pulls her back to this time and this place by wrapping her arms around Myka.

“I’m okay.” Myka says softly, distantly.

“He didn’t touch you?” Her mother’s hands are all over her now, checking her arms, her face and neck, before she crosses her arms in front of her.

“No,” Myka is moving the canister of mace back into its home on a shelf beneath the counter and when her mother sees this she smiles, she glances toward the top of the staircase and nods.

“Thank Helena,” Jeannie says to her daughter. “If she ever wakes up.”

Myka’s smile is small in response but she gives her mother a quick nod.

“I think that’s enough bookstore for today,” Jane is saying, nodding to Myka’s mother as she moves to step outside, walks to the sidewalk to look down the street.

“I think I agree with Jane.” Jeannie nods, her hand reaching back into Myka’s curls.

“Yeah, okay.” Myka says softly. “I’ll walk Claudia over to her mother in a bit and lock up.”

Jeannie nods and says, “That sounds good.”

Jane is walking back in, “Did you see where he came from?”

“The bar.” Myka gestures with a nod across the street.

“He _knows_ he’s not supposed to be here, or anywhere near here,” her mother is walking back to Jane, they both stand in the storefront window with arms cross, staring at the bar across the street as if willing it to no longer exist.

“He’s a drunk, Jeannie.” Jane shakes her head. “The only thing he knows, when he’s drinking, is how to intimidate his own family.”

The bar is her dad’s favorite. Always has been. Everyone there knows him by name. Knows his family. Knows Myka.

“Can I come down now?” Claudia’s tiny voice is calling from the top of the stairs.

“Come on down, Pipsqueak.” Myka calls, moving around the counter and to the bottom of the steps as Claudia descends them, a barely-awake Helena Wells is on her tail and scoops her hand up into hers halfway down.

“I told you to wait for me, Claudia.” Helena tells her gently.

“I know how to walk down stairs, H.G.” Claudia narrows her eyes up at the older girl and Myka smirks at the look Helena gives her.

“Do you believe this one?” Helena asks. “I used to change her diapers.”

Myka smiles, rolls her eyes. “Go sit behind the counter, okay, Pip? You can read for a bit while I close up.”

“Is that smelly man gone?” Claudia asks, looking toward the back of the store. “I told your mom he was here.”

“He’s gone. And thank you, Pip.” Myka nods. “Now go have a seat.”

The look Claudia gives to Myka is momentarily suspicious before it is compliant and Claudia goes to perch herself atop a stool behind the counter. Helena comes to stand in front of Myka, flashes her a sleepy grin, yawns.

“Good morning.” Myka tells her and it is a bit dismissive, she realizes, because her mind is still on her dad. On the man who suddenly claims to be her dad.

“Smelly man?” Helena is looking to where Jane and Jeannie stand, still speaking quietly to one another. They are debating whether they will or will not call the police before they turn to greet Helena.

“Dad was here.”

“What?” Helena’s eyes widen and she steps closer to Myka, sets her hands on Myka’s arms, moves them up to her shoulders and begins pushing up her shirt sleeves. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”

If she wasn’t so incredibly hot, Myka thinks, she’d be Myka’s third mother.

“I’m fine,” is what Myka tells her, but it doesn’t stop Helena from looking, from running her hands over Myka’s shoulders, from pulling Myka closer to her. And Myka smirks at the familiarty of this concern, of Helena’s hands beneath her shirt sleeves, and gently brings her hands to Helena’s, still on her arms, to pull them away. Myka steps away from her entirely. “He didn’t touch me.”

“He was drunk off of his ass, as usual. Just trying to intimidate her,” Jane adds as Myka steps away, walks back to the counter and takes a seat on her stool beside where Claudia now sits, fully engrossed in her book again.

“You’re okay?” Helena asks again, moving to the counter and leaning in to speak softly to Myka.

“I’m okay. I’m just going to close up and walk Claudia back to her mom.”

“I’ll go with you,” Helena offers with a nod. “Just… let me go put some actual pants on.” Myka smirks, eyeing the older girl’s pajama bottoms.

“It’s just right next door. You don’t have to…” She begins to protest with a shake of her head, but Helena is already countering.

“I’ll just be two seconds.”

Myka concedes with a sigh and Helena retreats past Jane and Jeannie, up the stairs.

“Does she have to come with us?” Claudia asks softly, barely turning away from her book. Myka’s smile is wide when she glances at the small girl, perched on her knees on a stool and leaning almost entirely onto the counter where she reads.

“Be nice,” Myka scolds her quietly.

 ***

Helena is back down stairs when she tells Claudia, “Turn around.”

“Why?” Claudia is glaring at her but Helena only points to the door at the front of the store. Claudia looks to Myka who stands just beside her, across from Helena, and Myka shrugs. Just as clueless.

“Listen to your elders, Pip.” Myka winks at Claudia.

Helena tilts her head to glare pointedly at Myka, questions softly, “Elders?”

Myka shrugs, her smile is devious. She motions, with her finger spinning in circles, for Claudia to turn around and the young girl rolls her eyes and does as she’s told. Presses her forehead against the glass door in her everlasting pint-sized defeat.

Helena smiles, accomplished, and brings her hands to Myka’s cheeks. Squishes them together, playfully. Pulls Myka closer. Sets a soft, barely-there kiss to the fishy-faced lips she has forced into appearance.

Myka arches a brow as Helena pulls away still smiling.

“Don’t waste your worries on him, Myka.”

Myka stares suspiciously before she says hesitantly, “I’m not…”

“You are, I can actually see you internalizing everythin–”

“I can hear you,” Claudia interrupts. “What’s the point of me turning around if I can still hear you?”

Helena rolls her eyes and shakes her head, letting her hand drop from Myka’s cheeks.

“Talk to me, if you need to talk,” Helena nods. “If you want to. I’m here.”

Myka knows this because after two months of Helena staying with them on the weekends, during holidays, on the occasional week day, they have done _so much_ talking. About Helena’s past, about their feelings, relationships, family, about anything and everything, wherever and whenever. So Myka knows.

And Myka, after they’ve walked Claudia to the salon and after they’ve run into Coach King inside that very salon, is singing much the same tune to a very emotional Helena Wells when they return to the bookstore. Because the older girl has suddenly gone quiet, is suddenly no longer looking at Myka. Suddenly, she is tired again and her smile, that playful authority, her willingness to talk about anything and everything, is gone.

“I think I’m going to go lay down,” she tells Myka and Myka, with her hands on Helena’s forearms, pushes her gently and slowly and with the utmost care, until she is backed against the wall just beside the stairs.

“I know you miss her,” Myka says softly and nods. “I know you miss the way things used to be.”

Helena is still not looking at her, still not lifting her head.

“I kind of miss the way things were, too. But don’t waste your worries, Helena Wells, lying awake in bed. Pouting. Not when you could be going to see a movie with me.”

Helena looks up now and her glare though playful is very telling. Myka smiles her crooked smile.

“Okay.”

Myka’s grin grows and she kisses Helena’s temple.

“My turn to go get ready.”

 ***

This is where they talk, in the movie theater. In _their_ movie theater. Almost every weekend, when Myka isn’t with Abigail or Helena isn’t sleeping all day long. Because that’s been a thing with Helena, sleeping all day.

Coming to the apartment at five in the morning every Saturday, falling asleep on the couch so that no one has to give up their bed or their room. Staying asleep until Myka wakes up and wakes Helena up and guides her, half asleep, to Myka’s own bed while Myka goes on about her day.

It’s become such a thing that Myka’s mother made Helena her own key long ago. And it’s become such a thing that Myka will wake up three hours earlier than eight o’clock to drag Helena into her room. To put Helena into her bed, to fall back asleep on the trundle she’d pulled out the night before. If she had ever even put it away the previous weekend.

But if Myka has learned anything by now, it is that being in the movie theater is no guarantee that Helena will stay awake. It is, in fact, very guaranteed that Helena will fall asleep forty to fifty minutes into the movie, after their conversation has mostly slowed down.

Today is no different.

Myka expects it, when she feels Helena’s arms wrap around her arm and Helena’s head rest against her shoulder and in less than a minute after that, Helena is snoring so softly that it is only Myka who hears her. It is only Myka who gets to suffer with the sweet sound of Helena’s breath in her ear.

It is only Myka and Myka thinks, maybe that isn’t really suffering after all. To hear this breath. To have this girl so close. To be able to reach out and touch those cheeks and that hair and this person whom she loves so very much. This person that used to be so very impossible to her.

Though she tries not to want, to long for, to _do_ anymore than just reach and touch and _be_ , she does because she isn’t trying all that hard.

She does want Helena, still. She does long for Helena, still. She does press her lips to that too-pale skin of Helena’s still. But she’s cautious because there’s still Abigail and the fact that she wants to, _needs_ to break up with her but cannot bring herself to do it. And for what reason other than to let Abigail go? Because Helena isn’t available, still. Helena doesn’t want to be together, still. Helena needs to heal, still.

Myka turns her head to Helena when she stirs, she presses her lips into Helena’s hair at the top of her head, kisses the older girl there and smiles. Because it’s funny now, to think that any of Myka’s worries would ever be wasted on her father when she has this beautiful thing with this beautiful woman sitting beside her who rarely if ever, and almost never, leaves her thoughts.

The credits roll before Myka can ever gather any of her thoughts on Helena Wells into something coherent. But that is nothing new.

The lights come up in the theater, Myka doesn’t move. An usher comes in, someone she knows. Someone who knows her, too. The guy, who is probably Helena’s age, just shakes his head and rolls his eyes because how many times has Helena fallen asleep in this theater? This is no new thing, her sleeping through the end, into intermission.

He leaves them without a word. A handful of people trickle in again. The lights eventually go down again. The movie previews begin to roll again.

Myka rests her cheek against the top of Helena’s head and closes her eyes, too.

***

Helena is practically whining as they re-enter the apartment, about Myka letting her sleep through a second showing of the movie. Again. Myka questions, like always, why Helena is so exhausted that she sleeps all day knowing it’s just going to keep her awake all night.

“I’m sorry, I’m just so tired.”

“Yes but why?”

And that is usually when the conversation ends because Helena will roll her eyes or shake her head or wave her hand or walk away saying, “I couldn’t sleep last night.” Which is also her excuse for always coming home at five o’clock in the morning. Because she couldn’t sleep in her bed, in that house, with those people when something so much nicer, some place so much better, a family, was awaiting her arrival with open arms.

Myka doesn’t push the issue with Helena just like she doesn’t push issues with Pete because pushing it will only lead to frustration and arguing or, on the very rare occasion, it might lead to Helena hugging her close and thanking her for being so needlessly worried about her all the time but those very rare occasions are hardly worth playing the odds.

So Myka doesn’t push it today.

“Just in time for dinner.” Jeannie is smiling at Myka and Helena from the kitchen where she is currently swatting Pete’s hand away from a lasagna.

“Oh hey, Mom.” Myka’s eyes fall to Amanda, taking up a space that is usually occupied by Jeannie Jr. ”Hey, Amanda, joining us for dinner?"

“We were supposed to go out,” Amanda turns to glare at Pete, “but when we stopped by to drop something off and he smelled the lasagna…”

“Naturally, I had to stay." Pete shrugs and moves to sit beside Amanda.

“Naturally.” Myka nods walking to the dining room, tugging Helena along beside her with a hand on her elbow.

Helena doesn’t resist this touch but she does move Myka to sit beside Amanda, in the seat Helena sometimes occupies, as she sits in Myka’s typical spot. Away from Amanda.

“What are you…” is all Myka can get out before Pete is drooling out loud his satisfaction at his mother and Myka’s mother finally serving up the lasagna.

***

Myka hasn’t been following the dinner conversation, so she doesn’t know exactly when it goes sour. All she knows is that Amanda says something that makes Helena react in a way she has never seen Helena react before. In a very outspoken and verbally aggressive way. In a way that makes Amanda respond with more aggression.

In seconds Helena is on her feet, Amanda is on _her_ feet and Pete and Myka are having to stand in-between them, hold them back from one another, push them in opposite directions across the open kitchen, dining, and living rooms.

Pete tells Amanda, “What the hell, dude? You can’t just come in here and pick fights.”

Amanda tells Pete, “Really? You’re going to side with the slut?”

Jane is on her feet. “All right, that’s enough!”

Helena tells Myka, a little too calmly, “Myka. Let me go.”

Myka tells Helena, “Sorry, Babe. That’s not going to happen.”

Helena glares at Myka but the look softens, saddens the second their eyes meet. Jane eyes Helena before turning to Amanda and pointing toward the door.

She says, “Out. Now!”

Amanda begins to say, “But…”

Pete shakes his head and tells her, “Talking back to my mom would be a really stupid thing to do, Amanda. Really really stupid.”

Pete leads her out of the apartment. Jane turns back to Helena and Myka.

Jane says to Helena, “You. Go calm down,” and then to Myka, “take her into your room.”

Myka looks at her mother who just nods and with her hands on Helena’s arms, she leads the older girl back into her room where Helena sits back on her bed, quietly, and glares before finally saying, “I cannot stand her anymore, Myka.”

“Really?” Myka smiles. “I couldn’t tell.”

***

Helena needs to calm down.

They are laying side-by-side on Myka’s bed in the way Myka usually lays with Pete, not in the way Myka usually lays with Helena. But Myka is so enamored by Helena in this moment, so completely and utterly impressed and attracted to and simultaneously frightened by Helena, by the way Helena reacted to Amanda, that to touch her would mean Myka’s certain doom.

So Myka takes a chance with humor.

“I know this is probably wildly inappropriate right now,” she begins and turns to look at Helena who continues staring up at the ceiling, “but that was… insanely hot.”

“You’re right,” Helena turns to her, “that is wildly inappropriate right now.”

“I’m sorry,” but Myka’s grinning. She’s not sorry at all. And Helena rolls her eyes back up to the ceiling, playfully swats at Myka’s leg with the back of her hand.

“You and Tracy are definitely sisters.”

***

Jane lectures and Myka’s not sure, exactly, how she got caught up in this lecture, too, but she is there, sitting beside Helena on the living room couch, as Jane goes on for several minutes about maturity and adulthood and being the better person. About responsibility and appreciation and turning the other cheek.

Helena is apologetic and Jane tells her that she gets it, that she’s not upset with her because Amanda instigated the argument by trying to call Helena out on something that is zero percent her business. And Myka is still clueless because she hadn’t heard the argument or the accusation, so she keeps quiet and nods when prompted with a question about understanding.

Jane does not leave without confirming with Myka’s mother that Amanda won’t soon be allowed into the apartment nor her own home if that’s the way she chooses to act. Then both she and Myka’s mother leave Helena with a gentle pat on her shoulder, a kiss on her forehead.

Myka only gets a tussle of her hair before the two older women retreat into the kitchen to finish cleaning up.

“Twenty years old and I’m being lectured by parents who aren’t even mine,” Helena sighs, shakes her head.

“Just means you’re official now,” Myka smiles and she takes Helena’s hand into her hand. “So, Lattimer-Bering-Wells, were you really going to fight Amanda?”

“I could have strangled her but she would have loved the ensuing drama far too much. She would have told the entire town that I’d fantasized about doing just that for years.”

Myka puffs out a small laugh and asks, “You mean you haven’t fantasized about doing just that for years?”

“You make a valid point.”

“Promise me one thing, Helena,” Myka says, making her expression serious and turning her entire body to face Helena where they sit on the couch.

“What?”

“If you’re going to fight Amanda, just wait until I’m present so that I can make witness to that hot… ow!” Myka can’t even finish the sentence before Helena is playfully pinching her leg.

“Stop that.”

But Myka is laughing so hard that Helena cannot seem to stop herself from grinning.

***

“You asked for this you know,” Myka speaks softly, sleepily, into Helena’s hair that falls over Helena’s shoulder.

“Asked for what?” Helena is already on the defense, her tone returning to that so-rare decibel it had reached at the dinner table.

“To be my friend,” Myka says.

“Oh.” Helena smiles, relaxes, and nods. Her voice soft and wistful when she says, “I did.”

“Do you regret it?” Myka asks.

“What do I have to regret?” Helena turns to Myka now and Myka sits slightly up on the couch, where they have been sitting together for over an hour, staring at a show they aren’t actually paying attention to.

“You know, the little playful bits of my personality that are highly influenced by having spent my entire life around Pete.”

Helena’s smile grows and she brings her hand to Myka’s cheek, runs her thumb over the warmth of that cheek.

“I love when you’re playful,” Helena nods, her eyes moving from Myka’s, down to her lips, back to Myka’s. “I feel like I’ve gotten to know more of the true you in these past couple of months than I have in our entire friendship.”

“I don’t want to annoy you,” Myka says before biting down on her lip and letting go of a sigh, “like Pete sometimes does.”

“You’re not _Peter_.” Helena rolls her eyes, letting her hand fall and facing forward again. “And anyway, I truly adore Peter. He can be charming when he wants to be.” Helena turns back to Myka and lets her smile fall, “And I will never forget what he did for me.”

“Then I must annoy you much more than Pete does,” Myka nods, “since I’ve never done that for you. You know, redeemed my annoyances by saving you.”

Helena’s mouth drops open now, wide, before she gives her most disbelieving look to Myka, before she actually sits up and turns back to give Myka the most incredulous look she can muster.

“Do you really not think about that night? Ever?”

Myka says nothing, she only shrugs. Shakes her head.

“You don’t even know what I’m talking about do you?”

Myka is quiet.

“The pool house? You and me? My brother?”

“I think about that,” Myka says softly. “All the time.” Her hand finds Helena’s hand again over Helena’s lap. She pulls both of their hands into her own lap. “I couldn’t forget it if I tried.”

“But you don’t think of it like _that_ , do you? Like something that you did for me? Like something you saved me from?”

“No,” and Myka does not hesitate to answer this. “I don’t. Because we both lived that. We both needed to be saved from that. I didn’t do anything, I just picked up the phone and called the police…”

“You are clueless.” Helena interrupts her, shakes her head.

“According to your journal, it has happened so many times before. And it happened the same way it has always happened. That time I just happened to be there. It just happened to be happening to me, too. I didn’t save you from anything, he just didn’t get very far. I didn’t _do_ anything. I didn’t know _what_ to do…”

“Myka.” Myka stops talking. “How many times has it happened since then?”

Myka remains quiet.

“Zero.” Helena answers for her and Helena grabs her face again. “It has never happened again. Not since then. Because you were there with me. You did something I have never done, could never do. That my father has never done. That Vanessa has never done. That no one has ever done. Not to my brother. No matter how many times he has hurt me, I could never… but you did.”

“I’m sorry,” Myka says lowering her gaze.

“Don’t apologize!” Helena playfully swats at Myka’s leg and turns away from her, shaking her head. She has a smile on her face. “God, Myka Bering. One million years. That’s what it feels like, right-bloody-now. One million goddamn years because you are so insecure and innocent and clueless and,” Helena pauses when she turns back to Myka, still shaking her head, “you haven’t got a goddamn clue how much I love you.”

“I–”

“How much I love the person you have become and the person you have always been…” Helena lets her voice trail off and sighs.

Myka closes her mouth.

“This is why we aren’t together.”

“Oh, _this_ is the reason now?” Myka asks. “Because I don’t know? Because I–”

“Because I love everything that we’ve become,” Helena says lowering her voice and raising her hand to rest the backs of her fingers just below Myka’s chin. To run the backs of those fingers down the column of Myka’s neck. “I love that you’re my friend, Myka. I love the way you are as my friend. I love your sense of humor, even if it is a bit reminiscent of Peter, at least I know you’re comfortable with me. At least I know you’re being yourself.

“And I love everything about you, about us, the way things are. Right now.”

Helena’s finger beneath Myka’s chin lifts that jaw up, closes that once-again wide-open mouth. She smiles and it melts Myka’s heart.

“I just don’t want you to get carried away with this. The idea of us. With our being close. I don’t want you to forget and I don’t want to forget, either. That you are sixteen. That you are in high school. That you have a girlfriend. A girlfriend you love and care a lot about.”

“All of those things will change,” Myka says softly. “I won’t always be sixteen. I graduate high school in three weeks. And Abigail…”

“Don’t you dare.” Helena lifts her finger to Myka’s lips to stop her from speaking. She shakes her head and Myka lowers her eyes as Helena lowers her finger away from those lips. Brings her hand to rest back in her lap. Runs her other hand through too-long black hair.

“I’m going to anyway," Myka says quietly. “Eventually.”

“Not for me you won’t.” Helena turns forward to stare blankly at the television. “If and when you do, break up with Abigail, you will do it only for you.” Helena turns back to Myka. “Do you understand me, Myka Bering?”

Myka nods quietly before she eventually says, “Yes, Ma’am.”

Helena smiles again and her smile is small, sympathetic. She pulls Myka into her and Myka rests her head back against Helena’s shoulder, over Helena’s hair, and yawns.

Myka slips her hand back into Helena’s, laces their fingers together.

“I understand.”

***

Myka notices, when she joins Abigail for lunch at school, that a particular group of girls is occasionally seated at the table with Abigail before Myka arrives. And this particular group of girls always leaves the table just before Myka joins Abigail’s side.

“Since when do you hang out with the lip gloss crew?” Myka is asking Abigail this on one of these days as she watches that particular group of girls walk away. All of them whispering, giggling. Abigail turns to her and rolls her eyes.

“I wouldn’t call that hanging out,” Abigail says softly. “I wouldn’t even call myself a willing participant.”

Myka doesn’t know what this means but before she can ask, the rest of their friends, Pete and Amanda, Tracy and Leena, are descending upon that table. So the thought, the question, and even that tiny hint of concern, are no longer on her mind.

But in the past several weeks Abigail had grown quiet, less talkative, _moody_. Myka wants to ask her, jokingly, if she’s PMSing but Myka knows, from having dealt with a pre-menstrual Helena on several occasions throughout her young lifetime, that making such a joke would not be the wisest decision of that young life of hers.

There are two weeks left of school when Abigail tells Myka, “I know about Helena.”

Myka turns to her, where they sit in the Cho’s backyard, in the treehouse they so often claim, on fresh blankets, staring out at a thick line of trees that fades into more trees and still more trees beyond that.

“What about Helena?”

“That she stays with you,” Abigail says, her head lowered to stare at the blanket below. “I know she stays with you every weekend. That she stayed with you for Spring break.”

“It wasn’t exactly a secret,” Myka shrugs, shakes her head. “Who told you that?”

“ _You_ didn’t.” Abigail counters and then eventually adds, “Amanda.”

Myka rolls her eyes. “Amanda talks too much. More than you, even.” It’s an attempt at a joke and she smiles but Abigail does not smile. Abigail does not even turn to look at her. She continues looking down at the blanket, at where her hands fall over it, where her fingers tangle into her own shoelaces as she sits with her legs crossed in front of her. “Abigail?”

Myka gently pokes the smaller girl’s forearm and the look Abigail gives her is more a threat, her eyes dark and cold and Myka wants to take that poke back and throw it across the yard, far away from this cold stare that Abigail is giving her. That she has never seen on Abigail before. Because it, too, is sad and lonely. It is nothing like Abigail. Not the Abigail she knows. And even for the topic of Helena, this is a bit… much.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Abigail’s answer is too immediate, too sharp.

“Something is wrong.” Myka says shaking her head. “Like _really_ wrong. Beyond _Helena_ wrong.”

“Everything about Helena is wrong. Everything having to do with Helena is _wrong_ ,” Abigail spits out, still not looking up.

“So, this _is_ about Helena?”

“It’s always about Helena, isn’t it?” Abigail asks. “So, what? You guys live together now? Does she stay in your room? Do you _close the door_ , Myka?”

“I feel like you’re deflecting from the _actual_ problem. Whatever that may be."

“And somehow you suddenly know me so well?” Abigail looks up now. She stands. She leaves without another word, jumps down from the tree house and, instead of heading toward the house (and Myka thinks, guiltily, that that would be so much better, so much easier than this), Abigail heads straight into the trees.

“Abigail, stop.”

“No.”

“Abigail, don’t walk in there, please!”

Abigail doesn’t stop. She leaves Myka standing at the edge of the trees, where Abigail’s backyard ends. Where the woods begin. To ponder her next move.

Myka hates the trees. Myka absolutely hates the woods. She loves nature but she hates this neighborhood that sits at the edge of their town, where the homes are practically built into what qualifies to Myka as a forest, where trees have been leveled over to make way for houses. Where the yards are not entirely fenced and animals wander, both domestic and wild. And on top of that, _people_ wander. Both domestic and wild.

Into the woods, into yards, into places they do not actually belong.

It’s somewhat irrational, she supposes, and Abigail has teased her over it many times in the past. Myka has laughed off innumerable jokes about it but Abigail has never asked her to go into those woods, to walk into that thicket of trees. And Abigail has never expected it of Myka. Very likely does not expect it of Myka now.

But Myka goes. Hastily. She follows Abigail into the trees.

“I don’t think,” Myka says eyeing shadows, “that we should be walking into the woods. With the sun going down.”

“I came this way because I knew you wouldn’t follow me.”

“Well, I did,” Myka catches up to Abigail and puts a hand on her arm, swings the girl around to face her. “I followed you.”

“You still love her.”

“It doesn’t matter if I love her, she’s not okay,” Myka says softly. “She’s depressed and she’s alone. She needs help.”

“ _I’m_ not okay!” Abigail yells back.

It silences Myka.

“Maybe _I’m_ depressed. Maybe _I_ need help.” Abigail narrows her eyes on Myka. “But how would you know? You don’t ask. You don’t care. You don’t even like coming over anymore.”

When Myka says nothing, Abigail turns and continues walking and they walk for ages before Myka finally asks Abigail, “ _Are_ you depressed? Abigail?”

“Well, don’t ask _now_.” Abigail snaps. Myka catches the small girl again, just before a clearing. She catches Abigail by the arm, then sets her other hand over Abigail’s other arm. She gently pushes Abigail, forcing her to take several steps back, until she is backed against a large tree.

Myka lets her hands fall, gives Abigail the opportunity to walk away. _Waits_ for Abigail to walk away.

“Do you want to break up with me?”

“You would love that,” Abigail says turning away for several seconds before turning back to Myka, “to break up with me.”

“No,” Myka says. “I wouldn’t love that at all.”

It isn’t exactly the truth, Myka thinks to herself, but it isn’t a lie either.

“What I would love is to know what’s happening with you.” Myka looks around. “Or to get out of here.” She turns back to watch Abigail before admitting, “I can’t do either of those things without you.”

Abigail rolls her eyes. “They’re right, you know.”

“ _Who_ is right, Abigail?”

“The girls,” Abigail says, “with their lip gloss and their perfect hair and their make up and everything else that is so right about them. Colored eyes, pale skin. Everything else about them that is _so_ not me, that is _so_ very much everything you could want. That you could have. For which you’re just too scared or _stupid_ to ask.”

“Make sense,” Myka urges quietly, unmoved by her insult.

“I _am_ making sense.” Abigail narrows her glare on Myka.

“What have those girls been saying to you?”

“The same things I have always said to myself, Myka.” Abigail nods and returns her gaze to Myka. “That it’s impossible that you love me. That it’s impossible you even like me. It’s impossible that anyone could. Look at what I am.”

Myka arches a brow, “What are you?” She has a few suggestions, gorgeous, intelligent, way too understanding, way too good for Myka, but she waits to hear what Abigail has to say first. “Abigail?”

The smaller girl shakes her head, lowers her gaze to the ground and allows her shoulders to slump forward. Myka doesn’t have to see her face to know she’s crying.

“Abigail.” Myka steps closer to her and touches her hands to the exposed skin of Abigail’s arms. “Talk to me?” It is a plea, soft and gentle as the touch Myka uses as she runs her hands up Abigail’s arms, over her shoulders, up her neck, over ever-reddening cheeks on either side of that so very sad face.

Myka lifts Abigail’s gaze to hers and smiles, waits. And this, Myka suddenly has the thought, is why she has not, _cannot_ break up with this girl. This look in these sweet brown eyes. The fragility that is masked so heavily behind layers of something else. Like a porcelain doll, Myka wants to tell her knowing they aren’t the right words. Knowing it isn’t even close to being the right thing to say.

Instead she tells her, “You’re precious.” And when Abigail’s brow arches and Myka cannot read that expression, she adds, “To me.”

And Abigail stares at her for the longest time before she says, “Amanda thinks…”

“Amanda is the last person on this planet whose opinion I care about right now,” Myka interrupts her. “Amanda has too many thoughts about everyone else and what everyone else is doing and not enough thoughts about what _she_ is doing.”

Abigail clamps her mouth shut and exhales a heavy breath through her nose before she opens her mouth to speak again.

“Is there a reason we don’t…” Abigail lowers her eyes again, “I mean, that we haven’t…”

“That we haven’t what?” The look Abigail gives her now is very pointed. It makes Myka’s eyes widen. A soft “oh” escapes her lips. Abigail steps slowly away from her.

“Forget I asked,” she says, eyes lowering back to the ground as she begins to move again, away from the clearing, back through trees in what Myka’s not quite sure is the exact way they came.

“No.” Myka’s hand on Abigail’s arm is enough to halt the smaller girl’s movements, to make her stop and wait. It isn’t enough to make her turn back around, to look at Myka. Not until she says, “You said you weren’t ready. For that. Last year, at…”

“Do not say her name,” Abigail turns now, even if only to glare at Myka, she turns and the glare that Myka is sure she intends to glare just softens, falls, melts away from her face. Her expression is sad again, hopeless even. Full of rejection. “Just don’t.”

“There’s no other reason, Abigail,” Myka tells her, “if you think it’s because I don’t want that. If you think it’s because I don’t want to have that with _you_ just because you’re _you_ , you need to stop thinking that.”

Abigail turns away again.

"We were just never ready. It’s not something that I need to do. It’s not something that I require from you. That I would ask of you.” Myka tightens her grasp around Abigail’s arm. “It isn’t something that I deserve to have. To take away from you.”

It’s too quiet when Abigail doesn’t respond to that, when Myka doesn’t know what else she can possibly say because Myka doesn’t know what else she wants from this moment. Myka doesn’t know what she wants to become of this moment.

Most of what Myka does know is that the sun is going down quickly, it is getting dark, and they are still standing in the middle of a wooded area that took them a good five minutes of walking to get to.

“Abigail.” Myka lets her hand fall away from Abigail now and sighs. “The sun…”

Abigail turns back to her now with some urgency and, without a word, she reaches and takes Myka’s hand, laces their fingers together.

“I know the way.”

***

They are back at the treehouse by the time the sun has gone completely down. They are back at the treehouse and Abigail is pulling Myka into her. Abigail is stepping up on the tips of her toes. Abigail is gripping Myka’s shoulders, pressing her lips into Myka’s lips. Moving her body closer to Myka’s body. Reaches higher, grips tighter, presses further, moves closer, until Myka thinks she might lose her balance. Thinks they might both topple over.

And she would go, with Abigail, to the floor right now. She would gladly go and hold on tight and never let go of this tiny little thing before her. This tiny little needy thing that is her girlfriend. Her beautiful, intelligent girlfriend that she doesn’t deserve to have. Not in one million years.

So Myka’s hands find Abigail’s waist. Myka’s hands are on Abigail’s hips before they move up to Abigail’s sides and wrap Abigail more securely in her arms. And this, what they do, with their hands and their lips and their bodies and the closeness, here in this treehouse, this is nothing new. It is absolutely not new to Myka.

But then Abigail moves away, only slightly away, to press her lips into Myka’s ear, or as close to that ear as she can get those lips, and she asks very softly, “Do you want to know what they call me?”

And Myka doesn’t know why she can’t speak to that. Why she has found absolutely zero words to express how she very much wants to know what they call her sweet and gentle and loving and caring and selfless, fragile little thing of a porcelain doll.

 _What_ she thinks, _do they call you?_

Abigail reads her thoughts. She’s sure. Because Abigail is clairvoyant in her ways. Abigail can look at her and see her and whatever expression is on her face and Abigail can just know because Abigail knows everything and she most certainly knows what Myka is thinking. What Myka is saying without ever saying anything.

 _Go on._ Myka’s eyes tell Abigail.

“A virgin.”

Myka finds her words now. She tells Abigail, without hesitation, “That’s not an insult.”

“No,” Abigail responds to that just as swiftly and takes a step away from Myka, sits down on the blankets at her feet. “That one isn’t but for some reason…”

“That one?” Myka sits slowly, cautiously beside Abigail.

“They’ve said worse.” Abigail brings her knees into her chest, wraps her arms around them, rests her chin there. “I don’t know why they don’t like me, I haven’t figured that out. If it’s because I’m dating you. If it’s because I’m smart. If it’s a race thing, I don’t know. They say every awful thing to me that they can possibly conjure up in those two-dimensional, paper-thin brains of theirs. They whisper things into my ear. Slip notes into my locker. Write things on my school papers…”

“Abigail.”

It’s been a while, Myka thinks as her hands ball into fists in her lap, since she’s been angry.

“But of all the horrible things they say, _that_ one gets to me the most.”

It’s been a while since Myka has felt this rush of warmth in her cheeks. This fast growing hatred that slowly begins to fill her heart. That forces her heart to beat faster. And faster. And faster still.

"And it isn’t that I have something to prove. I don’t. Not to them.”

Myka inhales deeply.

“If I did it would only be to you. It would only be _with_ you…"

Not even Helena. Not even Helena and her stupid affair with a woman much too old for her. Not even _that_ manifests the anger that is _this_.

“It’s just that…”

Abigail sits straight and turns to Myka with wet cheeks, with eyes red with irritation, with sadness on her face.

"With everything else, I _know_ they’re just saying whatever they can say to hurt me. But when they tell me that I’m not good enough for you… when they tell me you don’t really want me in that way, in any way more than just _this_ , that I’m nothing to you and that’s why… _that’s_ why you don’t want to touch me…”

Abigail sighs and shrugs and turns away from Myka, shakes her head.

“That’s just a little too… believable.”

Myka isn’t thinking. Not really. Myka is only breathing. Or trying to breathe. Trying to steady her breath because the anger, that anger that was bubbling, it is still bubbling, but there’s something else growing in there now. A feeling that overwhelms and consumes her whole, and the more she watches Abigail and the longer her eyes are on Abigail, the harder it is to be mad. The harder it is to comprehend what these other _things_ that she’s feeling are, exactly.

By the time Myka reaches for Abigail, the anger is nothing more than a little thing that Myka has very decidedly filed away for another day. Because right now, all she wants to do is pull this tiny broken girl into her arms, hold her close, kiss those tears away from those red cheeks, those sad eyes.

That’s how it starts anyway. A gentle tug on Abigail’s arm that turns into a secure grasp that evolves into a tight hold before Myka is cradling Abigail in her lap, in her arms. Kissing a forehead, the tip of a nose, a warm cheek. Two soft lips.

And then there are whispers, too grown to be coming from those lips. Too grown to be heard by Myka’s unknowing ears. Myka is almost sure of that.

“I want to. I’m ready.” Abigail’s voice is soft between soft lips. So soft that it does something to Myka that Myka won’t even dare try putting to words. But her stomach, her heart, and absolutely every organ inside of her, she’s sure, _dances_ at the sound of that whisper. “Please tell me you want to…”

Myka doesn’t need the words this time, when she kisses Abigail, when she holds Abigail tighter, when she pulls Abigail further into her lap and presses her lips firmly against Abigail’s. She doesn’t need any of these words. Abigail doesn’t need any of these words either. Because she knows, she is Abigail. She is clairvoyant. She _knows_.

But Myka says them anyway, against those soft lips, against an unyielding tongue, into the intoxicating lure of a wide-open mouth silently wanting, asking, _begging_ to take this plunge…

“Of course I do.”

***

Fingers are shaking, fumbling, tugging. Buttons just barely coming undone. Fabric is slowly giving way to meticulous tugs, pulled carefully but not entirely away from skin.

Myka’s fingers are hesitant, careful. Moving into places they have never before been. Places she has never before seen.

She asks, one million times, “Are you okay?” and says a million and one times, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Abigail bites back these too sweet sounds that Myka has never heard from her before. Not like this and not in this way.

Abigail closes her eyes. She tells Myka, “I’m okay,” and “You’re definitely not hurting me.” Asks Myka, ”Are you? Okay?"

Myka is okay and to that she nods but she is lost. Almost as lost as she had been in those woods. And time is passing, too much Myka thinks, before anything more than this happens. Before _this_ becomes so repetitive that it is almost methodical and effortless and emotionless. That it is almost all of these things that Myka so desperately does not want this moment to be.

Abigail reaches for Myka’s hand.

Abigail laces her fingers with Myka’s fingers and, just as she had in that forest, in those woods, so far away from everything like they are now, so very far away from absolutely everything, Abigail guides her.

Abigail shows her the way home.

And Abigail, Myka thinks, knows everything. She is intelligent and loving and careful. And she is needy only in this way with Myka. Only in this way that she needs to give herself over to Myka, first and foremost. That she needs Myka, first and foremost, to give herself to Abigail.

And Abigail knows, because she is so very smart. She is intelligent. And she _just_ knows.

Exactly. What she needs. To do.

***

“You’re late.”

Myka is startled by her mother’s voice as she enters the apartment, shuts the door softly behind her. She glances down at the watch on her wrist. The watch that is no longer on her wrist. The watch that is still at Abigail’s house, in Abigail’s backyard.  Tossed haphazardly aside in a collection of blankets in the treehouse.

She’s not even sure why Abigail had removed it. Other than to take  _something_ , anything at all, off of a suddenly hesitant Myka.

“Sorry, I uh…” Myka holds up her bare wrist, “I literally lost track of time.”

Myka’s mother arches a suspicious brow at her, from where she sits alone with a book on the living room couch, before she offers up something resembling a laugh.

"You look exhausted, Ophelia.”

Myka yawns right on cue.

“You aren’t experimenting with drugs are you?”

“Mom.” Myka rolls her eyes, shakes her head and her mother smiles, giving away her tease. Myka’s not entirely sure that little inquiry did not have some genuine concern hidden beneath the tone of it. Nor is she entirely sure that she cares enough to press the issue.

“Oh, Helena came in early.” Myka’s mother says this while turning back to her book but pointing behind her, toward the hallway. “She sounds like she’s coming down with something so I’d uh,” Myka’s mother looks back at her over the rim of her glasses, “ _avoid_  getting too close.”

Myka wants to throw a pillow at her mother. Instead, she walks to her and drops a kiss on the top of her head. Says softly, “I’m starting to see where Tracy gets it from,” before heading toward her bedroom.

“Well,” Myka hears her mother say, not quite underneath her breath and to no one really at all, “she certainly didn’t get it from your father.”

***

Helena is wide awake when Myka walks into her room. Wide awake and holding,  _clutching_ , onto the journal that Myka still has not finished reading.

“Hey,” Myka smiles softly at her as she tosses her book bag onto the floor beside her desk.

“Hi.” Helena’s voice is small, her smile slightly less small as she pulls the journal into her chest and crosses her arms over it.

“Are you okay?” And the question, as Myka is speaking it, makes her think of Abigail. Of the time she had just spent with Abigail and how much she had seen and felt  _of_  Abigail. But these thoughts, that begin with Abigail, transform into thoughts that are not about Abigail at all.

Because Abigail doesn’t have all of those freckles in all of  _those_  places. Abigail isn’t quite the height of the body that bends and curves and stretches and bucks at Myka’s touch, in Myka’s mind. Abigail’s hair isn’t anywhere near  _that_  long.

Her touch is not that tender. Her lips not that soft. And the way it makes Myka  _feel_ … it isn’t a twist or a flip or a dance of the belly anymore. It is so much more than that. It is too much, in fact, in too many places. All at once in too many new and unfamiliar places.

Far far  _far_ too many places.

Myka has to look away from Helena when the older girl’s smile grows at her question, at what Myka is sure is her cheeks reddening in the silence to follow that question.

"I’m okay.” Helena nods and she turns, pulls her feet from Myka’s bed, rests them against the trundle that she must have put together on her own, in Myka’s absence. Helena bites down on her lip, for only a second. “Are you okay?”

Myka can’t. She absolutely cannot. She downright  _refuses_.

“Yeah, I’m just going to go shower.” Myka nods. “Really quickly. I’ll be back.”

She doesn’t wait for a response from Helena because Helena is already standing to her feet and setting down that journal and moving to Myka when she turns and goes and disappears into the hallway. Into the bathroom. Into a shower.  A freezing, ice-cold shower.

Suddenly, so very many of Pete’s jokes are beginning to  _make sense_.

***

The shower helps. For a little while.

It helps while Myka towels herself dry. It helps while Myka changes into her pajamas, while she tosses her dirty clothes - and she will never again be able to not think of this new standard of so-called filth that her clothes have come to achieve. But at least she isn’t really thinking of Helena as she throws those close into the washing machine.

The shower still helps when she ventures into the kitchen for a glass of water, when she returns to her bedroom with two glasses instead of one. It even helps, just a little bit, when she finds Helena laying, in her usual way, with her back turned to the door. Breathing softly, quietly. Completely motionless.

Myka sets both glasses on the shelf beside her bed and it’s when she returns to set herself down on the trundle bed, that she sees Helena is still awake. Still flipping through pages of her journal.

“You’re early,” Myka says. And it’s still helping right now, the shower. The last remnants of cold. The sedating chill that bites back this feeling that she has so rarely in the past had the discomfort of feeling.

It helps until the moment Helena rolls onto her back to look up at Myka with those dark brown eyes and her long black hair falling down and over the side of the bed. It helps, just a little bit, right up to that second and then, just like that, it is done helping.

Just like that, Myka wants to _do things_ with Helena that she has never really truly thought about doing before.

Helena sighs.

Helena smirks, and shrugs. Rolls back onto her side, her back still to Myka.

But Helena’s hair does not fall in the same way it had. It now falls in a way that exposes the skin of her arms, her shoulder, her back. A back that Myka has always been so fond of kissing. A back that Myka hasn’t set her lips to in so long. Too long.

_Good for absolutely nothing._

“I missed you.”

_Worthless, worthless shower._

Helena turns back to Myka, arches a brow. Waits. Patiently.

Myka climbs onto her bed, crawls over Helena, lays down on her bed in front of Helena, rests her head against Helena’s pillow that is actually Myka’s pillow that Helena claims whenever she’s here. Whenever she’s home.

The older girl smiles at her. It is wide and unrelenting. Full of a too-rare happiness, that so-rare genuine happiness that Myka has taken too much for granted. Because right now, in this moment, with Helena beside her, moving closer to her and resting her head over Myka’s shoulder, what all of these things _do_ to Myka… is entirely unexplainable.

“I missed you, too,” Myka sighs and whispers into the top of Helena’s head, into dark hair, against a very warm forehead.

_She, herself, is utterly useless._

***

“You’re so quiet,” Helena says softly and she’s putting space between her and Myka as she says this.

Myka breathes in.

“Can I ask you something? That’s really personal?”

Helena smiles and holds up her journal for Myka to see. Sits it down again between them where they lay side-by-side on the bed now.

“Anything at all, Myka.”

“I know you’ve never liked talking to me… about these things in the past but I was just wondering. When was the first time… that you, um…” Myka presses her lips together tightly and rolls on to her back. She lets go of a deep sigh. “That you… were _with_ … someone?” She turns to look at Helena now, eyes squinted as if expecting an actual physical blow in response. Still, she also asks, “Like _that_. How old were you?”

Helena’s brows are in the air but she has a gentle smile on her lips when she says, “You’d know, if you ever bothered reading this thing.” She’s holding up the journal again.

“I’m sorry, I just…”

“I’m teasing you,” Helena nods. “I know it’s difficult.”

Helena’s smile disappears as she seems to lose herself to thought, to the method of tailoring her words specifically for Myka. As she begins to set into what Myka has always thought to be her mothering mode.

“Well,” Helena twists her lips to the side and shakes her head just a bit. Her eyes dance everywhere, focus on everything that isn’t Myka. Myka can see that much, that Helena isn’t looking at her. “I think that I was far too young.” She’s nodding now, when her eyes fall back on Myka. “I was fourteen.”

“Why?” Myka asks, her eyes wide.

“Why did I do it or why do I think I was so young??”

Myka shrugs, “Both, I guess. Did you think you were ready? Did you _feel_ ready? _Were_ you ready?”

“I thought I was ready.” Helena nods with the hint of a smile on those lips. “I _acted_ like I was ready. Fooled even myself.” A small puff of laughter escapes Helena’s nose, she licks her lips and pulls them inward for a beat before adding, “I _still_ act as though I’m ready. I’m still managing, somehow, to fool myself.”

“So you aren’t ready? You aren’t sure?”

Helena blinks in thought and then shrugs.

“But how can you not be sure? If you’ve done it so many times before—”

“Well, not _so many times_ , Myka,” Helena is rolling her eyes with a wide and amused smile.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” Myka clears her throat. “I just meant, I just wondered, I guess, if you ever felt _sure_ that you were ready. If it ever felt _right_ afterward. I guess.”

“I don’t know, Myka. I mean, with some people it just feels how it feels. It is exactly what it is. And with _others_ …” Helena lets her voice trail off, her eyes, Myka notices, are somewhere else. And not in that avoiding sort of way but in that very wistful, thoughtful, nostalgic sort of way. In the sort of way that tells Myka that Helena is somewhere else, too.

There’s more lingering silence and Myka is watching Helena lose herself to her thoughts, to some invisible thing of interest on the wall behind Myka. And Myka does just the same thing, losing herself to thought, but Myka’s eyes are on something far less invisible. Far more interesting.

Helena clears her throat suddenly, eyes floating back to Myka’s when she asks, “Why do you ask?”

Myka clamps her lips shut and shakes her head, turns to look away from Helena. Turns entirely away from Helena because whatever expression has just landed on her face in that moment, she’s certain it is telling. She is more than certain that she cannot hide that look from Helena. That she cannot hide any single bit of this from Helena.

She had looked at herself in the mirror, afterward. In Abigail’s mirror, before leaving Abigail’s house. And in her bathroom mirror just now, after showering.

She looked the part. Even to herself. She looked the part of a guilty person even to herself and she’s amazed that her mother never saw it. Amazed that her mother never questioned it. Wonders if maybe her mother trusts her too much. Wonders if maybe her mother thinks she owes Myka _that_ much.

“No reason.” Myka finally gets it out after a series of throat clearings that are so far from casual that even now, after hearing herself, after _knowing_ herself and how very horrible she is at _this_ and at, Myka thinks, _life_ in general, she wants to laugh.

Helena is quiet and when Myka turns, eventually, to look back at Helena, the older girl is watching her. No smile on those lips, no smile in her eyes. Just one very high, very suspicious brow arch.

“Myka,” Helena says and it is the softest challenging voice Myka has ever been met with. And it _is_ a challenge.

Myka can see that Helena is very much _still_ in mother mode. Very much still trying to play that part, to be something of a protector to Myka. A worrying, over-protective jumble of curiosity and questions and on-the-verge-of-knowing-too-much about far too many things that she doesn’t need to be worrying about sort of protector.

Myka turns to Helena fully now and Helena takes in a deep inhale, moves and adjusts to prop herself up on an elbow, lingers over Myka in a way that sends Myka’s heart into a heightened rhythm, warms her entire body, sends her into a dizzy-spell.

“You.” Helena finally says, still in that soft voice. But it isn’t challenging anymore. It is something akin to understanding, to recognition. “With Abigail.”

Myka remains quiet. Her nod is slight. It is so very slight, as she bites down hard on her bottom lip, as she moves her eyes slowly down and away from the woman above her.

Myka can see Helena’s lips form the start of a word a couple of times before she manages any actual sound.

“When did you…” Helena doesn’t finish. Myka doesn’t know why.

Myka bites down too hard on her lip. Tastes blood. Her eyes look away.

“Oh,” it is tiny and yet so endearing when Helena says it. When that revelation, that this is all so _very_ new to Myka, hits her.

Then Helena smiles, and it is beautiful and understanding and simultaneously curious and just a little bit sad. But the sadness, Myka thinks, is so minute, it is so just barely there that it is practically not there at all. And when Helena then shakes her head, the sadness is gone. Myka sees only the understanding.

She sees only the beautiful.

Helena also says, and it too is so very soft, an endearing whisper, “My littlest of loves, you.”

Myka’s eyes begin to burn with the welling of tears and she doesn’t know why this makes her cry, she’s not sure she feels particularly sad or particularly happy about anything right now.

She feels a _lot_ of things, but she isn’t so very sure that sad or happy are the most prominent of the things she feels.

Relief, Myka decides, is what she’ll chock it up to. To having overestimated that tiny portion of her conscience that thought Helena would be so disappointed in her. That thought Helena would be so upset with her. So heart broken over her.

And it is also not relieving, for Myka, that Helena smiles at her revelation. That Helena is smiling like the proud over-worried mother that she is, at the realization of what Myka has done. Because she could be just a little bit jealous, couldn’t she? If she really loved Myka?

This moment, with Helena, seems almost too grand for those moments, with Abigail. Seems almost _more than_ those moments, with Abigail.

Helena’s smile widens and she palms Myka’s cheek as those tears begin to slip from her eyes and run across the bridge of her nose, toward her temple and to the bed where she lay.

“Why are you crying?”

Myka doesn’t answer Helena, she just cries more and this seems to break Helena’s heart but she smiles, still, and shakes her head. Helena brings her forehead to Myka’s and then her lips to Myka’s forehead.

“It’s okay, Myka,” her voice is a whisper when she says this and when she adds, “Are you okay?”

Myka can only nod beneath Helena’s touch.

Helena sets her lips against the bridge of Myka’s nose, against still-falling tears, and she presses her lips there, lets them linger for so long before she kisses Myka there, too. Before she is moving away, licking her lips, tasting, no doubt, the salt of Myka’s tears against them.

“I cried, too, you know. I was so unsure of myself,” Helena eventually says. “After my first time.”

Myka’s eyes catch Helena’s gaze again and the older girl smiles, nods. Seems to shrug off this telling little thing as though it is just some other silly aspect of her personality, the crying.

“Was it Giselle?” Myka wonders aloud. “Your first time?”

Helena almost laughs when she shakes her head. “No.” She clears her throat. “His name was Jules. He was my brother’s friend.” When Myka’s eyes widen, Helena does laugh. “One of the better ones.”

*** 

 _Helena is fourteen when she’s sure she’s falling in love with this boy_.

 _He is tall with shaggy blonde hair, a gentle smile, blue eyes. He is a musician, he loves to write songs. He loves to sing. He carries a guitar everywhere he goes_.

 _Helena thinks everything about him is absolutely ridiculous but she is definitely sure that she is falling in love with him_.

 _It has been almost two years since they’ve moved to the states and Charles, after raising hell in the worst kind of way for the first six months of that time, is settling in. Helena thinks it shouldn’t be at all surprising that he has found so many like-minded guys his age, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, to hang out with in America. Almost every last one of his friends is as menacing as he_.

 _Except this one_.

 _Helena doesn’t count how many times Charles has destroyed something in her bedroom since they’ve been in the states. How many times he has picked her lock or kicked her brand new bedroom door in. How many times he comes home throwing a fit, fighting with their dad, taking his anger out on everything Helena owns and on Helena, too_.

 _On more than one day, she comes home to find him and his friends in the pool. To find her room completely ransacked. To find her own hidden stash of cash gone. Her novelty piggy bank shattered on the floor_.

 _And they’ll laugh when she confronts him. They will all laugh and make jokes and call her names and splash water at her and she’ll stand there, arms crossed, glaring at her brother. At his friends. At all of them except that one_.

 _That one will find her later, when she’s in her room alone. He’ll find her and he’ll apologize. For him, for them. For everything. And Helena will be crying on the floor, cleaning up this mess alone until he is there, beside her to help her. He doesn’t leave until her room is spotless_.

 _It happens this way once, twice, three times, four. Every single time, he is there to help her_.

_She asks him once, crying, "Why don’t you stop him?”_

_It is the first time he holds her when he pulls her into him and says, "How can I protect you, if he thinks I’m not his friend?”_

_Nothing at all happens then but Helena is pretty sure she wants it to_.

 _It’s past midnight, one night, when Mr. Bering is dropping Helena off at home, when she enters a house full of Charles’ friends, when she escapes up the stairs mostly unnoticed. Her dad is out of town, Vanessa is probably with him. So Helena is upstairs, in her room alone and she skips the shower, locks her door, puts on her pajamas and climbs hastily into bed_.

 _Helena has been asleep for two hours when she wakes up to that familiar pressure on her arms, her legs, digging into her abdomen. It is dark but she sees them, Charles, his friends. She feels their hands everywhere, holding her down. Then suddenly she’s not being held down, they are lifting her up into the air, off of the bed_.

 _She fights, kicks, screams, then falls. Half on the bed, half off the bed. And it takes her a while to register what is happening because it is dark and all she hears is yelling but then she sees him, Jules, wrestling her brother away from her, backing him into a corner, against the door. Telling him to leave Helena alone. Shoving him into that door, telling him to get out. Telling them all to get out_.

 _Charles does not leave without making one last threat_.

 _Helena is crying again. She is angry_.

 _“Now what will I do?” She asks him_.

 _“Come with me,” he tells her_.

 _She doesn’t know what that means but she does just that. She goes. And they’re in his car, he’s driving nowhere at all, they’re listening to music_.

 _Eventually they are at the lake and talking. Eventually they are holding hands and kissing_.

 _Eventually they are doing so much more than that and then they are doing nothing at all. He is asleep, his arms wrapped protectively around her, she is awake, curled into his side_.

 _Helena is fourteen years old and she is wide awake_.

***

“I thought I loved him,” Helena scrunches her nose and shakes her head. “And maybe I did but I thought… it should have felt _perfect_ afterward. It should feel the way people in movies and television appear to feel afterward. It shouldn’t feel… shameful. I didn’t expect that. But that’s just how we’re raised. As women, I think. To be ashamed of our sexuality.”

Myka is watching Helena quietly when Helena smiles at her, when Helena’s thumb glides gently across her cheek and over tears. Wipes them away.

“You don’t have to be ashamed, Myka. It’s perfectly natural for you to want to be intimate with someone. It’s perfectly natural if you _don’t_ want to be intimate with someone.”

Myka presses her lips tight.

“Do you understand me?”

She nods and Helena’s smile, in response, is satisfied.

Helena runs her hand through Myka’s hair and Myka closes her eyes, turns further into that touch, sighs when her forehead comes to rest against Helena’s bare shoulder. And Helena lays back down, wraps her arms around Myka, pulls her closer into her.

“It’s been a while.” Helena’s voice is a whisper. “Since I was the one comforting you.”

“Mmm,” is all Myka can manage before moving her face into Helena’s hair, against Helena’s neck, and sighing again. Her arms snake their way around Helena’s waist, her hands joining at the small of Helena’s back, pulling the older girl closer.

Helena doesn’t say anything more. She runs her hand up Myka’s arm, across her back, holds her closer. They are so close, that when Helena moves slightly into Myka, she is almost on top of her.

“Goodnight, Helena,” Myka tells her softly, closes her eyes, and gives in to the lull.

She only faintly registers the press of Helena’s lips over her eyelid before she gives in to sudden exhaustion.

***

Myka almost expects things to go back to normal. She almost expects that things _should_ go back to normal. But nothing does. Nothing will because the next week is the last week of her high school career. And then she graduates. She graduates twice. Once from high school with a diploma, and once from college with an associate’s degree.

And when she sees Helena at her graduation, it is the first time she’s seen Helena in two weeks. Her eyes are exhausted but she looks amazing despite that and that is almost “back to normal” except that Helena and Abigail end up in the same space at once, after her graduation, and the tension that lingers there, between the two of them, could be cut with a knife.

Still, Helena is polite. More than usual. And Abigail actually talks, a little less than usual. Eventually what happens is Helena hugs Myka amidst the hugs she also receives from her mother, from Ms. Jane and Pete, even Tracy, and Helena whispers into her ear, “See you tomorrow?” And when she pulls away, Myka nods, smiles. Resists the urge to then put her hands on Helena’s waist and pull that girl back into her.

Helena goes and then it is Abigail’s turn. And there is nothing normal about being with Abigail anymore because things have changed, ever since that day, two weeks ago, in the treehouse at the edge of the woods. Things have changed between them and Myka cannot say they are bad things, these things that change. Because mostly what changes is that they spend way more time than usual together, and way more time than usual together _in_ that treehouse. And Myka has spent one or two more evenings forgetting her watch in that treehouse, too.

Tonight, her college graduation night, is more of that same change. Only now, the third or fourth or fifth time, Myka doesn’t cry. She doesn’t feel lost or somewhere between not happy and not sad. She doesn’t return home with that guilty look on her face, she doesn’t keep her head down around her mother, or blush furiously when Pete makes _those types_ of jokes around her anymore.

And it is Tracy, her little sister, only fourteen years old herself, who puts that change into perspective that night, when she catches her sneaking into the apartment at close to three in the morning, and says to Myka, “You are _definitely_ my sister.”

***

Helena’s graduation, by comparison, is huge and takes absolutely forever. Even Myka’s mother is exasperated over the wait, saying they should not have arrived until they were at least in the Ts. So when Helena finally walks and receive her degree, they are cheering for both her accomplishments and the light at the end of this too-long tunnel of a graduation.

For the first time in almost a year, Myka sees Vanessa Calder outside of the high school. She is hugging Helena, congratulating her, palming her cheeks, kissing the tip of Helena’s nose. And Myka isn’t exactly sure what she’s feeling when she sees this but she is thankful, very much so, when Pete’s hand is suddenly on her shoulder and his voice in her ear saying, “Relax, she has her boyfriend with her.”

Myka sighs and she sees him, the man standing beside Vanessa Calder, who drapes an arm over her shoulder casually, smiles and says something to Helena that makes Helena smile. And Myka doesn’t know why this makes her feel better but it does. Maybe to know that Vanessa Calder is otherwise preoccupied. Maybe to know that Helena sees this isn’t an option anymore…

“Myka!” Helena eventually sees and greets her before bringing her arm to her face and coughing into it. “Sorry.”

“I knew it!” Myka’s mother says then, appearing out of almost nowhere. “Helena, Sweetheart, you have got to take better care of yourself.” And Myka’s mother is playfully shooing Myka out of the way as she pushes past her toward Helena, to wrap the older girl into a hug. “Also congratulations, we are so proud of you.”

Jane is a little more reluctant to step any closer to Helena. Even more so when she goes into another coughing fit. She echoes the sentiments of Myka’s mother from behind where Myka and Pete stand.

“I know it’s your graduation night, Honey,” Vanessa is saying, “but I do think Mrs. Bering is right. You need to rest.”

“It’s fine, I had no plans anyway,” and Helena’s eyes fall on Myka’s just then. She smiles and finally moves in for her hug. Whispers into her ear, “Hi, my love.”

“Oh, am I yours again?” Myka teases her, squeezes Helena in her arms.

“You have always been.” Helena whispers and sets a quick kiss to her ear, then presses her cheek further into Myka’s cheek.

“You’re really warm,” Myka whispers back and when they part, Helena is shaking her head.

“So you’re my mother now, too?” She asks with a smile.

“If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle an overly hormonal maternal mess all dressed in black, I don’t know what is,” Myka teases before wetting the pad of her thumb with her tongue and moving that thumb to Helena’s cheek. “Ya got a little schmutz here.”

Helena glares but she doesn’t push that hand away. She just pulls Myka back into her.

“If I weren’t feeling ill…” and that is all she says before kissing Myka’s cheek again.

***

Helena apologizes to Myka before she even says why and when Myka asks just that, Helena tells her she’s going to stay with Vanessa for the weekend. That she’ll be moving her things out of _that_ house with _those_ people and into Vanessa’s.

And, “I know you’re upset but don’t be upset, it’s not like that,” comes next from Helena’s mouth, as they’re walking to dinner in the city, with absolutely everyone walking ahead of them.

“I’m not upset.”

Helena eyes her.

“I hate when you _do_ that.” Myka walks faster, ahead of her.

“I’ll be home Sunday night,” Helena reaches for Myka and stops walking, makes Myka stop walking. Turns Myka toward her. “I’m going with Mrs. Donovan to pick up Claire from school that morning.”

“Home?” Myka echoes because Helena has been saying that a lot lately, in reference to their small town and the bookstore. When speaking about Myka.

“Home. For now.” Helena nods and drops her hand from Myka’s arm. “Will you be there or will you be busy? With Abigail?”

Myka shakes her head, rolls her eyes, too.

“Oh, I’ll be home. And I’ll be waiting."

Helena arches a brow.

“Should I expect you at a decent hour or will it be the usual five in the morning?”

“You’re _such_ a mother,” Helena is throwing her hands to her sides now, walking off past Myka who is smirking when she turns to trail behind the older girl.

“Well, I have so many of them now, I just don’t know what to do with myself.” Myka teases, jogging to catch up to her.

***

Helena is with Vanessa Calder. At her house. In her home. And yes, Ms. Calder has that boyfriend and Helena has _moved on_ and things are so very different now because what they had was _long ago_ , as Helena puts it. But Myka can’t help to wonder. What happened. What was no longer happening. What she tries very hard to believe is not still happening.

Myka hasn’t picked up Helena’s journal in a long time but tonight? Tonight, when she is home and it is late and she has showered and everyone has gone to bed, she picks up the journal, settles herself on her bed, opens the thing up and reads.

She is determined to get through it. She is determined to finally read about what happened between Helena and Ms. Calder, however _long ago_ it had happened.

***

Helena is tormented by her brother in all the same ways Myka has read, imagined, witnessed for herself. To get her out of the house more, to distract her, to give her space, Myka’s mother suggests she start watching Myka and Tracy for them.

At some point, Myka begins to get the feeling that being in the Bering home isn’t as much of a reprieve as her mother had planned for it to be. But Helena writes, more than once, about how much she adored Myka, even Tracy. How very much she has always cared for her.

*

Helena falls in love with Jules and from the way she writes about that portion of her life, she still loves him. It’s really no surprise, that Helena holds on to that love, like she holds onto all of her love. But even after he moved away without ever saying goodbye. Even after she never heard from him again.

And Helena has her suspicions, about why he left. She has her own ideas and assumptions. Her own comforting tales that Helena seems to tell herself to make herself feel better about this person she loves, one of the first of so many, that has eventually disappeared from her life.

*

Vanessa becomes a big part of Helena’s life again. Helena is starting high school and Vanessa begins substitute teaching at that high school. When Helena isn’t babysitting, when she isn’t home alone, she is at Vanessa’s. She spends weeks and months there at a time because her father is never home. Her brother, now an adult, out of school, on his own, is also rarely home. But when he occasionally _is_ home, Helena makes sure she definitely _isn’t_.

*

Vanessa Calder takes Helena to a barbecue at the Kings and this is when she gets to know Giselle better. Helena writes about how she knew of Giselle from school, had always found her fascinating and attractive, but never thought to talk to her until the barecue.

Giselle thinks Helena and Vanessa are sisters and Myka almost laughs herself to tears when she reads that. It doesn’t take them long, after the barbecue, to figure out they like one another. It’s typical, the story of how they end up together, it is so typically them. And that makes her miss Giselle. It makes her miss Helena and Giselle together and that is the oddest thing.

Helena doesn’t linger too long on Giselle but the way she writes about Giselle, even in these short few pages, resonates so much love that Myka’s nostalgia gives way to jealousy. Because at this point, Helena has known Myka for three or four years and all Myka has read of herself is one or two lines about how adorable she used to be.

_Used to be._

Myka scoffs. Turns the page.

*

When Helena writes about Vanessa, it is like Myka is not reading Helena’s writing at all. The entire journal is dotted, here and there, with little things that give way to Helena’s obvious crush on the older woman but when Helena becomes a teacher’s assistant in Vanessa’s class, things just… change.

Her feelings for Vanessa grow stronger and Myka doesn’t want to say that they also grow more _real_ but they do seem to be more… substantial… when Helena becomes an adult.

*

Helena is heart broken when she breaks up with Giselle. She is still heart broken, judging by her writing. But Vanessa is there and Vanessa has just broken up with her boyfriend, too. And nothing happens then, not really. Helena is as she always is, moping around in bed. Moping around in _Vanessa’s_ bed but it is nothing more than how they have always been. Vanessa grading papers, Helena buried beneath covers beside her.

Nothing happens then but Vanessa receives a phone call and it’s _him_ whoever _he_ is, and they argue and the call ends badly, or Myka guesses so, just like Helena guesses so, because Helena is somehow comforting Vanessa much like she comforts everyone else. Like everyone else comforts _her_ and there’s a kiss but it’s small and it’s quick and it’s accompanied with soothing words like, “I’m here,” and “you’re okay”, followed by, “we’re both okay.” But small as it is, it is everything to Helena, even if it is nothing or very little to Vanessa.

It is _everything_ to Helena.

And, as far as Myka can tell, Helena pulls Vanessa back into that bed and into her arms and this is the first time, in all of the times they’ve shared a bed, that Helena gets to hold Vanessa closer to her, in her arms.

It is the first time, in all these years, but it is not the last.

*

It happens after the trial. _After_ the night of Helena’s party, with Giselle and the spiked punch. After the sentencing, even. It happens before Helena’s twentieth birthday and Myka remembers it fondly, how put out Helena had been that day. How _awful_ her mood had been. And it makes sense now because it happens, or it had happened, somewhere around that time.

The situation is not as fragile as it had been that first time. They are not emotional or sad or comforting one another, or one comforting the other. What they are doing is practically nothing at all, except they’ve been talking _a lot_. About Leo, about what he did to Helena, about the trial, about Helena’s feelings about _everything_. They even talk about Myka, and this weirds Myka out but she adds another tally to the few she has, to mark all the times Helena has mentioned anything significant about her.

So they are talking and it just happens, according to Helena’s words, because there is a pause in their conversation and Vanessa is looking at Helena like the proud older sister that Giselle has always thought her to be. (Poor unsuspecting Giselle or maybe not as unsuspecting but now Myka wonders how much Giselle knows. How much she knew then.) Vanessa is looking at Helena with pride and Helena just… can’t… help… herself.

Myka prays (oh toastered god in appliance heaven) that there are no details in Helena’s writing before she reads further. And there are no details. What Helena says is simply this:

_I don’t know why she let it happen. I don’t know why she let me touch her that way. Why she didn’t stop me. Why she didn’t stop herself. But it happened and I wouldn’t change that night for anything in the world, Myka. It was everything. It is everything. She meant everything to me._

It doesn’t end there but Myka stops reading there. She closes the journal and sighs and extracts herself from her bed, sets the book on her desk. She goes to the bathroom, she goes to the kitchen, the refrigerator. Pulls out some string cheese to snack on. Eats the entire thing before she even closes the refrigerator door because she’s trying to decide what to drink, what to wash this cheese stick down with.

Water, apple juice, orange juice, milk?

Her eyes land on her mother’s wine coolers.

*

Myka settles back onto her bed, with that journal, with that wine cooler. She sips, reads. Sips, reads. She’s not even sure why but it’s delicious, this thing, and it helps, she thinks. Or it will eventually, she supposes, since that is its purpose.

She reads. Helena and Vanessa get into an argument. Vanessa essentially bans Helena from her house. The last time Helena talks to Vanessa that year is before that Thanksgiving with Myka’s mom and Ms. Jane, and before that Christmas out at that cabin, and before that New Years Eve with Helena.

Myka thinks the timeline sounds about right. Myka thinks that it makes sense. That they became so close after that. That Helena opened herself up after that. Because Vanessa had done just that with Helena and it had made her world. It had been her everything. So Helena did just that with Myka and it was Myka’s world. It _is_ Myka’s everything.

*

Whatever is at the end of the journal, it is dated later than every other entry of explanation that Helena has written in the journal. It is dated sometime _after_ Myka’s birthday. _After_ Helena had given Myka the journal.

 _It feels almost foolish now,_ Helena had written, whenever she wrote these words, _the way I felt about Vanessa. The way I acted with her. The way I reacted to her. I still love her but it feels foolish, now that I love you so much more._

That’s it. That is all there is.

***

Helena comes home early again. She comes home way too early. Myka has just finished her second wine cooler when she hears the familiar sound of the doorknob, of the door opening not quite as quietly as Helena might think, when she hears it close again.

She hears Helena moving down the hallway, hears her stop in front of her door, hears the light tap before Myka tells her to come in.

And there is almost no time between the moment Helena opens the door, comes through the door, shuts the door, and the moment Helena is climbing onto Myka’s bed, falling into Myka’s arms, into her lap, sobbing over Myka’s shoulder.

Five minutes pass, then ten, fifteen, almost twenty, before Helena begins to calm, to relax, to feel heavy in Myka’s arms. Myka turns to let Helena stretch out onto the bed beside her. She leans in over Helena, touches a hand to a warm cheek, swipes her thumb below still teary eyes.

Myka kisses that warm cheek, kisses those teary eyes.

“Do you want to talk about it?” her voice a whisper when she asks this. Helena, not at all surprisingly, shakes her head _no_ and Myka nods. “Are you okay?” Another _no_. Myka runs her hand through Helena’s hair. “Do I need to wake the mothers? Call the police? Take you to the hospital?” A third _no_ and Myka sighs. “Okay.”

Myka sits up, reaches to remove the heels that Helena wears, tosses them to the floor.

“I thought you weren’t going out.” She’s surveying Helena’s outfit as she asks this. A cropped shirt over a tank top, both reveal her shoulders, her cleavage, her arms, her belly, and shorts that are almost too short to be shorts. Myka returns her eyes to Helena’s with a soft smile. “Do I need to send Pete after some–?”

“What would it take?” Helena speaks and her voice is low, breaking, full of congestion and sorrow, sickness and sadness.

“What would what take?” Myka asks and Helena smiles, wipes at her own tears with the back of her hand.

“For you to stop loving me?” Helena bites down on her lip and closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I’m just curious.”

Myka tilts her head and smiles, even if Helena cannot see. “My very end,” she tells her and Helena opens her eyes again, almost seems to lose herself in their gaze. “Until the very end of me.”

Helena reaches to Myka’s cheek now, her palm coming to rest there.

“Ever the romantic.”

Myka leans into that touch, turns her head into Helena’s hand, kisses her palm.

“Pot,” Myka says, “meet kettle.”

***

“What is this?”

Helena is holding those two now-empty wine cooler bottles when Myka turns to her from where she lays, half-asleep on her own bed.

It is almost five in the morning.

“Distraction.”

“A distraction from _what_?”

Myka reaches under her pillow, pulls out Helena’s journal and holds it out to her. Helena sets the bottles back down and takes the journal, holds it for a while, seems to contemplate its existence, before she sits back on the bed beside where Myka is laying down.

“What part are you on?”

“No part,” Myka says. “I finished it.”

“You…” Helena lets her voice fall, glances at Myka and runs her hand through her hair.

Myka sits up beside her and reaches for the journal in her other hand and pulls it gently from Helena’s grasp.

“This isn’t it,” she tells Helena while holding the journal up. Helena still looks at her with some concern. “It would take way more than this.”

Myka tosses the journal to the floor and lays back down, tugs at Helena’s hand until the older girl is laying beside her again, then yawns.

“A whole lot more.”

***

“I need to talk to H.G.”

“Okay.” Pete is brushing past Myka, scooping up Helena by the arm where she stands in the living room, pulling her toward the hallway. “Good morning to you, too.” Myka rolls her eyes and looks suspiciously at Helena whose face reads mostly of moderate concern, fright, confusion.

Myka shrugs.

“What did you do?” She teases.

“I’m sorry,” her voice barely croaks and Pete disappears with her, down the hallway, into Myka’s room.

***

Only Pete leaves Myka’s room several minutes later before falling into a seat beside her at the table where Myka is eating breakfast.

“Amanda has lost her mind,” is the first thing out of his mouth.

“Is that news?” Myka smiles.

“She has it out for H.G.”

“Again, is this news?” Myka takes a bite of her eggs before Pete pulls her plate away from her and snatches up her toast. It’s in his mouth before she can protest. “Dude.”

He chews, swallows.

“She’s crossed a line this time and I just… want you to know before you hear it from anyone else.”

“Know what?” Myka reclaims her plate, spears more of her eggs onto her fork.

“That I don’t care what H.G.’s been doing to make some extra cash. No one should care. It’s her business. And even if it was everyone’s business, no one should care that she’s doing it. But Amanda’s spreading photos. I don’t even know when she took them but they’re all over MySpace.”

Myka swallows her eggs. Sets her fork down on her plate.

“ _What_ are you talking about?”

“Amanda had no right going there, she had no right taking _us_ there, just because she knew H.G. worked there.”

“H.G.,” Myka sighs, corrects, “ _Helena_ doesn’t work _anywhere_ , as far as I know, so you had better start making sense before I throw this plate of eggs at you.” Myka thinks for a beat and adds, “Although, you’d probably like that.”

Pete has that look on his face now. That look that tells Myka, tells anyone, because he isn’t the best at lying, that he has said something he probably shouldn’t have said and he is only just now realizing that fact.

“Beans. Spill. Now.”

“You didn’t know?”

Myka glares.

“I thought she…” Pete brings his hand to palm his forehead, closes his eyes, “Fuck.”

***

Myka is standing with her back against her bedroom door. Helena seated on the bed across from her, head and eyes lowered, several sheets of paper in her hands, tears falling from her eyes and onto those several sheets of paper.

“Please tell me that Pete is as crazy as his girlfriend.”

Helena doesn’t move.

“You’re working as a stripper?”

“I dance,” Helena says softly. “I like it.”

“You work at a strip club.” Myka clarifies.

Helena sighs.

“You shimmy around on a stage, in a bar, and remove your clothes from your body in front of crowds of men for money.”

“Myka…”

“Is this why you come home at five in the morning? Is this why you’re always so tired? You spend all night letting old dirty drunk men grope you?”

Helena groans, “Myka, stop.”

“Stop? Helena? Is it not enough, what your brother did to you? Is it not enough what _Leo_ did to you? The unwanted male attention, remember that? The _looks_ , the things guys _say_ is not enough? Now you’re just putting yourself out there, getting half naked in front of—“

“Stop!” Helena is on her feet and she is approaching Myka and she is angry and uncrying, in Myka’s face, throwing down those several pieces of paper at Myka’s feet. “You don’t get to do this, Myka. You don’t _get_ to say those things. You think you’re old enough to know what you’re saying. You think you know _everything_ but you don’t get to stand here and put those things on me, Myka Bering. Not my brother, not that disgusting _fuck_ either.” She takes in a sharp inhale, “As though it’s all my fault, what they did. As if _I_ have to take responsibility for _their_ actions because they’re attracted to me, to hurting me, to making my life miserable. I can’t believe you… that you would even try to…”

Helena clamps her lips shut and shakes her head, crosses her arms in front of her and lowers her head.

“I need to leave.”

“Helena…”

“I’m leaving and you need to move out of my way.”

Myka throws her head back as she steps aside, heaves out a giant sigh. “Helena, I didn’t mean it like _that_ , I just…”

“You what?” Helena pauses halfway through Myka’s door. “You know, for the first time in my life, I made a decision for myself, for _my_ body. I made the decision to have control over when and where and how much of my body gets to be seen, experienced, appreciated.” Helena’s breathing is heavy. “For the first time _ever_ , Myka, I feel in control. I just… I knew you wouldn’t understand that I hadn’t _told_ you. But I thought you would at least be have the decency to be supportive when no one else would. When I knew no one else would understand this freeing feeling that I’ve felt. How much stronger I feel.”

“Helena.”

“Once again, Myka, for old time’s sakes. You can find me when you want to grow up and be a friend to me.” Helena shakes her head, exhales. “I will see you later.”

Helena pushes past Myka, who doesn’t say another word. She pushes past Myka, down that hallway, through the living room, out of the apartment and the bookstore and into her car without saying another word.

Back in her bedroom, Myka picks up those several pieces of paper. Print outs from Amanda’s profile on that website that Myka is certain Abigail is a pro at navigating.

There are pictures there, of Helena down to dark lace, of Helena on a dark stage, of Helena in ways that Myka has never yet imagined Helena to be.

“Like I said,” Pete is suddenly behind her, the most guilty look imaginable draped across his face, “Amanda is out to get H.G.”

***

“I can’t believe you brought up Leo.”

“I know.” Myka sighs.

“It’s not comparable, Mykes.”

“I know, Pete.”

“You can’t even touch strippers,” he continues, “so she’s literally safer doing _that_ than she was walking around at our high school.”

“I get it.”

“She probably makes _really_ good money, too.”

“Pete.”

“She’s never going to talk to you again.”

“You’re probably right.”

“Mykes, you suck at this.”

“At what?”

“Relationships.”

“We’re not even in—.”

“Exactly.”

***

They’ve been driving around for hours. Helena is nowhere. Not at the pool house or her father’s house, not at the diner, the movie theater. They call Vanessa and Helena isn’t with her either.

Myka thinks to check one more place and asks Pete to drive out to the lake.

As soon as they pull up onto that hill, Myka spots her car.

***

Pete walks with Myka long enough to find Helena sitting on the beach in their usual spot, toes in the sand, legs folded up in front of her, palm resting against her forehead.

“I’ll go home with Helena.”

“You sure?” Pete questions. “She might leave you here.”

“Deservingly so.” Myka waves him off after hugging him, thanking him.

***

Myka doesn’t tip-toe around Helena. Not literally. Not figuratively. Myka walks right up to Helena, kicks off her shoes, and comes to a stop directly in front of her. Blocking her view, blocking her sun.

“What are you…” Helena sighs when she recognizes that person eclipsing her sunlight. “Myka, I can’t do this with you right now.”

“You can.” Myka drops to her knees in front of Helena, sets her hands on Helena’s legs. “You _will_ because I owe you an apology. A really _really_ big apology, for what I said to you, for how I acted. I _owe_ you that and I need you to listen to how very sorry I am. I need you to _know_ how very _very_ sorry that I am because we are not going to stop talking for half a year again. _That_ is not going to happen ever again.”

Helena averts her eyes, lets go of another sigh.

“I didn’t know, Helena. All of this time, I never knew. All of this time and I never would have known if something _had_ happened to you. If someone did something to you, I never would have known and that thought…” Myka moves closer to her now, pulling Helena’s legs over her own. “The thought of it.”

“I’m an adult,” Helena says. “I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” and Myka is nodding. “You _are_ an adult and I’m not. I’m a know-it-all teenager who knows nothing at all about anything and especially not stripping. About _dancing_. Except for what I know from movies, television, books, and the little that I know is _scary_ , Helena. So I’m sorry if it’s not really like that and I’m sorry if I overreacted. I’m sorry that I said what I did to you because I never… I never… meant to imply that you… that it’s your fault. I used the wrong words. I said all of the absolute wrong things.”

Myka bites down on her lip and shakes her head.

“I’m sorry. I love you and I support you, in whatever you do and in whatever makes you happy, if it makes you happy, and I am sorry.”

***

Myka sometimes thinks Helena forgives too easily. Myka sometimes wonders if Helena has any actual intention of staying mad at her, of standing her ground about anything with her, because even now, on the beach, on the sand, Helena is pulling her closer and closer and impossibly closer until their lips are barely touching. And Helena, _Helena_ , kisses Myka’s bottom lip with the softness and the lightness and the airiness of a feather.

It is nothing more than a tickle on Myka’s lip, that kiss, even when Helena pulls her down to the ground, pulls her down into _her_ , pulls her down _over_ her, it is a feathered touch, that lip against hers.

And it touches once and twice and three times then four, one open mouth against another, but there is only breath and breathing and that feather-light brushing of lips. Helena moves closer or she wants to move closer but Myka moves back, sits up some, still lingering over Helena. She moves back and then she moves forward again, presses her lips into Helena’s forehead, her cheek, the space just below her bottom lip.

“Helena,” Myka’s breath is heavy, a whisper.

“Do not say it.” Helena tells her and closes her eyes, draws her arm over her face to cover the tears that must burn before they spill out from those lids and fall to her temples. “Please.”

Myka doesn’t say a thing.

Helena pushes Myka off of her playfully, or Myka thinks it is playful, she can’t tell from the look on Helena’s face. This look she has never seen before as Helena stands and begins to undo the buttons of her blouse, begins to reveal, beneath that blouse, dark lace and pale skin.

And before Myka can blink or breathe or move at all, Helena is dropping that blouse, stepping out of her jeans, revealing more dark lace and pale skin, her long legs, and not quite anything more than that. She’s stepping out of those jeans and walking away from Myka and further down the beach, closer to the water.

She looks over her shoulder, this older girl, this woman, with a shy smile and some silent plea. She bites down on her lip and Myka is certain that plea is no longer silent. That plea is no longer silent and it is no longer Helena’s because it escapes Myka’s own lips in its own quiet way when she just barely let’s go of the names “Jesus“ and ”Christ.”

Myka stands and she is not at all like Helena. Not her body, not what she wears under her clothes, not that _look_ that she gives in return. Myka is nothing like that but Helena is smiling at her, Helena is looking at her as if she is, beckoning _her_ to come closer and closer and closer still, until they are both in the water, together. Until they are so deep that Helena wraps her arms around Myka’s shoulders to stay afloat and Myka just barely has her toes on the ground, her arms around Helena’s waist.

Helena rests her forehead against Myka’s cheek, presses all of her facial features to all of Myka’s features. Soft and warm, brushing across skin. She lifts Myka’s glasses, teases her for having left them on, places them atop Myka’s head, nuzzles closer to Myka where her glasses are no longer.

“Helena,” Myka speaks softly.

“I said don’t say it,” Helena sighs, resting her head against Myka’s shoulder. “Just don’t.”

Myka kisses her cheek.

“Okay,” Myka smiles and she whispers all that she wants to whisper into Helena’s ear anyway. “I won’t say how dark it’s getting. I won’t point out the fact that you’re shivering. I won’t tell you that you, with your cold, should probably not be in this water. I also won’t tell you how very badly I want to and _need_ to take you home, to wrap you up in my arms, to keep you warm. I won’t. I promise, after this promise, that I will not say any of those things to you again tonight.”

Myka doesn’t say these things, not anymore. She doesn’t need to, not now, because Helena says, “Take me home.”

***

Helena is coughing and coughing and coughing and it has been an all night thing with this coughing. Ever since Myka _did_ bring her home, ever since Myka made her take a shower, ever since Myka wrapped her in one million blankets after that shower, served her hot tea and warm soup, ever since she finished those hot things and Myka pulled her into bed with her, wrapped herself around her.

Helena is coughing and the coughing soon turns to wheezing and Helena is awake and miserable and she’s lost her voice but she’s telling Myka how very terrible she feels and Myka is telling Helena how terrible she will soon feel, too, because “I’m _so_ getting sick.”

Then Myka gets out of bed and she pulls Helena out, too, takes her to the bathroom and tells her to sit on the counter.

Myka runs the bath water extra hot then flips the nob over to the shower. She lets the water run, steps back to Helena who is already breathing slightly better from sitting upright. She steps in front of Helena, where Helena sits on the counter, and steps into Helena’s space, between Helena’s legs, and sets one hand gently over Helena’s thigh, uses the other to push Helena’s hair out of her face.

“Just breathe.”

Helena takes in a deep breath, nods, wipes at fresh tears on her cheeks. She takes in more deep breaths and Myka nods, smiles, breathes with her.

“Thank you,” Helena says with one more big breath.

“My mom used to do this for us when we were little,” Myka says softly. “One of the few ways, I think, that she knew how to comfort us.”

“You will make a great mother someday, Myka,” Helena tilts her head to the side and Myka laughs softly.

“I know I will,” she responds softly, “because I will have the perfect child. One that does not exist.”

Helena’s eyes close, she yawns, then falls into another coughing fit. Myka pushes more of her hair from her face, rubs her back.

“I will miss this,” Helena sighs. “When I’m in London. Away from you.”

“What is it that they say?” Myka wonders aloud. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder?"

“My heart,” Helena smiles, “is quite fond of you. I’m not so sure it could grow any more fond than this.”

"In sickness and in health?” Myka offers.

Helena rolls her eyes, shakes her head again, and Myka moves her hands to Helena’s waist, to wrap around that waist, to rest at the small of her back.

“Til’ grad school do us part,” Helena teases with a puff of laughter.

***

The very first thing that Abigail says to Myka the next morning is, “This is why you need a computer.” But they can’t afford one, she’s told Abigail this before. Her mother isn’t a doctor, her father isn’t some famous pastor.

That isn’t the point, Abigail says. Because the point is that Helena is a stripper and the entire town, every boy in it, knows about it, has pictures, is talking about it, plans to _go_ to that club where she works and see, first hand, what she has got to offer.

Myka warns Abigail not to talk about Helena that way, in that condescending tone, and it’s just in time because Helena appears out of the hallway, walks to the kitchen, grabs a bottle of water, heads back to the bedroom in a coughing fit but stops when she sees Myka. When she also sees Abigail seated on the couch beside her.

“Hi.” she says it with caution or maybe it’s whatever illness it is that her body is trying to fight off. “It’s been a long time, Abigail.”

“It always is.”

Awkward silence ensues.

“You should be in bed,” Myka tells her and Abigail takes that very moment to put her hand over Myka’s thigh, to move that hand further over Myka’s leg, to stake her claim. Myka is as sure of Abigail’s intention as she is sure she wants to take back what she’s just said because the combination of those two things makes Helena’s face fall.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“I didn’t mean it like that, Helena. You’re sick and you should be resting. Mom’s orders, too.”

“Right.” Helena coughs. “If Mrs. Donovan comes by, please tell her that I’m sorry I won’t be able to go with her to pick up Claire. I don’t want to spread my ick.”

Myka nods. “Okay.”

“Enjoy your day.”

Helena disappears.

“Awkward,” Abigail says softly.

Myka just shakes her head, rolls her eyes.

***

Abigail and Myka are in the bookstore with the twins, Leila and Laila, and Claudia. The three six year olds have been spoiled with lunch, cooked up for them by Myka’s mother who had gone on for several minutes about how much she loved having little ones around.

They are all so distracted by the food, their books, their playful chatter, that the time for Claudia to return to the salon has come and gone completely unnoticed, and Mrs. Donovan arrives at the bookstore to pick up her up. Claudia is protesting when Mrs. Donovan asks her if she’s ready to go see her sister.

When Myka tells Mrs. Donovan that Helena is too sick to join them, Claudia fakes a cough. Says, “I’m too sick to go, too,” in the least convincing voice ever to exist in the world of faking sick.

“She can stay and play,” Myka offers. “I don’t mind watching her. We were just going to go to Abi’s house for dinner later anyway.”

Mrs. Donovan doesn’t want to burden Mrs. Cho with another mouth to worry about feeding.

“Trust me, my mom won’t notice one extra kid at the table. Especially one as quiet as Claudia.”

Mrs. Donovan arches a suspicious brow at this comment.

“By comparison, I mean.”

Mrs. Donovan relents but she insists on sending Claudia prepared, so drives them all to her house, to pack Claudia a bag in case it gets too late on their return, and then she drops all five girls off at the Cho house.

Claudia tries hard to pretend to be affronted, embarrassed, when her mother kisses her and asks, “See you where, baby bear?”

But she can’t seem to help that smile on her face when she responds with, “Here,” Claudia points at her head, “there,” she points at her mother’s heart then wraps herself around her mother in the biggest hug her tiny arms can manage, “and everywhere.”

Abigail and Myka exchange identical looks. The kind of looks that are accompanied with a smile and an “aw” and a gentle grasp of ones chest just over the heart.

And Myka will hold onto this memory, her very last memory of Mrs. Donovan, for absolutely ever.

*** 

Mrs. Cho is clearing her throat when she appears in Abigail’s bedroom doorway, before she says, “Myka,” not just-a-friend, and, “Claudia,” not Big Red to the twins’ Double Mint.

Just, “Myka, your mother is here,” and long pause, “Claudia…”

The air changes in that very instant.

Myka can feel it shifting, she can sense it thickening or maybe it’s thinning because suddenly she is finding it difficult to breathe. She tries to ignore that subtle change, tries to tell herself that Helena has just gotten her sick. That she’s coming down with something, that this isn’t more than just a bug in the air, infecting her blood stream, giving her lungs a workout, halting her breath.

Still, Myka reaches for Claudia’s hand and when Claudia takes her hand, Myka squeezes that tiny hand tight. Leads her into the hallway past Mrs. Cho. Past Mrs. Cho’s red eyes, glistening and wet. And Myka prays that woman has been chopping onions again but they’ve already had dinner. She’s already in her pajamas. There are no onions.

Myka knows, she _knows_ when she hears Mrs. Cho say, “No,” to Abigail and to the twins. When she hears her stop them before leaving the room, hears her telling them to stay put, to not move, to give them space.

And Claudia looks back, curiously. Confused. She looks up at Myka with more of that same confusion when Myka squeezes her hand, when Myka wraps her other hand over that hand, when Myka slows down in the hallway.

She slows way down. She slows down so much that they are almost not moving at all, that they are almost moving backward. Because Myka wants nothing more than to prolong this moment, this very last moment of happiness and even confusion and curiosity. Myka can sense, can _see_ , when her eyes reach her mother’s and Jane’s where they stand with Pastor Cho in the foyer, just at the other end of the hallway, she can _see_ that _that_ is it.

That is the line.

That is where it all ends.

That is where whatever she’s feeling becomes cruel reality and that is where Claudia’s life, this teeny tiny little innocent pipsqueak of a thing, will forever change along with the thickness of this air.

Myka tries.

Soon they are steps away, a step away, no steps at all. Soon they are upon her mother and the woman she jokes about calling her other mother and the man who could very easily be her father, he is a Father afterall, a better father than her own.

Soon they are there and their eyes are on Myka before they drop to Claudia and it’s over, Myka thinks. The illusion of happiness, this moment, Claudia’s life as she has known it to be for all of her six-going-on-seven years.

It is over.

“There was an accident.”

***

Myka cannot unhear Claudia’s tiny voice asking, over and over, “What does that mean? Myka, what does that mean? Where is my mom? Where is my dad? My sister, my brother? Myka? Myka, what is she talking about. She’s _your_ crazy mother, _what_ is she talking about?”

The questions had not stopped until they reached the hospital and sat in the waiting room where they still sit in the waiting room doing exactly that.

But there were no more questions after they first arrived because Claudia understands perfectly when the doctor says “died on impact” after her father’s name and Claudia understands perfectly when he says “critical” after her mother’s name, “surgery” after her sister’s name.

No more questions. For now, no more answers. No more talking.

The waiting room falls absolutely quiet.

***

Myka only stands when Helena appears because she needs consoling, she is already crying, already panicked, already asking what is happening, already trying to find some place to go when Myka’s mother moves to her and Myka moves to her, too. They pull her aside, hold her tight and tighter yet.

Pete shows up eventually with Tracy and says he can’t find Josh. No one knows where Josh is or has been or lives. So Pete, too, is defeated when he sits, when Tracy sits beside him, and joins the silence of the waiting room.

The silence is cut now only by Helena’s soft sobbing, by occasional whispers between Myka’s mother and Pete’s mother. By the consoling words of Abigail’s father who has become a liaison of sorts between them and the doctors as they venture in and venture out with news, no news, the same news, old news, nothing, absolutely nothing new.

***

The doctor appears.

He whispers something low to Mr. Cho, to Myka’s mother and to Jane who are immediately on their feet. He eyes Claudia over a shoulder and turns back to them. He nods. He makes a face like Helena’s non-reassuring face, then takes a step back.

Everyone turns to Claudia, where she sits beside Myka. Where she clutches onto Myka. Where she says absolutely nothing more to anyone and absolutely does not let go.

***

“They can’t stop the bleeding.”

“She should see her.”

“She needs to understand that this is a goodbye.”

“She’ll be hopeful but she should see her.”

“Jane.”

“Pete saw his father. He was _seven_ but he saw his father.”

“Jane, there was more time, less external trauma.”

“He always says he’s glad he got to say goodbye. _Always._ ”

“Jane…”

“Jean, honey, trust me. Okay? At the very least, ask her.”

“…all right. Myka?”

“I’ll get her.”

***

Jane takes Claudia in because Myka won’t be able to unsee any of this, not even the tiniest of details, and Myka cannot _deal_ with this, already. Not after Tracy. Myka knows that she can’t.

Claudia will understand. When she’s older. She’ll understand why Myka just can’t go in there with her.

***

_“Your father’s here.”_

The voice of her mother is resonating, reverberating in her mind. Her skull.

_“Why?”_

Myka is searching the ER. Every bed. Every curtain.

_“I think he was in the accident. I think… he caused the accident.”_

He’s been admitted already, according to one nurse. Third floor, room ten.

_“He what?”_

Myka doesn’t know how she makes it to the elevators. She’s pushing buttons. Door close. Floor three. Door open. Door open. Goddamn door, _open_.

_“Ophelia, don’t.”_

Myka is already outside of his room, pushing his door open, praying for the worst of him. Praying that the worst of Mrs. Donovan, of Claire, of Mr. Donovan, has happened to _him_.

What she finds is quiet. Peacefulness. Calm. Her father resting back on a bed, hooked up only to oxygen, to machines that beep in rhythm with his resting heart.

His not overworked by failing organs or internal bleeding or punctured anything heart. His useless heart, completely and entirely wasted on him.

All she can find wrong with him is a gash on his forehead, a fractured leg. Not even broken.

“Cardiac arrest.”

Myka turns, startled, and Pastor Cho is in the doorway behind her.

“What??” She realizes only now had badly her heart is racing because there is no change in pace when she turns to him. Her heart was already racing.

“He had a heart attack.”

“I know what cardiac arrest is,” Myka shakes her head, “but what I want to know is if he’s _drunk_.”

“Your mother said you might be heading this way for that reason,” his voice is annoyingly calm, Myka thinks. She has always found Pastor Cho enjoyable, his passion for religion even tolerable, thanks in part to his calmness, his content. But right now, it is the most annoying thing in the world.

“Mr. Cho.”

“No,” he answers. “He has no alcohol in his system.”

“Right.” Myka puffs out a disbelieving laugh.

“Do you need to talk?”

“To you? To _God_?” Myka sighs, has to catch her breath because she had been ready. She doesn’t know what for or how, not even now that she is here, but she had been ready to do _something_ , _anything_ to her father. And now. Now she just catches her breath, she just tries to breathe. “No, thank you.”

“I’ll let your mother know you’re okay,” he nods and turns and finally leaves her alone in that room with her father.

Myka exhales again, exasperated, exhausted. Wiping at tears from her eyes.

“Myka.”

That voice is so soft and her name so foreign on it, that she doesn’t believe it is her father until she sees his hand shift, his eyes move to her.

“Myka?”

“Don’t you dare say my name. Not _now_ , not with what you’ve done.”

Her father says nothing, closes his eyes.

“Rebecca?”

He’s lost, confused, delirious, Myka thinks.

She turns to leave.

“Rebecca? Okay?”

“You’re concerned? About someone other than yourself?” Myka turns back on her heels, moves to her dad’s side. “A woman no less? I guess you should have thought about that before…”

“Sober.”

“You don’t even know what that word means. And you have no idea what you’ve done. You have _no_ idea but I am going to remind you, _Dad_ , I am going to remind you every day of your miserable goddamn life of what you’ve done to Claudia Donovan.”

Myka leaves.

***

Mrs. Donovan is gone.

The scene in the waiting room, when Myka returns, tells that story. Claudia, perched in Helena’s lap, tells that story. Myka’s mother and Jane, holding onto one another, to Pete and Tracy, too, tells that story.

Myka is crying before she even makes it out of the hall. She is sobbing and her mother is pulling away from Jane, moving to Myka, wrapping her arms around her tight, holding her close.

“Why?”

“It’s out of our hands, Ophelia.”

That change in the air?

It is palpable.

***

Myka has just gotten Claudia to fall asleep in Tracy’s bed when she hears more sobbing. Helena’s sobbing.

She knocks on the door to the bathroom.

“Helena?”

She tries the handle. Locked.

“Are you okay?”

No answer. She knocks harder.

“Helena.”

The sobbing becomes louder.

“You’re scaring me, Helena.”

She _has_ been scaring her. For weeks. Since she found out about her job, since the accident, since the funeral. Since Claire, still on life support, had been pronounced brain dead.

“I’ve broken this door down before, Helena. I will do it again.”

Because the pieces to this door, when broken, are much easier to pick up than the pieces of absolutely everyone that have been left absolutely everywhere, all over this stupid town, this house. Myka’s family. All over these floors.

The lock clicks.

Myka steps into the bathroom to find Helena seated on the toilet. Bent forward, crying into her own arms.

There is an open medicine bottle on the counter. The sight of it gives Myka pause. Great pause.

She eyes that bottle, swallows back her own bile as a sudden nauseating feeling sweeps through her, unsettles her resolve, dizzies her.

“Helena.”

The older girl sits up.

She is a mess of tears. She is completely broken. Her hands rise aimlessly before she pulls her arms around herself, cluthes, holds on too tight.

“Myka,” she barely manages to say her name. “I’m okay.”

Helena is nodding when she leans forward again, leans too far forward, and Myka is quick to move to her, to catch her in her arms as she slides off of the toilet. Myka lands hard on her knees, pulls the now-limp older girl into her.

The next thing Myka hears is a blood-curdling, disembodied yell for her own mother. She worries, at first, that it is Claudia and her night terrors and her thoughts of all the things she has lost in the past three weeks of her tiny life flooding her tiny memory.

It isn’t until her mother appears panicked in the doorway of the bathroom that Myka realizes that the scream came from her own lungs.

***

“She didn’t actually take anything.”

Pete eyes Myka in silence.

“She just passed out. From exhaustion. Dehydration. I don’t know but she didn’t take anything. I guess she only thought about it.”

“Have you talked to her?”

“Her dad has kept her under lock and key ever since they released her from the hospital,” Myka sighs, turns to Pete as he stares blankly at the movie screen ahead of them. “I thought she loved me enough not to leave me, Pete. We have been talking, I’ve been there for her, everyday. I knew she was having a hard time, I just didn’t know it was enough to want to leave–”

“It’s not about you, Mykes,” Pete interrupts, turning to her, shaking his head. “It’s about her and what’s going on with her. It isn’t about you and how much you love her. Not when she feels like that. Trust me.”

“I just thought if I told her… if I reminded her how loved she is… that _I’m_ still alive and _she’s_ still alive and our family is still here… I thought it might help.”

“You can love her and she can love you but it isn’t about love, Myka. She can still love you while being crushed beneath the weight of a rock, do you get that? Love isn’t a magic tool that heals broken hearts or cures all pain. It certainly doesn’t resurrect people from the dead.”

Myka lowers her head.

“You love her and that’s great, she loves you, too. I’m sure of that. But it isn’t always enough. Not when weighed against everything else. Trust me, Mykes. It isn’t always enough.”

Myka’s eyes find Pete’s again. Just before he lowers his gaze, before he turns away again and she slips her hand into his, squeezes his hand in hers.

She says nothing more. Lowers her head onto his shoulder. Closes her eyes as he drops a kiss on the top of her head.

***

Claudia has her own chair at the dining table in the apartment now. She sleeps on the trundle in Myka’s room. She has her own dresser there, with her clothes, the few toys she wanted to keep from her house. Myka had to ask Pete to help her bring a small bookshelf from the store upstairs just to store all of Claudia’s books in her room.

Reading is all she does now. She reads and if not for the reading, Myka would worry that she was losing her language because Claudia hasn’t spoken since that night, since the hospital. She has not said one single word out loud to anyone.

Jeannie Jr., when she comes home, thinks this is intolerable, so she signs to Claudia, all the time. Since the day she came home. And it takes several weeks but Claudia, eventually, begins to sign back. And this is good because at least she is communicating her needs. At least Myka’s mother and Jane and everyone else in this very crowded little apartment with this very quickly growing family, will know exactly what she needs.

***

It’s near the end of summer and Myka hasn’t seen Helena in over a month, almost two. Has only heard updates from her mother about how Helena is doing, about Charles Senior’s plans to take her home, to London, after he sells the house. And even if the house doesn’t sell, they’ll leave at the very end of summer.

It isn’t that Myka hasn’t thought about Helena or isn’t always thinking about Helena, but she is trying to _stop_ thinking about Helena and trying so very hard to focus on _Abigail_ when Claudia brings her Helena’s journal. Myka is in her room, packing things for her move to the dorm rooms in the city, when Claudia brings the book to her and signs, with her simply to-the-point signs, “H, G, where?”

Myka signs back to Claudia, “Home. Sick.” She asks aloud, “Did you read this?”

Claudia nods.

“Not okay, Pip. This is private.”

Claudia shrugs, opens the journal up, flips all the way to the last page, points to Myka and herself, holds it up for Myka to see when she signs, “Me, you, H, G, sad, write.”

Myka pulls the page journal from Claudia’s grasp when she sees the date, sees the unfamiliar start of another new page that she has never read before. And it’s dated _after_ the accident. _Before_ Helena’s incident.

Claudia is right. Helena writes about them.

*** 

_I can’t stop thinking about everyone I have lost. Everyone that has left. Everyone that will eventually leave. I can’t stop thinking about almost being lost myself, almost being in that car, too._

_Whether by choice or force, act of God. I cannot stop thinking about all of these holes that are left in my life. All of these holes that I have tried so desperately to fill in the wake of everyone leaving. All of these holes that I can no longer find the strength to fill, thinking, knowing that maybe I’m not supposed to even be alive…_

_All I can think about, the only thought that is on my mind, is losing the very few people I have left in this life. Your mother, Jane, Pete, Tracy, Claudia, Jeannie._

_If it feels this way when I’ve only lost these people who are my blood, or who are my close friends, or who are my lovers… how will it feel when I lose those of you, the very few of you, who are my family? My surrogate mothers and brother and sisters? My very best friend in the entirety of this world?_

_I know. That I don’t have to say it. Not again. And again. And again. But I will. One last time. In writing, so that you know and you’ll always know, even when I’ve gone away to London, that you are my best friend, my very best friend, and I love you._

_I love you, Myka Bering._

_I love you._

_Helena G. Wells_

***

“Can I borrow the car?”

“For?”

“I need to go see Helena.”

“Myka,” it is the start of a protest, “no.” The end of that protest.

“I will walk.”

“Why?”

Myka shows her mother that entry in her journal, let’s her read it. Waits. And when she is done her mother, who has apparently been practicing how to be a much more stern mother, how to harden her face and say _no_ to things, sighs heavily, hands the journal back to Myka and says, “Drive carefully and don’t overstay your welcome.” Myka is already halfway through the door when her mother adds, “And don’t be upset if she doesn’t want to see you.”

“She will see me!”

***

A girl that Myka does not know, that Myka has never seen before, answers Helena’s door. Short, with brown skin, long brown hair. And her accent, when she speaks, as quickly as she speaks, is very sharp. She isn’t English, as far as Myka can tell. That is the accent of someone who knows English very well but speaks it as a secondary language.

“Can I help you?”

And for a second, Myka wonders if Charles Senior had finally sold the house. If he and Helena had already left the country. Were already in London. Would she know? She hasn’t seen Helena in almost two months. Would Helena have said anything? _Could_ she have?

“I um… Helena?”

But Myka can still see their things in the foyer and there is a sense of recognition on this girl’s face when she says Helena’s name.

“She isn’t taking visitors.”

Myka can’t read that stance, that tone, other than to think that it is one of someone who has told very many people at this very door the same exact thing about Helena not taking visitors. It is very rehearsed and almost entitled.

“Myka?”

She appears almost out of nowhwere, from behind the door, she pulls it open further as she steps beside this girl that Myka doesn’t know. That Myka has never seen before. She sighs, turns to the other girl, sets a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s all right, Kelly,” Helena turns back to Myka, “it’s her.”

***

“Who was that?”

“A school friend,” Helena says quietly, Myka follows her into her bedroom and Helena closes the door. “A _dance_ friend.”

Helena’s room, the room in this house that Myka is almost certain she hadn’t used in years, is bare with all of her things packed and in boxes that are stacked and pushed to the side.

Now Helena is taking up unsure space in the middle of that room. Her head lowered, a hand reaching to the locket that falls over her chest. Her fingers manipulate the mechanism without thought. Opening the locket, closing it again, opening and closing.

“Claudia found your note.” Helena stops the repetition of her hands to look up at Myka as she digs into her backpack and pulls out the journal. She holds it out to Helena. “She read the whole thing.”

Helena steps closer to Myka, takes the journal from her with a shake of her head, closes her eyes.

“Anything she can get her hands on,” Helena says and looks up at Myka now with some concern. “Is she speaking again?”

Myka shakes her head.

Helena sits back on her bed and pulls the journal into her lap, lowers her head again. Myka moves to sit beside her.

“Helena,” Myka takes in a deep breath, “the last time that I saw you…”

“I know, I’m sorry.”

“I thought you were going to die.”

Helena looks up at Myka with furrowed brows, with concerned brown eyes.

“I’m sorry, if I scared you. That it’s been so long. I just… if you hated me, if you _hate_ me… I never want to know.”

“I don’t.” Myka responds with immediacy, shaking her head. “I _miss_ you and I’m trying to understand _why_ … but I don’t hate you.”

Myka reaches for Helena, pulls her into her arms, holds her close as Helena drops the journal onto the bed, snakes her arms around Myka’s waist and rests her head against Myka’s shoulder.

“I just miss you.”

***

Helena is holding her journal out for Myka, gestures for her to turn and places the book into Myka’s bag that is draped across her shoulder, sitting at her waist.

“Do you understand now, Myka?” She asks, when the journal is tucked safely away at Myka’s side. Helena smirks and lowers her head, “Do I make more sense, now that you know my entire life’s story?”

“It isn’t your entire life,” Myka says with an arch in her brow. “You still have so much more life to live.” Her hand beneath Helena’s chin brings the older girl’s attention back to her. “I’m really looking forward to seeing you live your life, throughout my own. I am really looking forward to that.”

“Will you promise me something?” Myka is quiet now, watching Helena. “Abigail–”

“Helena–”

“Myka.” Helena stops her. “Take _care_ of Abigail. She’s a good girl. She has a happy home and a great family. She doesn’t need _us_ , this?” Helena shakes her head, “just take care of her, please.”

“Okay.”

Helena smiles, moves in close again, sets a soft kiss against the bridge of Myka’s nose. Another on her cheek.

“I have to go.” Helena smiles, pressing her lips back into Myka’s cheek. “Maybe I can convince Daddy to come back for Christmas.” She says this while side-eyeing her father who stands awkwardly in wait by their departing gate. “Maybe you can come pick me up when I do?” Helena drops her car keys into Myka’s bag by her side, her cell phone, too.

Before Helena can pull away, Myka pulls the older girl back into her.

“Can I?” Myka asks, slowly moving her arm around Helena’s back, leaning closer until their noses touch, until their heads naturally tilt to the side.

“Myka.” It’s hardly a protest.

“I won’t,” Myka says softly. “If you don’t want me to. I won’t.”

But Helena’s eyes on Myka’s eyes are telling a story of want, of need, and the nod that Helena gives is small, almost unseen. It is followed by a soft gasp of, “Yes,” before Helena’s eyes close and her arms move to Myka’s shoulders, to curly hair. “Do.”

Myka kisses Helena and it has been too long since their lips have touched, since they have been this close. Since Myka has wanted to be even closer than this to Helena. And Myka only intends for it to be a small kiss, not enough to mean anything at all. Not enough to be more than just a kiss between friends. But then there is that gentle press of Helena’s tongue against her lips and suddenly there is the taste of Helena’s tongue against hers. The feel of Helena’s bottom lip between Myka’s lips, of Myka’s teeth sinking gently into that lip, of Helena’s fingers snaking their way into Myka’s hair. Of Myka’s hands at her waist, pulling Helena so much closer to her.

Too soon Helena’s father is clearing his throat. Too soon the last call for boarding comes over the intercom. Too soon their lips part, only to rejoin again briefly, only to part once more.

Helena is stepping away from Myka, saying goodbye, saying I love you. And Myka, too soon, saying, “I love you, too.”

Helena disappears through the gate, down the corridor to board her plane.

Too soon, Helena Wells has gone again.

***

“I kissed her goodbye.”

There is silence. A stillness like nothing that has ever existed between Abigail and Myka before. Not like this. Never with Abigail.

“Why are you telling me this now? Three whole months later?”

“Because.” Myka wants to stop there. “Because you need to know.”

More silence but the air is no longer still. Abigail is moving. Shifting. Distancing herself.

“Did you tell her you loved her?”

Myka blinks, several times, when she looks to Abigail now and her expression is expectant but her mood is mostly unrecognizable.

Myka nods.

“Yes.”

Abigail nods, too, then sighs. Then, something weird.

She smiles. She smiles and she puffs out a soft laugh and she shakes her head. Lowers it momentarily before sitting straight again.

“She’s coming back, isn’t she?”

Myka is quiet.

Abigail says, “See, I told you.” She stands up, climbs the porch steps to her door and turns back to Myka. “Inevitable.”

Myka doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t turn around. Does not try to stop her.

The door opens. Abigail tells her, “Goodbye, Myka.” The door closes again.

Myka sighs. It’s relief. She can breathe again. She feels some guilt but mostly, she is relieved. She stands. She walks to the car.

She drives in silence, the sun slowly dipping into the horizon behind her. She takes the long way. Past the park, the movie theater, the diner, then home.

Outside of the bookstore her phone, Helena’s newest old phone rings in her back pocket. She smiles at the name as it appears on the display, answers the call, brings the phone to her ear.

“Rise and shine, Georgie.”

She smiles into the phone when Helena’s only response is a yawn and to tell her _no_. Myka closes her eyes. Leans into the door of the bookstore. Takes this moment to stay perfectly still.

“The faster you pack, the faster I get to see you.”

“You are _so_ impatient.”


	17. 16/17 & 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the episodic adventures of young Bering and Slightly Less Young Wells! In this installment:
> 
> Helena visits for six weeks, from that Thanksgiving until after New Year. 
> 
> Italicized bits, as always, are the past but are mostly in reverse chronological order from that summer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cheers to Nutty for introducing me to the "Georgy Girl" song and Appy just because I referenced "this person" at one point and couldn't stop laughing thinking about Soon. Also, I am so sorry that I posted this two minutes before the site is about to go down for several hours but I spent all night editing it and DO OR DIE, I am posting it NOW!
> 
> Also, you'all notice this story has an actual end. That's just how I've plotted the story but we all know this thing has a mind of its own.

Kelly is there.

It’s Sunday night, the Sunday before Thanksgiving, when Myka returns to her dorm room and Kelly, Helena’s  _dance_  friend, is standing outside her door. Her eyes are cast to the ground, hair pulled back into a loose ponytail but still managing, somehow, to fall mostly in her face.

Myka slows on her approach as Kelly lifts her head with furrowed brows and brown eyes that seem to somehow grow darker, and turns a bruised and busted lipped frown in Myka’s direction.

“Should I even ask?”

“I need to talk to your  _Julieta_ ,” and she turns, stands straight to face Myka head on now, reaching to her side to retrieve a backpack from the floor just beside her feet and hiking the thing, almost too large for her tiny frame, over her shoulder.

“Helena’s flight doesn’t get in until tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh… right. Time difference. I’ll… I guess I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“That looks really,” Myka takes a step closer, pointing to Kelly’s lip, swollen and split, stained dark red with dried blood, “ _really_  painful.”

“It’s nothing,” Kelly shrugs and Myka smiles, twists her lips to the side and nods her understanding.

“Yeah,” Myka doesn’t mean to but she puffs out a soft, disbeliving laugh before adding, “I am very familiar with  _nothing_.”

Kelly shrugs now, allowing her eyes to roll upward dramatically, “I won, if you're that concerned.”

Myka arches a solitary brow at the smirk that settles into Kelly’s expression and shrugs, too.

“There was never any doubt in my mind,” and with that, Myka turns to key the door lock, pushes that door wide open and steps inside. She turns back to Kelly, when the older girl doesn’t move, and with a gesture of her head asks, “You comin’?”

Kelly follows her inside.

***

_“Take care of her, Myka.”_

_It hadn’t been a question. It had not even been a suggestion. More a plea, Myka thinks when she thinks back on that conversation she’d had with Helena almost two months ago. That first time after she had run into Kelly on campus and spoken to Helena about it._

_“Take care of her?” Myka had asked then. “Need I remind you of the events that unfolded just weeks ago? When the three of us went to the diner with Pete right after he and Amanda broke up? And then Amanda_ showed _up. And then Kelly showed_ out _.” Myka laughed, even if Helena did not find it at all amusing. “That girl does not need taking care of.” Myka could practically see Helena rolling her eyes through the phone. “As a matter of fact, she should probably be taking care of me. Would you ask her to be my bodyguard?”_

_“For me, Myka,” Helena adds this with little amusement in her voice, with almost too much seriousness. And Myka thinks, again, about how sometimes Helena can sound dramatic. Sometimes Helena can sound like the tiniest things mean more to her than life itself and it’s admirable, sometimes. Sometimes it is absolutely puzzling but this time, it is admirable._

_“Anything for you, Georgie,” Myka had told her with her own eye roll to accompany her defeat, “as long as you come back to me.”_

_“I’ll try for Thanksgiving,” and Helena had sounded more sure of what she was saying then, more light-hearted and content, despite immediately following that up with, “No promises.”_

***

“Who lost?”

“Huh?”

Myka points to Kelly’s lip again. “The fight. Whose ass did you kick this time?”

“Ah,” Kelly grins and says, “closeted asshole cousin.”

Myka arches a brow, "Is he a closet asshole or is he closeted and also an asshole?"

“He's a dick,” is the only clarification Kelly offers.  After a moment she asks, “Where’s the other girl..." and points to the second bed in Myka’s sometimes too-small freshman dorm room. It’s been stripped for weeks, the other girl’s things gone for just as long. Disappeared while Myka had been at class.

“Dropped, I'm guess. It’s fine,” Myka sits back on her own bed, fitted with sheets from home and a comforter that Tracy had picked out for her as a “moving away and never coming back” gift, “you can sleep here tonight if you need to.”

“Thanks,” and Kelly sits down on that bed across from Myka, sets her backpack on the floor by her feet.

“I have some extra sheets and a blanket but I’m fresh out of pillows,” Myka tells her.

“It’s cool,” Kelly says reaching down to her bag to unzip it and pulling out a pillow of her own, “I kind of came prepared this time.”

Myka stands, shaking her head and walking into the small bathroom to retrieve a wash cloth, dampening it under the sink and returning to hand it to Kelly.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this,” Myka smirks, “but you might have an anger problem.”

“Who’s angry?” Kelly grins, bringing the dampened cloth to her lip. Myka kicks her shoes off and flashes Kelly a knowing smile before laying back on her own bed.

***

_Kelly is scrappy._

_She’s one of those girls whose paths you don’t know you shouldn’t cross until you’ve already crossed it. She’s tiny and unassuming. She’s gorgeous and intelligent. She is one of the most respectful young women, Myka’s mother and Jane will say, that they have ever met._

_What Kelly_ isn’t _includes words like shy, or a pushover. She is not weak. She is not easily intimidated. Nor is she ever really inclined to not give someone a piece of her mind. And it had very much been that way, in the beginning, with Kelly and Pete because he had finally broken up with Amanda for all the things she’d done to Helena but, according to Kelly, it had taken him far too long._

_In retrospect, they should have known better than to bring Kelly along, but she had grown so attached to Helena over summer, had spent her entire summer in town with Helena, by Helena’s side, keeping Helena company. At the time, Myka had dedicated too many hours out of her day to being upset about that, about feeling neglected and replaced, about being usurped by some girl that Helena didn’t know all that well to begin with._

_Now? Now Myka understands why Helena kept her so close. How Helena coped and even healed by having this particular nineteen year old around her. Because above all things, Kelly was loyal. She was, she is, a good friend… when you know that you can, eventually, call her a friend._

_That day was not coming so quickly for Pete, if it were ever going to come at all. It definitely had not come for Amanda. Because Kelly is scrappy and she had been especially so that day at the diner._

_First with Pete because how could he continue to date such a… series of colorful words that Myka will not repeat in either English or Spanish… after what she’d done to Helena?_

_And second with Amanda because Amanda, too, is scrappy. Amanda had come in with her fire lit and her guns ablazin’ and her mouth a’flappin’. And maybe it was the momentary look of confusion (or perhaps that look was repulsion) that had crossed Kelly’s face at Amanda’s assumption that she and Pete had some sort of_ thing _, that made Amanda think Kelly could be talked to like that. But the second Amanda had given her two seconds, just two seconds of silence to fully process what, exactly, was happening, Kelly burst into laughter._

 _Kelly laughed and Myka, for two more seconds, wanted to laugh, too. And Pete did laugh and also said, “You think I’m with her?” But Helena knew better because the only word that escaped her mouth began with the letter F and Myka’s thoughts turned, instantly, to a time some years ago when Helena would tease Myka about learning how to_ duck _._

_And duck is exactly what Myka did as Kelly, scrappy little thing that she is, practically flew out of that booth at Amanda just before Leena’s father told both Kelly and Amanda that they were not welcome there for the rest of summer._

***

“Brought you a present,” Kelly says digging into her bag again and Myka turns to her just as she pulls two wine coolers out of that bag, holds them up in display on either side of her very bright and very unassuming smile.  "I know you don't really like beer, so..."

Myka puffs out a small laugh and shakes her head, pulling a book from beneath her pillow, “I have early finals tomorrow.” Myka opens that book up to a Post-It note that holds the place where she had last stopped reading.

“I only have  _four_. Two for you, two for me. You aren’t going to get drunk on two _wine coolers_.” Kelly stands to cross the room, sits by Myka’s side, where she lay on the bed, and sets one bottle down in Myka’s lap. She pulls Myka’s book from her hands and tosses it onto the other bed.

“Kelly!” It’s a half-assed protest masked in laughter. “I was reading that.”

“You have company.”

“Hardly,” Myka says with a smirk.  "Company usually implies _pleasantries_."

Kelly side-eyes Myka while twisting opening the bottle still in her hand and holds it up to Myka who then arches a suspicious brow at the gesture before sitting up and taking the bottle from Kelly’s grasp.

“Drink up, Romeo,” Kelly smirks, retrieving the other bottle from Myka’s lap and opening that, too. Myka rolls her eyes as Kelly brings that bottle to tap lightly against Myka’s.

“Let me guess, you procured these from your closeted asshole cousin?” Myka questions taking a small sip.

Kelly shrugs and moves further onto Myka’s bed, pats at Myka’s leg to get her to move over before settling in with her legs crossed in front of her. “He won't miss them.”

Myka has come to find that there is a lot about Kelly that she really likes. That she can relate to, that she actually admires.

***

_“Hey, Romeo!”_

_Myka’s look to Helena, who hides her own smile, is exasperated. “Why does she call me that?”_

_“Because you love me,” Helena says, letting her hand fall away from her smile and to Myka’s hand, where it rests almost unmoving on Helena’s exposed thigh, “and because I love you.”_

_Myka moves her fingers to lace with Helena’s fingers and locks their hold._

_“If it makes you feel any better,” Helena’s smile falls into an amused smirk when she touches the fingertips of her other hand to her lips and turns, almost shyly, away from Myka and says, “she calls me Juliet.”_

_Myka thinks back to the time when, just a few months before this time, she thought Helena had swallowed those pills, taken those drugs. Taken charge of her own life, demanded her own death.  How tragic, how Shakespearean, and how very fitting._

_A gentle squeeze on her fingers and Myka’s eyes are on Helena’s eyes again._

_“She calls me_ your _Juliet.”_

_Myka pulls Helena’s hand into her lap and runs the fingers of her free hand along the length of Helena’s bare arm. Against soft skin, warmed by the sun, cooled by droplets of water from the pool that unstills just below the bend of their knees._

_“Helena,” and the name sits softly just at the tip of her tongue, just barely on the breath of a sigh as a solitary finger glides slowly down Helena's arm. Myka pulls Helena closer, gently closer, and moves that free hand to Helena’s hair and down to touch her cheek, to softly caress the warmth of that cheek, then to palm the back of Helena’s neck. “Helena, can I…”_

_But there isn’t a question to ask, Myka is already moving to her. Helena is already moving to Myka and their lips are an inch apart before Helena stops that so tiny distance between them from becoming any smaller than that._

_“But Abigail,” is what Helena chooses to whisper in that moment just before shaking her head, closing her eyes, moving slowly away. “Myka, this is already too much.”_

_“I know,” Myka sighs but she rolls her eyes, exasperated, wipes at warm tears with damp fingers. Puffs out a small laugh as she tightens the grip of her hand, in her lap, which still holds Helena’s hand._

_A low cough brings both their attentions to Kelly, treading water in the pool just before them._

_“Like I was saying,_ Romeo _,” her eyes travel to Helena, “_ Julieta _. I think you both need to either get into this pool or go take a cold ass shower.”_

_Helena grins when her eyes move back to Myka’s eyes and Myka’s smile is wider than life itself._

_“Not together!” Kelly adds, with a smile and false exasperation. “_ Cochinas _.”_

***

It’s dark when Myka startles awake only to find Kelly with an arm draped over her abdomen, snoring softly into her ear. And it takes some maneuvering but eventually Myka manages to unpeel herself from that grasp, from that beautiful snoozing Mexican girl with her alcohol-scented breath and busted up lip.

And Myka knows this routine now. She thinks of the handful of times Kelly has appeared outside of her door, bruised eye or busted lip, as she turns on her desk lamp.

She takes Kelly’s keys and wallet out of her pocket and sets them on her desk. Gently pulls Kelly’s jacket from her arms and hangs it on the back of her chair. She sets four now-empty bottles atop her night stand to be tossed away later.  She moves Kelly further into the middle of the bed, so that she isn’t teetering just at the edge, and replaces her pillow, beneath Kelly’s head, with the pillow Kelly had brought.

Routine.

Myka makes the other bed for herself and just as she’s about to settle in, a shrill tune cuts through silence and darkness.

Her phone lights up and begins to vibrate on the desk shortly thereafter.

“Georgie,” Myka answers quickly, in a whisper.

“You’re awake.”

Myka smiles at Helena’s voice.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” Myka sighs and looks at her watch. Almost three in the morning. “Are you boarding?”

“Slight delay, my love.”

Myka’s stomach dances with the sentiment, Helena uses it so sparingly now. Mostly when she’s in a particular sort of mood. A thoughtful mood.

She definitely seems to be in that particular sort of thoughtful mood.

“How slight?”

“I haven’t a clue, Myka,” Helena sighs, “why are you up?”

“Why are you calling me if you weren’t expecting me to be awake?” Myka teases in response.

“I wasn’t expecting you to  _answer_. I was just going to leave a…” Helena lets her voice trail off. “It isn’t important. I’m glad you answered. I’m…um…” she lets her voice fall away again and sighs. She is quiet for so long that Myka is almost certain the connection has been lost until she hears the airport intercom sounding in the background.

“Something’s wrong,” Myka says softly. “What is it?”

“I’m feeling… a bit anxious.”

“Anxious?” More silence. “About coming back?”

“Myka, so much happened this year–-”

“Helena, if you can’t do this--”

“That’s not it,” Helena speaks quickly. “I can. I  _want_  to and I  _am_. I just…”

Myka remains quiet, listening to Helena’s soft breathing.  She waits.

An eternity passes.

“Myka?”

“I’m here.”

Helena sighs again.

“I miss you. I can’t wait to see you.”

Myka’s smile returns.

“If not for these thousands of miles between us, Georgie, I would kiss all of those tears away.”

“How do you even know I’m crying?” Helena asks, her voice barely above a whisper and breaking with a small puff of laughter.

“Because I know  _you_ , Helena.”

***

_“One more day,” Myka had told Helena, “with me, on the beach.”_

_Helena had been locked away in her house all summer long. She was apprehensive and Myka got that, she understood, she sympathized but… just one more day, for now, is all she wanted. All that they needed._

_Helena was herself again, by the water. She was herself with Myka again by that water. Not at first, it took some time. At first she was not close enough to Myka to make a difference either way. At first she was sat so far away from Myka that they could have been across the lake from each other. They may as well have been sitting across an ocean from one another._

_And Myka gave her that space, for a time. For the longest time. For absolutely ever, if Myka was being honest. She gave Helena that time and that space and it was forever, surprisingly, before Helena was breaking and folding. Before Myka was moving to hold her, before Helena was falling into Myka’s arms again. Like she does, again and again and…_

_“My friend is gone,” Helena had choked those words out first and second and a third time until she couldn’t say it anymore. And then, “Claudia,” a name that just barely escaped those sad lips, followed by, “she’s just a baby, Myka. She’s just a baby and she lost everyone.”_

_“She is,” Myka had whispered into Helena’s ear as the older girl fell into her lap, Myka adjusting her hold and moving fingers through her hair. “But she didn’t lose everyone. She has us. She’s a tough little kid, Helena. You should see how tough that kid can be.”_

_Helena was shaking her head. “I can’t. I cannot… Myka, I…”_

_“It’s okay,” Myka had hushed her, pulled her further into her arms, wrapped her arms tight around the older girl. “You’re okay.”_

_Eventually Helena was okay. Or close enough to okay to sit up. Eventually Helena let her cheek come to rest against Myka’s shoulder as they both sat facing the water, staring at ripples, gazing at nothing at all across that lake. Saying nothing at all to one another._

_Helena wrapped her arms tight around Myka’s waist from where she sat, just slightly behind Myka. Tighter when Myka brought her own hands to rest over Helena’s._

_Myka hummed into the stillness and the silence between them, tightened her grip on Helena’s arms around her waist, began to rock slightly from side to side._

_“Sing it,” Helena had said softly, “aloud. Please?”_

_Any other time, and she would have said no, she would have put up a fight. Any other time when Helena hadn’t been breaking beside her. Any other time at all and she would have laughed at the thought._

_Myka sighed and cleared her throat._

_“Hey there, Georgie girl,” she sang the fist line, looked back to Helena as the older girl sat further up to meet her gaze, “swinging down the street… so fancy and free,” and she could have stopped right there, would have been happy to stop there, if not for that smile that began to pull itself into place on Helena’s lips. If not for that goddamn precious smile, she would have stopped. “Nobody you meet could ever see… the loneliness there,” Myka sighed, turned her own smile on Helena, “inside of you.”_

_Helena turned her gaze back to the water, Myka allowed hers to linger on Helena’s profile several seconds longer before she, too, looked back across the lake._

_More stillness. More silence._

_“Myka.”_

_“Yes, Georgie?”_

_Helena turned to Myka then, moved impossibly close. Pressed her lips to Myka’s in a gentle kiss. Quick and light, that kiss had been a kiss from one friend to another friend, not much more than that. But it was enough, even in its simplicity, it was more than enough for them._

_“Don’t leave me, please?” And it had been a strange request, from the girl who would soon be returning to her birthplace, away from Myka, thousands and thousands of miles away from Myka. But Myka understood what Helena was trying to say, she understood what Helena was asking of her._

_Don’t leave or disappear. Don’t turn and walk away. Don’t run or give up. On me. On you. On us._

_Do not die._

_“I promise I won’t,” Myka whispered softly in response, even if it was an impossible promise to keep, even if it was entirely out of her hands.  “I promise I will do everything within my power to always be here for you, Helena Wells. If you promise me the same.”_

_Myka held Helena’s gaze. Unwavering. Unblinking. She held her gaze until she was sure Helena knew exactly what she meant. And that recognition came in a slight nod of Helena’s head. In a tight squeeze of Helena’s grip, still around Myka’s waist. In another small kiss from Helena, against Myka’s lips._

_“I promise.”_

***

“I have a test Tuesday morning and some lab work I need to do on Wednesday, so I can take you to Jane’s this afternoon, after your flight gets in, but I have to be back tonight.”

“Why don’t I just stay with you until you’re done with school?”

“If you  _want_  to be cramped in this tiny dungeon for two nights,” Myka starts with a soft laugh.

“I don’t want you driving back and forth between town and the city. Not if you don’t have to and especially not at night,” Helena sighs.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, Georgie, but I’ve already done it one million times. Almost every single week I drive that route,” Myka tells her.

“Myka,” Helena starts but doesn’t finish.

“I’m sorry, I know that freaks you out, Helena,” Myka says, “I know it has since the accident but I promise you, I am a great driver.”

“It doesn’t matter how great of a driver _you_ are, Myka, if everyone else is a piss-poor driver!” Myka startles at the sudden rise in Helena’s voice, the quiet that follows. Another airport intercom announcement echoes through the phone before Helena speaks again. “I’m sorry, Myka. I’m just…”

“It’s okay,” Myka says softly. “You can stay here.”

Helena sighs on the other line, “I’m going to let you go.  Get some sleep.  I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah,” Myka whispers with a shake of her head, “see you soon.”

***

_After the beach they went home, together, to Helena’s house where Helena’s father was actually present and it was weird, the weirdest thing ever, that they weren’t alone in that space. They had been alone there so often, so many times before, that it was weird now to have him taking up space with them._

_Helena suggested they make dinner together. Baked fish with lemon, pilaf, mashed potatoes. A real dinner, mostly for them but they made enough for her father, too. And he stayed with them in the kitchen while they cooked, asked the standard list of questions for as long as those questions could be tolerated._

_“How is Tracy?” He had asked._

_“Still alive,” Myka said._

_“And your mother?”_

_“Also still alive,” Myka smirked. “Despite Tracy.”_

_“Or to spite Tracy,” Helena teased softly, throwing a glance in Myka’s direction that seemed almost bashful._

_“Very likely,” Myka had agreed._

_“And Jane? I assume she’s well, if your mother’s well.”_

_Myka caught Helena rolling her eyes and smiled, reached her hand to grasp the older girl’s wrist gently just before letting go._

_“They’re both fine,” Myka nodded._

_“How about the little Donovan girl? She lives with you now?”_

_“Claudia,” Helena spoke._

_“Georgie?”_

_And Helena turned around, set down the mixing spoon in her hand and repeated herself._

_“Her name is Claudia. You know her, her entire life you have known her and you can’t be bothered remembering her name?”_

_“Georgie, she’s just a baby, and one that I don’t exactly see very often–”_

_“Claudia.” Helena interrupted and she held his gaze for a long while before he sighed and seemed to let it go. Helena turned back to the stove, hazarded only a slight glance toward Myka who reached to grasp her wrist again._

_“I think you need to visit Doctor Singh again,” Charles Senior said, slightly under his breath. “Georgie, your demeanor...”_

_“Do not,” Helena began, turning to face him again, “don’t call me that anymore.  And I’m fine.  I’m actually better than fine. I don’t need Doctor Singh or her bloody prescriptions, and I don’t need you suddenly breathing down my back like you care about my well-being.”_

_“I care about your well-being, Helena. You’re my daughter.”_

_“_ Today _, I am your daughter,” Helena nodded. “A couple months ago I wasn’t your daughter. Last year? I wasn’t your daughter. If I fuck something up, perhaps then I am your daughter because my last name is Wells and you should probably nip it in the bud before it gets out that your daughter,_ a Wells _, is a royal fuck up–”_

_“You want to do this now, Helena? In front of Myka?” Charles seemed more put off than angry in that moment. Myka sighed only to herself and turned to face the stove, cut the fire below the mashed potatoes as they began to bubble up._

_Helena puffed out a small laugh, said, “I’m glad you at least remember_ her _name. That’s brilliant, Charles. Really fucking brilliant of you.”_

_“I’m your father,” he responded, standing, “you will address me as such and you will watch your language when speaking to me.”_

_“You are_ nothing _, you have never been anything. Not to me,” and Helena was shaking her head, balling her hands into fists._

_“Helena,” Myka said softly, coming to stand between her and her father. “Helena, it’s okay–”_

_“No, it’s not okay,” Helena brought her hands to Myka’s arms, squeezed a surprisingly gentle and reassuring squeeze as she took a single step toward Myka. before gently urging Myka to step aside, “it’s not okay.”  Myka let her hands fall and Helena stepped to the counter, across from where her dad sat back on his barstool.  “If you bothered to be a father to me at all, even to Charlie, at any point in our childhoods, as teenagers, and into adulthood, any point at all… things might be okay.” Helena shook her head. “But they are not. They are so very far away from okay.”_

_“Your mother abandoned you both,” and there was finally anger in Charles Senior’s voice, Myka could hear that much and she reached to touch a protective hand to Helena's back, “abandoned me with the both of you. I am all that you had. Me. I took care of you. I raised you. Alone.”_

_“And you must be so very proud of yourself for that, Charles,” Helena snapped back. “You must be so very proud of taking on such an obligation, such a burden as raising your children up and into an incarcerated narcissistic sociopath of a son and a queer royal fuck-up of a daughter.”_

_“Helena,” and Charles’ voice was softer, less angry. More annoyance or hint to that burden, that obligation. “Georgie–”_

_The buzzer on the stove cut Charles short._

_“Do_ not _call me that,” Helena turned suddenly back to the stove and cut off the heat, pulled out the fish and dropped the glass tray hard on the stovetop. Hot oil splattered, over the stove, onto the wall behind it, against Helena’s arms, but she made no sound at the touch of that hot oil on her skin._

_She turned, instead, to Myka. Turned and bit down on her lip, shook her head._

_“I can’t do this and I’m sorry, about dinner...” her voice was soft and sorrowful and breaking. “I’m just...” she tried, Myka gave her that at least, before shaking her head again and leaving the kitchen. Leaving Myka standing there with Charles Senior and a pot full of overcooked rice._

_Myka turned the last remaining burner off and turned to Charles Senior, watched quietly for a moment while he seemed to rub an ache away from his forehead._

_“You shouldn’t push her,” Myka said softly._

_“Life is all about pushing us to our limits,” Charles sighed. “Better me than some unknown variable.”_

_“No,_ not _better you. I know what you’re doing because it’s what my dad used to do,” and Charles looked up at her sharply then because he knew all about what Myka’s dad_ used to do _. “He pushed and pushed and he would have kept pushing until I went over that ledge. He would still be pushing if he could, as if he's preparing me for the real world.  As if he's making me stronger.”_

_“Your father is a menace. The things he did to you, to your mother–”_

_“You think you’re making her stronger. You think you’re forcing her to grow up, to be an adult. You’re pushing and it doesn’t matter, that it isn’t physical. You’re pushing her too hard to make her be something that she isn’t, that she’s never going to be. Helena is too close to that ledge for you to be pushing her like you do.”_

_“She’ll never be mature enough to live on her own? Because that’s what I_ want _her to be. She’ll never be able to take care of herself without me having to fly halfway across the country, across the globe to save her? Any adult should be able to accomplish at least tha–”_

 _“Uncle Charles,” it felt foreign in Myka’s mouth, but she didn’t know how else to get his attention, to shut him up. She crossed her arms and stepped closer to that counter, to that space Helena had taken up across from him just minutes before. “_ Save _her? She has spent her entire life taking care of herself. Protecting herself,_ saving _herself. From her brother, from you, from everyone else. Growing into her own, the best way that she knows how. All by herself._ Without _you.”_

_“Myka–”_

_“I know,” Myka continued, “because I’ve watched her. I’ve been with her, here, when no one else was home. I’ve been with her here with Charles Junior. After Leo. Those godawful people that you let her live with? And now through the loss of Claire, of Mr. and Mrs. Donovan. They were like parents to her, did you know that?_ Real  _parents. They treated her like another daughter.”_

_“Everyone has demons. Everyone experiences loss. You’ll get that. When you’re older–”_

_“I get it_ now _.” Myka uncrossed her arms and moved to the cupboards, pulled out three glass plates, set them down on the counter side-by-side. “You take a lot of credit for raising Helena, for raising Charles Junior, because they’re alive and they have cars and they live comfortably. Because they have a large house, their own space, all this money,” Myka gestures at everything around her with her hands moving aimlessly in the air, “and basically anything, everything that they could possibly want.”_

 _“I do take credit for that,” Charles responded. “I did that._ I _gave them that.”_

 _“You didn’t give it to them. You_ threw _it at them and then you ran.” Myka shook her head and began plating the fish, two fillets for each plate. “I never had any of those things,” Myka said and glanced over her shoulder, “my dad never gave me any of those things. He couldn’t possibly afford to but even if he could, even if had or wanted to, it wouldn’t change who he was, how he treated me. It wouldn’t_ fix _anything.”_

_“What is your point, Myka?”  Charles Senior seems to have reached the peak of his tolerance._

_“Do you know what worked? Do you know what did fix it?”_

_Charles Senior remains silent when Myka turns to look at him over her shoulder._

_“My mother,” Myka says softly. “My mother fixed it when she finally started acting like a mother to me, treating me like her daughter, like someone she loves. And it isn’t a complete fix, it will never be a complete fix. It can be super glued together but the cracks are still there. It can be a bandaid on a scrape but it still really hurts and it still needs time to heal. It will never be a complete fix but it’s healing and it’s a start.”_

_Myka turns back around, searches through drawers until she finds an ice cream scoop and spoons rice onto each plate in perfect little balls like her mother had shown her to do some time ago. Did the same with the mashed potatoes before she turned, with one plate in hand, to set it on the counter in front of Charles Senior._

_“You’re taking credit for raising Helena when all you did was throw nice things at her and now you expect her to be a perfect, emotionally stable human being? You expect her to respect you and bend to your whim, to know how to cope with absolutely everything at once? To know how to deal with rejection and loss and loneliness?”_

_Myka opened a drawer to retrieve three forks and set one on the plate in front of Charles Senior._

_“Helena raised herself,” Myka had finally said. "You may have given her a lot of resources to work with, and that’s almost commendable, but you never gave her your time. You never showed her you cared. If you love her, she doesn’t know it. She probably wouldn’t believe it even if you told her now. She only had herself, her handful of friends, a number that grows smaller every year, and the few people she has somehow found a way to love. She did what she had to do and she did a damn good job of it. And she did that all on her own._

_"So don’t try to take credit for that. Don’t try to take that away from her. It’s one of the few things she has, that she fought for without even knowing she was fighting for it, that she earned and acquired all on her own. Not with you, not with your wallet, not with your help, or your care, or your love._

_“That is one hundred percent Helena.”_

_Silence._

_Charles Senior watched Myka for the longest time with an expression on his face that looked so very much like the look Helena would give her when those so many years between them had become almost nothing at all. The look Helena would give Myka before she would ask things like, “How old are you, again?” or say things like, “You should be taking care of me.” Before Myka would respond with, “I’m thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen…” and, with a smirk, “I_ do _take care of you.”_

_More silence lingered between them until Myka finally turned and grabbed the two remaining plates and two forks and headed out of the kitchen, only to stop and turn back to Charles Senior and say, “Enjoy your dinner, Uncle Charles.”_

***

When Myka wakes up in the morning, it is with the too familiar weight of an arm draped across her abdomen. Of a soft snore in her ear. Of alcohol breath against her neck.

She rolls her eyes and grips at that arm, pushes it gently away from her before turning to the smaller, older girl that is curled into her side.

“Kelly,” Myka says it softer than she intends to, with her voice coated in sleep. She clears her throat and says again, “Kelly, there’s a reason I let you have my bed.”

She pushes gently on the other girl’s side until the familiar sound of a moan escapes that girl’s nostrils, until Kelly rolls, finally, onto her back, and immediately begins to stretch, to yawn, to curl back into Myka’s side.

“I have class,” Myka moves now, before Kelly can completely curl her tiny body against her.

“No class today,” Kelly protests. “I’m going  _mimis_.”

Myka smiles, rolls her eyes and sits up, “Not you, dork. Me.” Myka moves over her and straddles Kelly’s side before leaning down to plant a kiss on that girl’s cheek. “You’re so annoying,” Myka whispers into her ear.

“I hate you, too,” Kelly smiles in her half-sleep state.

Myka leaves her to her sleep while she gets ready and as she’s heading out the door, Kelly reaches a hand out, grasps Myka’s wrist as she walks by.

“Hey,” the older girl calls and tugs Myka closer.

“What’s up?”

“Thanks,” Kelly tells her, “for letting me stay last night.”

Myka smirks, “You’re welcome.”

“I promise I’ll be out before you get back,” Kelly adds, dropping her grasp on Myka and rolling onto her back again.

“Negative, you’re going with me to pick up Helena from the airport later,” Myka says backpedaling to the door. “At the very least, you can shower and, I don’t know, maybe do something about that breath.”

“Isn’t that kind of your guys’  _thing_? I’m not trying to be a third wheel or anythi–”

“She needs to see you,” Myka nods, halfway through the door open, “coming back to everything, I know she’s going to want you close. So, if you’re not busy... I know she’ll want you there.”

Kelly sighs and nods, “Okay.”

***

_“I see you’ve been taking anger management advice from your friend Kelly again,” Myka smirked at a fist-sized dent in the plaster of a far wall in Helena’s room as Helena stood aside to let her in. She set the two plates of food down on Helena’s desk as Helena closed the door behind her, then moved to the damaged wall to inspect it._

_“If you let yourself get to know her, you would love her,” Helena said softly, “probably more than you love me.”_

_Myka turned and smiled at Helena, arched a brow at the way the older girl’s head was lowered and tilted to the side, at the way she held her right hand, balled in a fist, in her left hand._

_“Can I… see your hand?” Myka stepped to Helena as she held that hand out and Myka took that hand in hers, examined the small irritations from hot oil and those familiar red and swelling knuckles for just a moment before bringing that hand to her lips, kissing every knuckle softly. “I’d be surprised.”_

_Helena raised her eyebrows, watched Myka curiously in silence before asking, “Surprised by what?”_

_Myka bit down on her lip for just a moment, then, “If I ever came to love anyone more than I love you.”_

_Helena’s laugh was soft and shy, her eyes only on Myka’s for a moment before she was shaking her head and looking anywhere else at all._

_“I heard you talking to him,” Helena spoke softly. “I could kiss you for every single word you said.” She turned then to look at Myka. “For every single word you didn’t say but that I know you wanted to say.”_

_“All of those four-letter words, gone entirely to waste,” Myka grinned before letting that grin soften into a smile. “Every word I said was true, you know? It’s amazing how little he knows about you. Your own father.”_

_Helena rolled her eyes, moved her arms up and around Myka’s shoulders. “I’ve always been amazed by the same thing, when it comes to your father. I’ve always wondered how someone so sweet and gentle, beautiful and intelligent, could come from_ that _.”_

_“Technically, I came from my mom,” Myka winked and Helena just shook her head, bit back another shy smile._

_“It’s amazing how much you know about me.” Helena set her forehead against Myka’s, closed her eyes tight, softened her voice. “How well you know_ me _.”_

_Myka smiled, closed her eyes, too. “What does it feel like,” she asked of Helena, because it had been too long since the last time, “a million years? Between you and I. Or nothing at all?”_

_“Nothing at all, as tall as you are.” Helena said under her breath and with a smile. “You could be eighteen. You could be twenty-three.”_

_“No,” Myka smirked, wrapping an arm around Helena’s back and pulling the older girl further into a hug that Helena was far more than willing to fall into, “because if I were,” Myka moved her lips so very close to Helena’s ear to whisper, “neither of us would be standing right now.”_

_She felt the shiver that ran through Helena’s body, felt the weight of Helena as it fell mostly into her arms. And she’s sure Helena would have collapsed in that very moment, if not for her hold on her._

_A shaky breath escaped through Helena’s parted lips, exhaled against Myka’s cheek, against the side of her neck, and Helena moved in close, to press her cheek to Myka’s cheek, then her nose against Myka’s cheek, her lips found their way there, too._

_Helena, in Myka’s ear, responded, “I am trying so hard to be good with you, little girl. Please,” another breathy sigh and Myka was sure she would be the one to go down this time, “do not tempt me.”_

***

Helena misses her connecting flight out of New York because of the delay in her flight from London, so it’s five hours later, almost ten o’clock at night, when Myka and Kelly find themselves in the airport lobby in wait. It is closer to eleven o’clock when Helena finally appears in the long corridor that leads from the lobby back to the boarding gates.

Myka shrugs her shoulder where Kelly’s head rests, where Kelly is no doubt drooling to accompany those soft snores that she’s been snoring for the past twenty minutes.

“She’s here,” Myka says softly while standing and Kelly stretches, yawns just beside her. When she stands, she is directly behind Myka, who turns to her with a raised brow, “Why are you hiding?”

“I feel like I’m not supposed to be here,” Kelly sighs, leaning her forehead against Myka’s back. “This is  _your_  tradition with Helena, not mine.”

Helena sees Myka then, a smile overtakes her face and she waves but she is still several hundred yards away. So Myka turns, she turns directly to face Kelly, puts her hands on the smaller girl’s shoulders, and all but shakes her.

“Stop,” Myka tells her. “I’m not your aunt. I’m not your cousin. You’re not unwanted. You’re my friend, Kelly, and most importantly, you’re  _Helena’s_  friend. She loves you.”

“I know you’re only nice to me because she asked you to be,” Kelly says as her brow begins to furrow in an all too familiar way, “because you’d do anything for her.  I respect you for that.  Enough to give you your time with her.”

“You know what, you’re right,” Myka stands straight, crosses her arms, “I only put up with you drooling on me,” she wipes at her shoulder, “with you dropping by my room at all hours of the night, with you climbing into my bed, stealing all of my covers, and throwing your entire self on top of me in the middle of the night because I love Helena. It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I  _like_  you or that you’re my friend. Because I would so easily tolerate snoring and wine-breath from someone I didn’t like, right? Someone I didn’t care about?”

Kelly is quiet but she pouts. It’s an angry pout. An adorably angry pout that makes Myka just want to slap Kelly in her adorable angry face.

“You’re wanted here, Kelly,” Myka nods, “whether you like it or not. So stop pouting and be happy that our Helena is temporarily home where she belongs.”

Kelly groans and glares up at Myka, "I've been trying really hard not to like you as much as I do."

Myka laughs softly, "So this is what it's like when you actually like me, huh?"

“Myka,  _who_  are you talking to?”

Myka spins around quickly to find Helena has been standing behind her with an amused look on her face. A curious and amused look that soon warps into surprise, to happiness, to elation, at the sight of the person who stands just behind, and soon beside, Myka.

“Kelly!” and they are instantly in each other’s arms and then Helena's hands are instantly on Kelly's face and she is asking about that darkened eye, that still busted lip but Kelly rolls her own eyes and brushes Helena's wandering, concerned hands away from her face before pulling her into a hug again.

Myka rolls her eyes and says under her breath, with her own amusement, “Not supposed to be here, my ass.” Soon after that, Helena’s hand is reaching for Myka’s wrist, pulling Myka into her, and she's pulling her arms around Myka, squeezing tight and tighter. Helena kisses her cheek and it’s lingering, it lingers forever, even after Myka sets her hands on Helena’s waist to steady herself, to steady Helena, too.  The contact is maddening, the whispers that follow threaten Myka's entire being.

“Thank you. I love you and I have missed you and thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for being a friend to her.”

“Don’t thank me,” Myka says, reluctantly pulling away from Helena and narrowing her eyes back on Kelly, “she’s a major pain in the ass.” Myka smirks but Helena’s face falls, her mouth dropping slightly open.

Kelly responds, without hesitation, “She should be happy if I’m even touching her ass in the first place.”

Helena arches a brow and reaches a hand to her hair, scratches her head in perplexed silence.

“Not that I really have a choice with the way you sleep,” Myka pokes Kelly and turns to Helena, “I gave her my bed so that she could have all the covers to herself and I still woke up with her sleeping on top of me.”

Helena’s eyes go wide at that.

“I don’t know what it is about queer girls that makes me want to sleep with them. You’re both excellent cuddlers.”

“I might be able to answer that for you,” Myka teases with a wink.

Helena is shaking her head now as a smile slowly spreads across her lips, as she tries hard, with little success, to keep that smile at bay.

“Speaking of which, I’m getting really tired so we should probably go,” Kelly turns to head toward the baggage claim area, “I have this theory that I’d like to try out, that sleeping with two queer girls is better than sleeping with one.”

“I told you,” Helena says, her grin taking over now.

“Told me what, exactly?” Myka questions while reaching for Helena’s backpack, pulling that overweighted bag from her and throwing it over her own shoulders.

“That you would love her.”

Myka shrugs and shakes her head, taking Helena’s hand into hers as they move to follow closely behind Kelly.

“ _Love_ is generous.  At best, I tolerate her.”

“I heard that!”

“That was the intention!”

***

_“So, Doctor Singh?”_

_Helena turned away from Myka to look somewhere across her room despite there being nowhere to really look. Despite the only things of interest in her room now being those so many packed boxes that awaited her move._

_“I’m not crazy,” Helena said softly._

_Myka, with her fingers just below Helena’s chin, turned Helena’s attention back to her, to where they sat with their legs crossed, across from one another on Helena’s bed, dinner plates in their laps._

_“I know you’re not,” Myka said speaking just as softly as Helena had, “I’m just making sure it’s nothing serious... or necessary.”_

_Helena shook her head, “It’s not.”_

_“Okay.”_

_Myka returned her attention to her plate, Helena picked at hers. By the time they’d finished eating, Myka was almost certain neither of them had eaten anything at all._

***

Myka lets Helena share a bed with Kelly.

“She kicked me enough last night,” is all the reason Myka needs to concede her place by Helena’s side. Also, sleeping with both Helena and Kelly in a twin bed did not seem as promising for her as it might have been for Kelly.

Helena and Kelly together are a thing of wonder as they lay side-bye-side in bed because Myka has so rarely witnessed Helena’s brilliance. Also, Myka and Kelly have never had an intellectual conversation but Helena and Kelly together, talking about school, about life, and falling down rabbit hole after rabbit hole of deep, existential conversation? It is something to behold.

And Myka beholds it so well that it eventually puts her to sleep.

Some time later Myka wakes up to the sound of bare feet brushing against hardwood in the darkness, to a chill as her bed covers are lifted. To a dip in the bed and a small, warm body that curls into that bed just beside her.

“Kelly, you have Helena,” Myka complains, mostly asleep.

“I  _am_  Helena,” the other girl laughs softly.

“Oh,” Myka smiles, laughs too. “I’m sorry.” And she pulls Helena closer until Helena’s head comes to rest on her shoulder and Helena’s arm snakes slowly across and around her abdomen. Myka’s arm settles around Helena’s waist, to hold her as close as possible.

Helena sighs deeply into that hold, squeezes her grasp on Myka and Myka returns that gentle squeeze.

“I’m sorry,” Helena speaks, her lips just below Myka’s ear, “for earlier, on the phone. I didn’t mean to be so abrupt.”

Myka is chuckling softly.

“Is that funny?” Helena asks, sitting up on her elbow, leaning over Myka. “I’m serious, I worried..”

“No, I’m just,” Myka shakes her head.  "Don't apologize, okay?  It's not necessary.  What were you even worried about?”

“I didn’t want to hurt your feelings,” Helena says with a shake of her head and a shrug, “or upset you.”

Myka smiles her crooked smile and she’s not even sure Helena can see it that well in the dark. She reaches up to Helena’s arm and gently slides the tips of her fingers up the length of exposed skin, across tiny bumps that prickle beneath her touch, and then slides her fingers slowly down. She does this again and again until Helena eventually pouts and lays back down.

Myka pulls Helena back into her, moves those traveling fingers of hers into Helena’s hair, against Helena’s scalp.

“I don’t care. We have six weeks together,” Myka tells her softly. “Let’s try not to kill each other in the meantime.”

“I’ll kill both of you if you don’t stop talking,” Kelly’s groggy voice calls from the darkness across the room, leaving both Helena and Myka chuckling softly together.

***

_“How is Abigail?”_

_Myka arched a suspicious brow at Helena where they sat side-by-side on Helena's bedroom floor, their backs to Helena’s bed. Myka had been the first one to find herself there, after setting their dinner plates back on Helena’s desk. It hadn’t taken long for Helena to follow, to lower herself carefully, cautiously beside Myka. To quietly slip her hand into Myka’s hand and lace their fingers._

_And now here she was, reminding Myka of exactly why she probably shouldn’t be here, why she shouldn’t be anywhere near here or near Helena._

_But Helena is her friend. Above all things, Helena is her best friend, and with so many of the things that had happened, that had been happening, they both needed each other._

_So Myka could justify this proximity for now._

_“You should know that I’m genuinely curious, if that would help remove the skepticism from your face.”_

_Myka sighed and shook her head, “Still Abigail. Still sweet and beautiful on the outside, still completely shattered on the inside.”_

_Helena sighed then, as they seemed to share the same thought, because their hands slid slowly apart and folded themselves neatly into their own laps, almost simultaneously._

_“It’ll be easier,” Helena started to say but corrected, “_ better _when I’m gone. When I’m no longer here to distract you.” But Helena’s reassuring little nod to follow that statement fell into that same hopeless chasm of reassuring gestures that were never all that reassuring._

_“There’s nothing better about you being gone, Helena.” Myka shook her head. “And I wish you wouldn’t say gone like that. It freaks me out. You make it sound so final.”_

_Helena brought her hand to rest over Myka’s thigh, brushed a single finger against the back of Myka’s hand, still folded neatly in her own lap._

_“I’m sorry,” Helena sighed, “Myka, I don’t know what to say or how to convince you that I’m okay.”_

_“You don’t need to apologize,” Myka sighed moving her hand back over Helena’s and locking their fingers together again. Myka shook her head, squeezed that hand in hers, “Wherever you were then, however you felt, whatever your thoughts were, you don’t have to apologize for it.”_

_And Myka wanted to turn to Helena then, to give her own reassuring glance to the older girl beside her, to try, at the very least, to give Helena that. But Myka knew there was nothing at all reassuring about her expression either. There was nothing at all reassuring about any of this._

_Myka pulled her legs up and leaned into them, buried her face there, forehead to thighs, and draped her free arm atop her knees while pulling Helena's hand further against her chest. The tears came shortly after, relentless and unyielding, wet and warm against her cheeks._

_The next thing she felt had been Helena’s arms around her, Helena’s lips against her cheek, Helena’s hands grasping onto her, and Helena’s whispers in her ear, apologetic and pleading and sad and desperate._

***

When Myka is out of the shower, steps out of her bathroom, she comes face to face with a very pissed off looking Helena.

Myka comes face to face with a very pissed off looking Helena who is holding up four empty wine cooler bottles and very soon, very angrily, like spoken-between-gritted-teeth sort of angrily, asking Myka, “What is this?”

“Uh…”

Myka has already given herself away but Kelly, and she’ll have to thank her later, tries to save her. Kelly tells Myka but is mostly speaking to Helena when she says, “I tried to tell her they’re mine.”

Helena turns to Kelly and glares, “Don’t try to cover for her,” then back to Myka, “because if there’s one thing you don’t know about my darling Myka Bering, it’s that she couldn’t lie to save her life. _Especially_ not to me.”

Kelly arches a suspicious brow at Myka now, too, from where she still lie on the bed, flipping mindlessly through a magazine.

“I tried, Romeo,” Kelly shrugs a single shoulder.

“You really didn’t try that hard,” Myka scoffs, walking to Kelly and pulling that magazine from her hands, throwing it across the room.

“Hey! Don’t get mad at me because you’re in trouble–”

“ _Both_ of you,” Helena says sharply before clamping her lips shut, shaking hear head. “Myka?”

“I only had two,” Myka concedes. “The other two are Kelly’s.”

Helena shoves those four bottles into Kelly’s arms and tells her, “Go throw these out.”

“What’s the big deal?  She’s sixteen!  She’s in college–”

“The big deal is that she’s _sixteen_ and _in college_ ,” Helena repeats and turns back to Myka, “and if she gets caught, she could lose her scholarship. Her  _full ride_  scholarship that her mother cannot afford for her to lose.”

“Oh, my bad,” Kelly says taking those bottles to the door but she smiles, winks at Myka when Helena can no longer see. “Sorry, Romeo.”

Kelly slips out of the door and into the hallway.

“Helena, it’s not a big deal–”

“You’re sixteen,” Helena says, cutting Myka off and stepping closer to her until Myka is backed up against her own bed, then stepping further into Myka’s space, lowering her voice. “Stop. Drinking.”

“We promised not to kill each other,” Myka says softly giving Helena an innocent smile.

“I made no promises,” Helena says but her glare softens and her anger, the anger in her eyes, seems to dissolve instantly. She lowers her eyes, reaches for Myka’s hands. “Please, for me?  Until you’re twenty-one.  Or, at the very least, until you finish school?”

Myka sits down on the edge of her bed and pulls Helena closer before dropping her hands to Helena’s waist, so Helena moves her hands to Myka’s shoulders, around Myka’s neck.

She smiles thinking of them this way because almost four years ago, she had walked in on an eighteen year old Helena standing in this very same way with a girl who was very much her girlfriend. With a girl she used to love very much. A girl whose hands had traveled a path that Myka’s hands are now traveling. A girl who had caused this girl to come nearly undone in Myka’s arms so many times.

Myka is nowhere near as tall as Giselle had been, nowhere near as bold either, but her hands, before she even realizes where they are, are on Helena’s thighs, thin as they are, and cupping those thighs, sliding up thighs and pulling Helena even closer to her.

“I’m sorry,” Myka says softly and she hazards a glance up at Helena only to find the girl standing above her with her eyes shut tight, too tight, her lips parted slightly, only just slightly.

Helena lowers her forehead to Myka’s then and turns to sit in her lap as Myka brings her hands back to Helena’s waist. Helena’s exhale is shaky, her hold on Myka is weak, so Myka tightens her grip on Helena’s waist, moves one hand to her thigh to hold her in place while the other tests against her back.

“Helena, I wish that I could have this right now but–”

“Stop.”

Myka does.

“Just for two seconds,” Helena sighs. “Just leave it for two seconds before you remind me that you have a girlfriend.”

Myka smirks.

“I thought I was in trouble,” and she laughs softly. Helena sits up straight then, brings a hand to palm Myka’s cheek.

“You  _are_  in trouble,” Helena exhales breathlessly. “No more drinking. Non negotiable.” Her thumb taps gently against Myka’s chin and Myka nods.

“Okay,” she smiles. “Did you hear that, Kelly? Stop bringing me beer, you’re a horrible influence.”

And Myka laughs when Helena startles at Kelly’s response, “I didn’t force your hand or your mouth.”

“Jesus Christ,” Helena sits straight, turns to a grinning Kelly, “when did you...”

“The trash chute is literally down the hall,” Kelly chuckles. “God, I leave for two seconds and you’re already jumping that poor girl’s bones.”

Both Kelly and Myka burst into laughter as Helena’s face flushes. The older girl quickly peels herself away from Myka, who could not protest enough at the lost contact. Not nearly enough, even as she reaches for Helena. Even as Helena tugs her hand away from Myka and moves to her backpack.

“You’re both impossible,” Helena huffs grabbing up her bag. “I’m going to go shower,” and she crosses the room to the bathroom, hesitates for much longer than a moment at the door as she turns her gaze back on Myka.

Myka smiles, presses her lips together tightly before saying, “I have a class to get to and will be in the library after that but make yourself at home. Your car keys are on my desk.”

Helena nods, her back to the bathroom door as she turns the knob and slips slowly inside. Her eyes do not leave Myka’s until the door clicks closed between them.

Neither Kelly or Myka speak until they hear the water running.

“You didn’t tell her,” Kelly says, falling back on the other bed.

“Tell her what?”

“About your girlfriend,” and Kelly arches a brow, “about your  _ex_  girlfriend. The other night you said you broke up with her.”

“I did.”

“Well?”

“Well,  _what_?”

Kelly holds out her hands in expectation, and Myka knows what she wants to hear, knows what she is expecting to hear.

“You’re both single and free and together. Like physically _together_ , _on the same continent_ , so you might as well be  _together together_ , right? That makes sense, that would be logical?” And Myka can’t help laughing at the motion Kelly makes with her hands when she suggests all of this _togetherness_.

“She’ll be pissed,” Myka sighs, “if she finds out I broke up with Abigail because she was coming back home. Aside from  _that_ , I don’t think I could do a relationship right now. Even if she wanted that. I just want to enjoy having her here while I can. I want to enjoy every moment I can possibly enjoy with her, without having to worry about what it’s doing to Abi.”

Kelly is shaking her head.

“Do not tell her, Kelly,” and Myka says this with a very direct finger pointed in Kelly’s direction. “I swear to God, Kelly, if you say anything to her…”

“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything because I totally give up on the both of you.” Kelly rolls her eyes and grabs up another magazine, turns completely away from Myka. “You are both so fucking infuriating.”

“I know,” Myka sighs, falling back on her own bed, “I _know_.”

***

_“My mom is right,” Myka had told Helena, her eyes on their joined hands as she stretched her palm out, spread her fingers apart, and Helena’s fingers slid lightly, aimlessly between hers but never let go._

_“About?” Helena turned her gaze back on Myka._

_“I probably shouldn’t be in a relationship.” Myka closes her hand around Helena’s hand now, squeezes that hand gently. “I’m really bad at it.”_

_Helena let go of a soft chuckle and that smile that she smiled, Myka thought, couldn’t have been more heavenly. The way Myka felt when Helena smiled that smile, couldn’t have proved her point any more convincingly. Because she wanted to kiss that smile, wanted those lips on her lips. And not just then, not just that day and the next day. Not just every day until it was time for Helena to be gone. But even after that, long after that, until it had been so long… that there would be no more afters._

_“I’m really bad at it, too,” Helena eventually confessed, that smile still on her lips and still tempting and taunting and teasing all at once. When Helena turned away, Myka’s eyes lingered on her profile, on the hint of that smile which remained, on black hair that cascaded pulled behind her ear and falling over Helena’s shoulder. “Your Abigail, my Giselle. I don’t know…” Helena began but did not finish in that moment._

_“You don’t know what?” And Myka’s question drew Helena’s attention back to her. Helena smiled, a shy sort of smile, before running the fingers of her free hand through that long hair._

_“I don’t know if that… makes us relationship pariahs, doomed to remain forever alone or…” Helena was biting down on her lip, biting back that beautiful smile and turned away from Myka then._

_“Or perfect for each other?” Myka offered with her own smile._

_Helena puffed out a soft laugh when she returned her gaze on Myka and Myka, too, bit back a small chuckle._

_“Maybe we should just play it safe for a while,” Helena sighed, “before we bother trying to find out. I quite like having you close and compliant.”_

_“Compliant?” Myka had laughed fully then and glared playfully at Helena, reached across to the older girl with her free hand to touch a gentle finger to her arm. “You like that I bend to the whims of my elders?”_

_Helena’s affronted gasp only made Myka laugh even more._

_“Don’t be a brat,” Helena told her after a quick kiss to her cheek to sober her amusement._

_Myka sighed then and squeezed her grasp on Helena’s hand and told her in response, “Don’t be so perfect.”_

***

Myka’s dorm room is clean. The sort of clean where things go missing because they are neatly put away into places that aren’t in plain sight. Put away onto shelves and in dressers and desk drawers and storage containers, a Tupperware or two, and an old Kaboodle.

Helena must have been very bored.

Now she and Kelly are dressed up which Myka is realizing mostly equates to barely dressed at all because where were the rest of Helena’s shorts? Also, she’s sure Kelly lost the straps to her top. They are putting on make up, playing music, and thankfully, thankfully not singing along because Myka’s tolerance can only be stretched so thin, even for Helena. But they are dancing and not just dancing but  _dancing_  in that way Myka thinks they must have done when they worked together.

Myka drops her bag on the floor, an action that isn’t entirely voluntary. She’s sure the way her mouth falls open and her eyes refuse not to stare is also involuntary. The smile, too, that takes over her face when Helena turns to her and calls out to her and smiles her own bright smile in return, is a thing not to be contained. And when Helena is in her arms less than three seconds after that, Myka is almost positive she must have died on the way back to her room. And  _how_  she is still absolutely dying over this girl is just a mystery.

“You said you had  _a_  class,” Helena is whispering with her arms wrapped tight around Myka’s neck. “It’s almost nine, where have you been?”

“I said I was going to the library,” Myka smiles and she feels the burn in her cheeks like she has not felt in the longest of times.

“That was a whole entire ten hours ago.” Helena is pouting and squints her eyes in an accusing glare at Myka.

“Here we go,” Kelly says almost beneath her breath as she slips into the bathroom.

“I wanted to finish up some final projects before the long weekend,” Myka laughs. Nervous laughter. This situation, she concludes, requires diffusing. “Is that okay,  _Mother_?”

“No, because I called you,” Helena moves away and crosses her arms in front of her. “Straight to voicemail. And I am not your mother. Not even close, young lady.”

“I was in the  _library_ , my phone was  _off_ , and you’re not really helping the case against you being my mother,” Myka reiterates with a shake of her head as she moves past Helena to sit on her bed. “Are you going out?”

“Perhaps.  And who is mothering now?” Helena smirks, running a hand through her hair, as she steps to Myka and adds, “We’re going to visit some friends tonight. Just for a little bit.”

Myka nods. “ _Okay_ ,” she adds cautiously.

“I would extend an invitation but…”

“I know,” Myka is already waving her hands in the air, “eighteen and older, I get it. It’s no big deal,” and it truly isn’t. Myka almost wishes she had any inclination at all to go out with Helena and Kelly but, “I don’t exactly have the warddrobe for that kind of party.”

“Hey,  _cabrona_ ,” Kelly is calling from somewhere inside the bathroom before poking her head out of the doorway, “don’t act like you don’t appreciate the warddrobe.”

“Oh, I uh,” Myka grins at Helena who turns her head slightly away to hide her smile, “ _definitely_  appreciate the warddrobe.”

“ _Sucia_ ,” Kelly laughs, disappearing back into the bathroom. Myka rolls her eyes.

“ _She_  is calling  _me_  a dirty girl?” Myka arches a brow in Helena’s direction and the older girl laughs softly, sits herself on the bed beside Myka. Close enough for their bare arms to touch. Close enough for Helena to lean in, just a few inches, and settle in Myka’s space.

“I won’t stay out late,” Helena tells her softly, a look akin to guilt plaguing her expression.

“Helena, despite our previous conversation, I am, in fact,  _not_  your mother,” Myka tilts her head, “you can stay out as late as you want. Imagine that.”

“I know that I  _can_ ,” Helena’s smile returns, “but I’m telling you that I won’t.”

Myka hums thoughtfully as Helena bites down on her lip.

“So, I don’t know,” Helena rolls her eyes up to the ceiling and tilts her head to the side, “maybe… leave some room for me tonight?” Helena glances just behind them toward the bed then back to Myka. “I don’t really require a lot of space.”

“Don’t you?” Myka teases. “As long as I get the wall so you can’t push me out of my own bed again.”

Helena rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

“You have a problem with letting things  _go_ ,” Helena accuses.

Myka’s smile grows into a grin as she wraps her arm behind Helena’s back and pulls the older girl into her, presses her lips to Helena’s ear and whispers, “Lucky you.”

***

_“If you hated me, if you hate me… I never want to know.”_

_These words lingered, echoed, even as Helena fell into Myka’s arms, as Myka pulled Helena further into her, as Myka fell back on Helena’s bed and tugged Helena closer, wrapped an arm around her, moved her fingers into Helena’s hair._

_“I could never,” Myka had whispered into her ear, through sobbing and tears and the tightest grasp that Helena has ever held onto her with. “I could never hate you. I love you. And even if it wasn’t love, you will always be my family. I could never hate you.”_

_Helena didn’t speak for several minutes after that, even as her crying had quietted, even as the grip she had on Myka began to relax. She did not speak until Myka spoke first._

_Myka turned to her, turned in such a way that forced Helena to roll onto her back, turned in such a way that Myka was now looking down on the older girl, hovering just above and beside her, propped up on her left elbow, dropping her right hand to Helena’s waist._

_“I feel helpless,” is all Myka could think to say to her then, that first day of seeing Helena after months of not seeing Helena at all. After months of not knowing what had happened to her. “I feel useless. To you. As a friend. As a sister. As anything at all. I just feel…”_

_“Myka.” Helena’s hands against Myka’s cheeks, wiping away Myka’s tears, gave her pause and she took in a deep breath before lowering her forehead to Helena’s._

_“What happened?”_

_Helena shook her head, as if to shake the question away. As if to shake the entire possibility of them having this conversation away._

_“Helena,” Myka spoke softly, closing her eyes, “I called. I came by the house. I even emailed you.” Myka opened her eyes, putting space between them again. “Mom said to leave you alone and I did, I have. Your dad said you didn’t want company, that you needed time. And I’m sorry, if you still need time. I’m sorry, if you still need space, that I came today but if you don’t…” Myka paused to watch Helena as Helena watched her intently, “If you don’t… then I’m here. I’m_ right _here.”_

_It took a while, even after that, for Helena to finally say anything at all._

_“I saw Giselle.”_

_“You saw her? You mean somewhere aside from the funeral–”_

_“I met up with,” Helena corrected quickly, “Giselle. She called me, a few days after the funeral, and we went out and…” Helena’s eyes drifted slowly elsewhere, her voice softened the more she spoke. “And I know better, Myka. I know that I do but… I have missed her so much and… I have missed feeling anything at all with anyone so much. So we…”_

_“You…” Myka raised two expectant brows but she already knew and because she knew what it felt like, to want, to long for that, to miss that, she didn’t hesitate too long before offering, “you slept together.”_

_The tears began to pour._

_“She has a girlfriend,” Helena choked out. “It was nothing to her. Just a memory. Just something to remember, to take back to school with her. She has a girlfriend and she doesn’t love me anymore and that’s okay because I don’t, I don’t think I love her anymore either, but I still missed her and…”_

_“Helena–”_

_“With Claire gone, with everything that happened, I just needed something familiar. I just needed someone close and I… I chose the wrong person. I’m sorry, Myka. I just… I chose wrong and on top of everything else, I didn’t know what to do.”_

_“Helena.”_

_“If you hate me,” she’d said again, “I don’t want to know.”_

***

Myka wakes up to arms snaking their way around her waist, to the warmth of another body moving in close to her back, to soft lips against her arm. A hand reaches to her shirt sleeve and moves that offending piece of cloth further up on her shoulder, exposes more skin. Soft lips find their place there before Myka feels a gentle kiss and soft breath on the back of her neck.

“Don’t try to sweet talk me,” Myka says, her voice mostly muffled by her pillow. She feels Helena’s soft laughter in the way the older girl’s body moves against hers. Another kiss on her back and Myka is cursing the shirt she wears, that keeps those sweet warm lips unnecessarily away from her.

“Why would I do that?” Helena asks in a tone that Myka would question if Myka had never seen Helena talking to Giselle before.

“You’ve been drinking,” Myka says turning onto her back and forcing Helena to readjust her hold. “You ban me from drinking and then go out and get drunk? Some influence you are.” Helena is laughing quietly, burying her face into Myka’s shoulder as she inches her way closer.

“I’m an adult,” Helena says following a sigh.

“I’m a child?” Myka questions turning onto her side and facing Helena directly now. One cue, Helena brings her arms to Myka’s shoulders, wraps them around her neck and holds.

“No, darling,” and suddenly Helena’s voice is heavy with sleep, “no longer a child.” Myka’s eyes slowly adjust against the darkness but she sees enough of Helena to know she closes her eyes, smiles a small smile. “Abigail saw to that.”

Myka wants to laugh when she asks Helena, “And what exactly did Abigail do?” and receives in response, at first, a pout and then, “She took my innocent little girl away.”

“You really are drunk, aren’t you?” Myka questions, then with more than an inkling of concern she asks, “Did you drive?”

“No, love,” Helena says opening her eyes and Myka feels Helena tighten, only for a moment, the hold she has on her. “We hitchhiked actually.  It took quite a bit of a leg show...”

“Helena…” Myka doesn’t _actually_ believe her but… Helena intoxicated is a whole different _thing_.

“You’re so worrisome,” Helena smiles, closing her eyes again. “A friend picked us up.” And Myka sighs, a combination of annoyance and relief, as she brings her hands to Helena’s sides, moves her arms around Helena’s waist.

“Look,” Myka says, and she’s waking up a bit more, “I will always worry about you. So you might as well get used to it.”

Helena grins smugly.

“What _now_?” Myka exaggerates her mild annoyance, which really isn't annoyance at all.

“You sound like me,” Helena speaks through that grin. “I used to tell you that all the time. You used to be so upset with me, Myka. For worrying over you. Now look at you, worrying over me. It’s precious. You  _love_  me.”

Myka is rolling her eyes, though she’s not entirely sure Helena can see, but the older girl is still laughing softly in her arms, Myka can tell that much by the way she moves. So Myka holds her closer and perhaps it is inadvertant, the way her hands move further down Helena’s back to pull every bit of Helena closer to her, but even if it hadn’t been, Helena has little to say when Myka’s fingertips meet the edge of Helena’s underwear.

A soft hum escapes Helena’s lips in a sigh and the older girl nuzzles closer to Myka.

“Georgie,” Myka says softly with a smile.

“Hmm?”

“Where are your pajamas?”

“London.”

Myka rolls her eyes again.

“I’m rolling my eyes at you,” she tells Helena in a whisper.

“I’m okay with that,” Helena sighs.

Myka moves her hands higher, to rest on Helena’s back again.

“Mm mm,” Helena protests, reaching for Myka’s hand, moving that hand lower again, until Myka’s palm is over Helena’s hip bone, lingering along the border of what Myka is certain can be classified as lingerie. Where cool silk meets warm skin.

“You and your fancy underwear,” Myka teases, snapping the elastic band against Helena’s skin.

“Stretch my knickers and you will have _hell_ to pay.”

Myka laughs at the thought. And not just that thought, but of the so many thoughts that flood her mind about Helena in this way. About the things she doesn’t know of Helena in this way. About how she knows so very much about Helena, her best friend, a friend she’s known most of her life, but she knows so little about  _this_  Helena. The Helena that some boy in this world named Jules knows. The Helena that Giselle knows. That Marcus knows. That even Vanessa Calder seems to know so well.

The thought, the several thoughts to follow that cause her cheeks to burn hot, that cause her to thank the stars for night and darkness and shadows and a less than observant, inebriated Helena…  _those_  types of thoughts make Myka laugh.

Myka refrains from snapping the elastic of Helena’s precious knickers again, moves her hand back up Helena’s side, to rest against Helena’s back once more.

“It’s okay,” Helena tells her.

“One day, Helena Wells,” Myka whispers to her softly, “I will gladly test both the elasticity of your  _knickers_  and the depths of your patience for me but today,” and Myka kisses the bridge of that girl’s nose, “my drunken beauty, today will not be that day.”

Helena is quiet. She is so quiet that Myka is sure she’s fallen asleep. Her breath is so soft and so steady, that Myka is sure she’s been asleep since before she ever stopped talking. And so Myka closes her own eyes, settles into that so tight grip from the sleeping beauty before her. But then…

“I hope Abigail knows.”

Now it is Myka’s turn to remain quiet, to simply breathe.

“How lucky she is to have you.”

“There you go trying to sweet talk me again,” Myka teases.

“Does she visit you? Here?”

Myka shrugs. “She has… a couple of times… but it isn’t the most spacious place in the world, as you’ve likely figured out,” then jokes, “still, it’s better than a treehouse.”

She doesn’t know what to make of the sigh that Helena breathes, of the look on Helena’s face that appears almost full of sadness or guilt as her eyes flutter open. Jealousy? Myka doesn’t believe that for one second.

“I’m glad you have her.” The smile is forced. The words, too. That much Myka knows.

“I could treat her better,” Myka confesses. “I should. She’s really not that lucky to have me, actually. Maybe  _plagued_  by me is a more accurate description of our relationship.”

“I’d suffer that plague.”

“Trust me when I say that you, Georgie girl, would not suffer. At all. Not one single day.”

“I would,” Helena says, “I  _do_.  For different reasons.”

“Give me a break, Hel–”

“I mean it,” Helena says cutting her off. “If I could go back in time, Myka. If I had  _known_ , I would travel back in time and I would wait for you. I would wait and I would beg you to wait for me–”

“Helena, shut up,” Myka is smiling though she isn’t entirely sure she’s joking when she scolds the other girl, “you are going to hate yourself in the morning. When I tell you all of this... _bullshit_ you’re saying.”

Helena rises up suddenly above Myka to straddle her waist and, with eyes wide and curious, Myka’s hands instinctively reach to steady her, to rest over Helena’s thighs, and higher still to the soft curve of Helena’s backside, to just above her waist.

And Helena leans down to press her lips to Myka’s lips in a gentle kiss, her hands are on Myka’s cheeks, not forceful but steady and determined to sway Myka from pulling away. Myka has no intention of pulling away at all but if she had wanted something so asinine as to pull away from this kiss… Helena was not about to let that happen.

Helena is in control. Helena says when this kiss is over. And as it ends, as Helena pulls away first…

“I’m sorry,” Helena whispers, when their lips part and an inch of space materializes between them. She shakes her head and tells Myka, “I chose wrong.”

“What do you mean by that?  Why do you keep saying it–”

“It broke my heart,” Helena says quickly, cutting Myka off, “that night you came home, when you told me about you…and Abigail. I wasn’t expecting the way it would make me feel. It felt like my heart was actually breaking. Giselle was supposed to fix that.”

“ _Helena_ …"

“I think a part of me wanted that part of you,” Helena says lowering her forehead to Myka’s. “A very big part of me wanted that with you and regrets always telling you no. And I just,” Helena is nodding now, “I envy Abigail. She will always have that part of you, she will always have you and I envy her for it.”

Helena leans down into another kiss. Soft, simple. Just a gentle press on Myka’s lips. A tiny press that sends waves of emotions rushing through Myka. As her hands slide slowly up Helena’s sides, beneath her top, against warm skin. They slide slowly up and they are just above her belly button, then further up until Myka can feel the ridges of Helena’s ribs in the spaces between her own wandering fingers, until her hands settle just below Helena’s breasts. They are there for just a moment before she slides her hands further around those ribs, until her arms are around that too-small torso, and she hugs her close, holds tight into this tiny thing of a kiss. She almost doesn’t let go.

Helena pulls away first. She pulls herself up, pushes herself away until she is hovering above Myka and they are staring at one another, all breathless and glossy eyed and cool hands against warm skin beneath problematic pieces of clothing that should not exist in the spaces they currently do.

And in seconds, of course, she is moving away. Feet to the floor, back pedaling, standing before Myka, dressed only in her top and in those  _knickers_  that are most definitely lingerie.

“I’m sorry, love,” Helena’s voice is soft and sad. Helena’s voice is breaking.

“Stop,” Myka says sternly, sitting up suddenly and catching Helena’s wrist before she turns. And she is turning, or trying to turn, toward the other bed where Kelly is somehow passed out, even through all of this. Myka supposes Kelly is adult enough in Helena’s book to drink  _her_  cares away. “You’re not running away from me right now.”

“Myka–”

“If you’re just drunk and being stupid, fine. It’s okay. If you’re not drunk, if you really meant all that… that you just said? That’s fine, too. It’s  _more_  than fine.” Myka takes in a deep breath. “What  _isn't_  fine is you running away. You are not running away from me right now. Not tonight. Not  _again_. Not when you  _just_  got here.”

“Ophelia,” comes the start of a plea.

“Don’t you  _Ophelia_  me,  _George_ ,” Myka narrows her eyes on Helena, tugs her closer, pulls her wrists until Helena is standing just in front of her. Standing between Myka’s legs where she now sits at the edge of the bed.

Myka moves her hands to Helena’s back to hold her in place, down Helena’s waist to grasp at her hips, to grasp at those too prominent hip bones that jut perfectly out and fit perfectly into Myka’s palms. Like Helena’s body was made for this moment, like Helena herself was made to fit perfectly with Myka’s in even these smallest of ways.

It is perfect, too, the way Myka sitting atop her bed, holding Helena in this way she holds her, is almost eye level with Helena’s neck. The way her lips fall level with Helena’s chest. It’s easier, this way, when Myka leans forward to place her lips against that chest, to then rest her forehead against Helena’s shoulder as she tightens her hold.

“Stop trying to fix everything,” Myka whispers a plea against Helena’s skin before kissing her shoulder.

Helena’s hands slowly rise to Myka’s arms, slowly snake their way around Myka’s back, one hand just below her neck, the other moving into curly hair.

“Not everything needs to be fixed, Helena.” Myka sits straight now, looks up at Helena and shakes her head. “Some things just need time,” Myka nods. “There is no fixing us, do you understand me? We aren’t broken and you weren’t wrong to say no to me, Helena. In all of these years, you were not wrong to tell me no because without that what would we really have?”

They are quiet for a long while before Myka puffs out a soft laugh.

“Can you imagine where we would be, Helena? If you had never said no to me? I have loved you since before I even knew what love was. Before I ever knew what to do with that love. And even after I had  _some_  idea,” Myka laughs again and shakes her head, “I still would not have known what to do with  _you_ … with  _this_. I  _still_  don’t know.”

Myka moves now to fall back on the bed, returns her grasp to Helena’s wrist but she does not urge her to move. Not just yet.

“You have taken better care of me throughout my life than my own parents have, Helena,” Myka tugs gently at the older girl’s wrist now and Helena slowly climbs back onto that bed, climbs over Myka, to lay down beside her, to curl up against her. “Don’t start second guessing yourself now.”

Helena burries her face into Myka’s curls, presses her lips into Myka’s neck.

“For the record,” Myka sighs, closing her eyes at the feel of those lips on her skin until Helena looks up to catch her gaze just as Myka bites down on her lip and pulls her in close, “you didn’t choose wrong."  Myka opens her eyes to Helena again, "You chose _right_.  You chose to protect me from everything, even yourself.  You chose to protect me before choosing to protect yourself. You always do that. You have always done that and I appreciate it and I love you for it but you have got to stop now, Helena. You have done enough of it.”

“Myka, I–”

“No,” Myka interrupts, presses her own kiss to Helena’s lips, and moves only a breath away when she shakes her head. “No. It’s my turn to look after you. So the next time you feel like you need to  _fix_  something by giving yourself away to someone, Helena Wells, someone who is just going to draw you further into that dark place where you don’t want to be…  _talk_  to me.” Myka’s smile is soft, she sets another gentle kiss over Helena’s lips and this time, when she moves away, her tears fall. “Let me be here for you. It won’t hurt, I promise. It won’t be awkward. Just you and me, alone in a movie theater with a bucket of popcorn. On the lake, sitting on a blanket? Absolutely nowhere doing absolutely nothing.”

“But Abigail…”

“Abigail will understand,” Myka nods, resting her forehead against Helena’s and finally closing her eyes. “She always does.”

There is more lingering silence. Myka is almost asleep when she hears Helena call her name, when she says Helena’s name in reponse.

Helena whispers, “I might be a tiny bit intoxicated,” and this makes Myka laugh. She presses another kiss to Helena’s lips and sighs.

“I know, babe,” Myka teases with a sleepy smile, “I still love you.”

***

_“Will you answer one thing for me?”_

_“Hmm?”_

_“Why Kelly?”_

_“Myka…”_

_“I don’t mean that to sound rude, I just mean… what is it about her? That you let her stay. That makes her the only one…”_

_Helena shook her head, "_ _I know what you’re really asking.”_

_Myka clamped her lips shut._

_“Why not you?”_

_Myka looked away._

_They were both quiet, where they lay in Helena’s bed, side by side._

_Eventually…_

_“She needs me.”_

_Myka turned to look at Helena who did not turn to look at Myka until Myka said, questioned, “She makes you feel needed?”_

_“Needed,” Helena repeated with a slight nod. “Wanted.”_

_Myka reached her hand across to touch a gentle finger to Helena’s chin._

_“I need you,” Myka told her and Helena blinked away tears, turned to face the ceiling again. Myka rolled onto her side, to face Helena, and pressed her lips to Helena’s bare shoulder, kissed her there. “I want you.”_

_Helena looked abruptly back at Myka then and offered up an unconvincing smile, her eyes moved wildly over Myka’s features. From eyes to hair to lips to neck, then eyes to lips to eyes again._

_“You have everything now, love.”_

_Helena sighed and she licked her lips, perhaps without really knowing what she was doing, and she bit down on her bottom lip but this, Myka was sure, she was conscious of._

_“Except you,” Myka whispered, entirely unsure of herself. Suddenly nervous._

_“You have Abigail,” Helena responded immediately before looking away again. “I didn’t want to get in the way of that.”_

_“Helena, you’re my best friend.”_

_“I am your_ friend _,” Helena repeated, turning back to look at her, “Myka. You are a good friend. I’m just trying to be that same thing to you.”_

_“Secluding yourself isn’t the way to do that–”_

_“You just graduated high school. You’re about to start your first year of college. You have Claudia and Tracy and your mother. Jane, Pete, Jeannie. Abigail. All of these wonderful things to look forward to, all of these wonderful people in your life–”_

_“And you,” Myka cut her off and Helena was shaking her head again._

_“A burden.”_

_“Not even close.”_

_Helena was quiet again and Myka swallowed, cleared her throat._

_“Helena,” she'd urged._

_“I heard you.”_

_“Why are you excluding yourself from my life?”_

_More silence._

_“Why are you acting like you don’t belong in that list of people?”_

_“Maybe I don–”_

_“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”_

_Myka pulled herself up on her elbow, leaned in, hovered over Helena. Glared down on the older girl._

_“You are just as important to me,” Myka began, shook her head, “you are more important to me than that. Than nothing. Than a burden. You…”_

_Myka sighed, moved in close to Helena. Close enough to kiss her, though she didn’t at first. What she did was close her eyes and press her cheek to Helena’s cheek, then move her lips to Helena’s chin to kiss her there. She moved her fingers into Helena’s hair, tucking dark strands behind her ear, allowing her fingertips to linger just behind the lobe of that ear._

_“Helena,” Myka shook her head and pulled her lower lip almost entirely into her own mouth for a second before another whisper, “Helena, I cannot lose you.”_

_Helena closed her eyes at that point and tears fell from both her and Myka. Myka’s tears falling against Helena’s tears on Helena’s cheeks. Helena reached then, to her own cheeks, wiped all those tears away, reached to Myka’s cheeks to wipe those tears away, too._

_“Be in London,” Myka added, "be in New York or France or Russia for all that I care but wherever you go, I need you, at the very least, to be able to come back to me. Do you understand, Helena Wells? You can even hate me, if that’s the way things go between us, but at the very least I should be able to find you and hold you and kiss you and never let go._

_“At the very least, Helena Wells, you should be alive.”_

_Helena nodded and she nodded a long time and eventually she pulled Myka into her, down over her, and wrapped her arms around her and held her. She kissed Myka’s cheeks and squeezed her tight and cried, quietly until she couldn’t cry quietly anymore. And then she cried audibly until Myka turned them over, turned onto her back and pulled Helena over her and into her._

_“I love you, Helena Wells. I love you and I need you and I want you and you are so important to me that I cannot help but love you.”_

_Soon things were calm and they were side by side again and Helena was clutching tightly to Myka’s hand, turned slightly to Myka, leaning her head onto Myka’s shoulder._

_“I need her too, you know,” Helena says after a long while, stretching her neck to look up at Myka. “She has taught me to be so strong, to love myself, who I am, this person that I’ve become.”_

_“This person?” Myka questions. “And what person is that?”_

_“This mess of a human being,” but Helena has a wide smile on her face before she closes her eyes and curls back into Myka’s side._

_“You and me both.”_

_“Have dinner with us?” Helena asked in the quiet as her room grew dark around them. And even Myka had begun to worry because they’d been a while and Kelly was still there, somewhere, in that house, awaiting them. “Get to know her? She means a lot to me, I just…”_

_Myka sighed and smiled in the darkness. “Is this like when you asked me if I wanted to meet Giselle, to get to know Giselle? Because, Helena, I… I’m happy for you if she’s your new Giselle. I am and I’m here for you but I…”_

_“Oh, do shut up,” Helena poked softly at Myka, “you would not be happy. You would be miserable. Don’t ask all of these things of me and then try to feign happiness at the thought of me with…” Helena paused and sighed but it was amused, she shook her head. “She’s not like Giselle. It isn’t like that at all. She’s a friend. She’s more like… a less obnoxious Pete. She’s just a really good friend and I adore her as such.”_

_Myka smiled, nodded._

_“A less obnoxious Pete?” Myka questioned and she felt Helena nod against her shoulder. “I don’t know why but, for some reason, that is… a difficult thing to imagine.”_

_Their laughter, that evening in that moment, filled the remaining silence between them until they rose and hugged and Myka kissed those tear stained cheeks and Helena straightened Myka’s disheveled clothing and wild hair. And Helena thanked her, pulled her to Kelly, hidden somewhere in another room of the house, and gave them a more proper introduction._

_“Right,” Kelly had winked, upon their official meeting, “Helena’s Romeo. I’ve heard enough about you to build a bridge of feelings and then immediately jump off of it and into a river of gag-inducing disgust.”_

_Later that night, Helena would whisper into Myka’s ear, “She really likes you.”_

***

Myka doesn’t wake Helena in the morning. She’s not exactly sure that she could if she tried to. She kisses her forehead, pulls her sheets and comforter entirely over that older girl, covering long limbs and exposed skin, and kisses her cheek.

“Disgusting,” Myka hears from behind her and she snaps her head around abruptly to glare at a half-sleep Kelly, who has her face buried into a pillow but with one barely-open eyeball peeking out at Myka.

“Quiet. What? Hush up!” Myka whispers all these things.

Kelly rolls her eyes, or she rolls the one eye that Myka can see.

“You two,” Kelly says. “I almost wish I could be in the room when you two finally _fuck_.”

Whatever face Myka makes then, that causes her cheeks to warm and that warmness to spread down her neck and into her chest, also causes Kelly to grin triumphantly.

“Never mind,” Kelly says, “I’m sure I’ll know exactly when it happens. Like, a fucking rainbow will literally burst through the ceiling of whatever five star hotel you two are hiding away in and light up the sky from here to London.”

Myka is still glaring, still growing warm. Still speechless.

Kelly laughs softly and shakes her head, turns over, onto her other side.

“Have fun at class or whatever it is you’re actually doing today.”

Myka says nothing but hides away in her bathroom to shower, to think, to imagine, to see Helena only in her mind in ways she has only seen Helena in her mind. She cannot stop the images or the thoughts or the hopefulness that comes along with the idea of her and Helena... together…

When Myka is done showering, done dressing, ready to leave, it is to find Helena still asleep, Kelly curled up in Myka’s bed by Helena’s side.

Myka goes to her, leans close to her ear, whispers into it, “You’re obnoxious.” She kisses Kelly’s temple and the other girl smiles wide after her.

“Flatterer,” she hears Kelly say as she heads out the door.

***

Kelly tries to put up a fight.

“You’re coming with us,” Myka tells her through gritted teeth. “Get your shit and get in the car.”

“No, you two, stop,” and Helena is already grabbing Kelly’s things, too, throwing them into the car. “I’m fine, I can take the bus…”

Myka laughs.

“No, I didn’t just spend half of my week with you taking up space in my bed, getting me into trouble with my best friend, and snoring alcohol-tainted breath all over me just so you can run back to your horrible aunt’s house to spend Thanksgiving locked away in a bedroom that you share with your closeted gay alcoholic cousin’s creepy, hoarded My Little Pony collection.”

Silence and an arched brow follow Myka’s… _mild_ outburst.

“Well,” Helena smirks with a hand rubbing gently against Kelly's back, “you heard the woman. Get in the car.”

“I hope you know that this is considered kidnapping and you both owe me a queer girl cuddle sandwich.”

“Considering how many of us there will be under one roof this weekend,” Myka nods with confidence, “yeah, you’ll probably get your sandwich.”

***

Kelly will probably get her sandwich because they’re at Jane’s house for two nights as the apartment and the bookstore are being fumigated over the long weekend. And Myka isn’t so sure that her mother didn’t plan things this way and she accuses her of such when they do make it home and into the Lattimer house.

“Of course I planned it, Ophelia,” her mother says, “but not for whatever Helena-seducing reasons you’re thinking.”

Myka’s mouth drops open.

“Don’t worry, you’re not even sharing a room.”

“Mom.”

“Yes, ’Phelia?”

Behind where her mother stands, Jane is holding up a bottle of wine, pointing to that bottle and shaking her head no.

“Never mind.”

Behind Myka there is trouble as Pete enters the living room carrying Helena’s and Kelly’s bags, Helena and Kelly on his tail, bickering at and also threatening him to be careful.

“You know, we don’t actually allow wild animals in our house,” Pete is saying to Kelly.

And Kelly, without ever missing a beat, says, “So your girlfriend won’t be joining us then? How sad for you.” Pete glares. “But thanks for the confirmation that she is, in fact, an AKC certified bi–”

“Home, sweet home!” Helena interrupts loudly, eyes wide and sending a silent plea to Myka but just as she moves in that direction, the mothers swarm past Myka toward Helena and Kelly. Myka stands affronted just behind where they are now hugging the two older girls.

“Oh thanks, guys,” Myka rolls her eyes. “Miss you, too.”

“We see you every weekend,” her mother waves her off, turning back to Helena. “How are you Helena, honey? Kelly, what happened to your face!”

Pete is leaning into Myka’s space now, “Hey, at least you got something of a hello. They see me everyday. All I get is ‘Pete do your homework’ and ‘Pete take out the trash’ or ‘Pete… _grab our luggage_.’”

He leaves her with a lingering glare at the last example and heads into the hallway with bags in tow. Myka decides she’ll follow, if only to escape the fantastic show of a hennery taking place in the living room.

“So,” Pete drops Helena’s and Kelly’s bags unceremoniously onto Jeannie’s bedroom floor then turns to Myka, “are you guys official yet?”

“Excuse me?”

“You and H.G.?” Pete arches a brow, holds his arms out expectantly. “Jesus Mykes, it’s been almost a week since you broke with Abigail…”

“How do you know I–”

“Everybody knows,” he shakes his head, as if this is obvious. As if it is common knowledge that everybody knows. “Except for Helena, judging by this look on your face.”

Myka glares.

“Mykes, just tell her. You’ve been waiting over a year for both of you to be single again.”

“Pete, no.”

“Fine, you want me to wingman this one and I’ll tell her? I can just casually mention it during din–”

“You will do no such thing!” Myka points, “Do  _not_  tell Helena. We do not need that shit right now. Mouth. Shut. Pete.” Myka motions with her hand as if to zip her mouth closed, once, twice, and a very emphatic third time.

“Don’t tell Helena what?”

Of course, Helena is stepping into the room.

Myka swings around, eyes still wide, mouth clamped shut, and Myka is sure her expression is telling more than she wants it to say, more than  _she_  wants to say.

“Helena! Hi. Hello.” Myka grins now.

Helena squints at her, twists her lips to the side with curiosity.

“Don’t tell Helena?” she questions again.

“That you’re sharing a room with Jeannie and the tyrant,” Pete interjects with a shrug. “Oops, sorry, Mykes.  I _told_.”

“Oh,” and for some reason Helena looks disappointed, for some reason Helena also actually believes what Pete is telling her. That this was the thing they’d been talking about not telling Helena under penalty of death, though they hadn’t quite gotten that far into the conversation yet.

“Mykes is in my room, Trace and the pipsqueak in the guest room,” Pete adds. “Sorry, didn’t know you were bringing a wild boar with you but I’m sure there’s a mud patch outside that she can roll around in until it meets her satisfact–”

“I can hear every word you’re saying!” Kelly says suddenly in the doorway. “With my wild boar ears, you wanna-be  _machismo_  doucheba–”

“Okay, wow, look at the time,” Myka says loudly, looking at her watch. “I better go get my bag so I can help mom start out on dinner.”

“I’ll join you,” Helena shakes her head, grabs Kelly’s arm. “Another day, Raquel.”

“Raquel?” Pete starts to laugh but stops the second Myka’s and Helena’s glares land on him. “Never mind.”

***

“We don’t need this shit?” Helena is questioning Myka out by the car with a curious smile.

Myka knows that she should trust her instincts. The ones that constantly remind her that Helena has a brilliant mind, that she might be emotionally off the charts but very little gets past her. Especially when it comes to Myka because Myka can get very little past Helena to begin with.

“Don’t worry about it,” Myka smiles pulling her bag from the back seat and throwing it over her shoulder.

“Myka, I–”

“ _Julieta_!”

Helena sighs, looks behind Myka to where Kelly stands near the front door of the Lattimer house.

“Yes, darling girl?” Helena smiles as Kelly approaches them.

“Do you think we could go to the store?”

“The store?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel right showing up empty handed,” Kelly shrugs, “I can at least make something for dinner tomorrow.  Or dessert, to contribute…”

“She’s trying to make us all look bad,” Myka scoffs before turning to Kelly, who looks at her in a way that makes Myka want to reach over her own shoulder to check for the growth of a second, curly-hair infested head.

“You don’t have to do that, Kelly,” Helena wraps an arm over Kelly’s shoulder and pulls her close. “Trust me, Jane and Jeannie are pretty masterful when it comes to cooking Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner.”

Kelly doesn’t respond to Helena with anything more than a look that is mostly sad with hopeful and wide eyes.

“All right, I’ll take you to the store,” Helena rolls her eyes. Kelly smiles, winks at Myka.

“Let me go grab my wallet,” Kelly says heading back into the house.

“I can cover the cost!”

“Shut up, I have money!” Kelly disappears through the front door and Helena turns a smirk on Myka.

“Care to join us?”

“Mm, tempting,” Myka smiles, “but I think I’m good here.”

Myka does not miss the split second of disappointment that crosses Helena’s face before a full smile takes over.

“Are you planning to sneak away to visit Abigail?” and a wink follows a very out of character suggestive eyebrow wag.

Myka puffs out a small laugh and shakes her head. “You’re cute,” and Helena tilts her head to the side, her cheeks flushing red. “That’s really cute but no, um,” Myka shrugs, “you’re kind of stuck with me for the next six weeks. So, I don’t know, maybe try pacing the rate of your middle-of-the-night, alcohol-induced confessions?”

Helena’s smile falls away and her face pales to a white that is more pale than usual as her memory seems to kick into full gear.

“Oh, Myka, I’m… I…”

“Helena, it’s okay,” Myka laughs reaching a hand to Helena’s arm and pulling the older girl into a hug. “I meant what I said. As long as you remember what I said to begin with.  If you don’t, well, you missed out on a really heartfelt speech that I am not repeating.”

Helena’s smile returns and she brings her arms up, around Myka’s neck, to pull her in closer, to balance as she lifts herself on the tips of her toes, to set her forehead against Myka’s. Myka steadies the older girl with hands at her waist.

“I did not miss it,” Helena whispers softly to Myka.

“Oh my God, is it finally happening?!”

Both Helena and Myka sigh, then laugh, at the sound of Kelly’s voice. Helena moves slightly away from Myka to peek over her shoulder as Kelly makes her way to them.

“Is  _what_  happening?”

Myka turns and motions, by swiping her hand horizontally across her neck, for Kelly to cut it off. As in her head. Which is attached to her currently very giant mouth.

Kelly rolls her eyes, does not stumble for a second when she reaches for Helena’s arm to pull her away from Myka and says, “You, taking your hands off of Myka long enough for us to go to the grocery store, that’s what.”

Myka’s instincts, those instincts that she knows good and well that she should be listening to, tell her that Helena, who glares at her suspiciously while climbing into the driver’s seat of her car, definitely knows that something is up.

Helena points an accusing finger at her from inside the car, mouths the word “you” and signs the word “later”. Myka smiles, that crooked innocent seeming little smile, before shrugging and signs, in response, “You, too.”

***

There is no warning, no outburst, no laughter, no sound whatsoever when a tiny body propels into Myka from behind, wraps her tiny self around Myka, buries her face into Myka’s back.

“Pipsqueak,” Myka smiles finding her hands and tugging the small girl around until she can properly return the hug and lift Claudia up from the ground. “I’ve missed you so much, how was visiting your brother?”

Claudia makes a face when Myka sets her feet to the ground again. She makes a face and rolls her eyes, shakes her head before signing, “Girlfriend, awful witch."  And there is a single finger difference between the signed letter "W" and the signed letter "B" that catches Myka off-guard for just a second.  Claudia then proceeds with pretending to choke herself.

“She’s not lying,” comes Jeannie Jr.’s affirmation as she enters the kitchen, Tracy just beside her, shaking her head to silently echo that sentiment.

“What’s wrong with her now?” Myka’s mother is asking without ever turning away from her task at the kitchen counter, though Jane does turn to greet Jeannie Jr. and Tracy and Claudia, who hugs her and then also hugs Myka’s mother from behind.

Only then does Myka’s mother turn, to lean down close to Claudia’s ear and whisper, “Welcome home, little one,” before planting a kiss on her cheek and immediately returning to the task before her.

“Apparently Claudia’s warddrobe isn’t appropriate for a little girl,” Tracy says with a roll of her eyes. “That the next time we send her to visit, she needs dresses for when they go out to their hoity toity restaurant.”

"Like hell..." Jane scoffs below her breath.

“She also takes up issue with Claudia’s so-called  _condition_ ,” Jeannie Jr. adds, covering Claudia’s ears.

“Because there’s nothing physically wrong with her, she should be talking and we shouldn’t encourage her silence by signing to her,” and the annoyance is more than evident in Tracy’s voice.

“Did Josh say anything to her?” Jane questions.

“Yeah, Josh knows the deal and has known the deal since day one,” Myka shakes her head. “If Claudia isn’t ready to talk then she isn’t ready to talk.”

“The boy is  _whipped_ ,” Tracy shakes her head. “Like if there was a puddle in that woman’s path, he wouldn’t just throw his jacket down. He’d lay himself in it and let her walk across his back. Whipped.”

“Well, nobody in this house is buying Claudia dresses that she’s not going to wear,” Jane starts, turning back to the counter to continue helping the elder Jeannie, “so she’s shit out of a luck.”

“Mom, language,” Jeannie Jr. teases with a smile.

“You girls just go get ready for dinner.”

***

After dinner, before bed, Tracy and Myka are changing into their pajamas in the guest room when Tracy says to Myka, “You haven’t given her the ring back yet.”

“Huh?”

Tracy points to the ring,  _the_  ring, that Myka wears on her own right ring finger.

“Your H.G. wifey ring, why haven’t you given that back to her?”

“Who says I’m going to?”

“You haven’t told her yet.”

“Told who  _what_?” Myka _knows_ what her sister is on about but she is exasperated at the sheer number of people who also know.

“Playing stupid isn’t a cute look for you, Ophie,” Tracy smiles, “I like you better as a super genius nerd. So why haven’t you told Helena about Abigail and why are you not already re-married? I miss having a sister in-law.”

“ _Amanda_ can be your sister in-law,” Myka laughs.

“Number one, no, she's a bit _too_ crazy for my taste,” Tracy falls back on the bed in the guestroom after dressing, “and number two, Pete doesn’t even talk to her anymore.”

“I thought they were working things out..." Myka drops onto the bed beside her sister.

“Negative.”

“Since when aren't they talking? He hasn’t told me anything.”

“Since a month ago.  Have you asked?”

Myka sighs, “No. We haven’t really had much time to hang out…”

Tracy sits up and pats Myka’s leg. “You should probably make the time. You should probably ask him about his plans after high school.” And she stands to her feet and heads out the door, also saying over her shoulder, “You should also, probably, tell Helena about Abigail. Your fourteen year old sister,  _me_  Ophie, should  _probably_  not have more sense about your relationships than you.”

“Right,” Myka says softly to herself after Tracy shuts the door behind her. “Probably.”

***

Thanksgiving is weird. _Again_.

Thanksgiving is weird because there are three Berings, three Lattimers, a Wells, one tiny Donovan, and a Hernandez packed tight into the dining room of the Lattimer home and it feels normal. It feels like home. Like this is how things were meant to be.

Myka spends the first twenty minutes of dinner entirely captivated by everyone around her. Talking, signing, laughing, teasing. It is home. It is _family_. And how her family had grown from one broken thing into this large thing that was taking place before her, she almost didn’t know. She almost couldn’t remember how all of this had come to be because there had been so much that happened between then and now.  She almost could not even fathom it.  But here it is and it is beautiful and gorgeous and she can’t bring herself to look away from any one of them.

And it is also weird because it lasts this way for a while, for a very long while. For longer than Myka could have even hoped for, before everything comes to a screeching halt. But Myka hasn’t been paying attention to the conversation, she hadn’t been focused on Helena and Jeannie Jr. signing to one another in their corner as they so often do, because Helena wasn’t seated beside her at all. Helena was seated between Claudia and Jeannie Jr. and Claudia between Helena and Myka. So, Myka hadn’t been paying attention to their conversation until Helena had turned and that question escaped her and silenced the entire table.

“You broke up with Abigail?”

Silence.

Somehow, Myka realizes this isn’t the first time she’s asked this in the past twenty seconds. Somehow Myka can almost also recall hearing a much quieter just before then, “Since when?”

So Myka answers that question first because Helena is looking at her in a way that Myka cannot describe or put words to but it is somewhere between upset and hopeful, or angry and happy, or heartbroken and in love.

So Myka says, softly, “Saturday.”

And the look that Helena is giving her begins to sway, to lean more to the upset and the angry but also _in love_ , than it does to hopeful and happy and heartbroken.

“The day before I flew home,” and Helena’s voice is so soft. “Myka, I told you…” but she stops herself, as if she is suddenly aware of the quiet and the way everyone is watching and how very much neither of them wants to have this conversation right now. So she lowers her head and shakes the statement away and when she looks back to Myka, she offers only a small smile and slight nod and an, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

The conversation resumes and there is still laughter and teasing and signing eventually but it is somehow softer, quieter than before. Helena is much more quiet where she sits pushing food around her plate with her fork, eating nothing at all, taking small sips of water from her glass.

“Mykes,” Pete is leaning to whisper into her ear and she turns to him, “she’s gonna run the second dinner is over, you know that, right?”

Myka sighs, “I know,” and shrugs, “just let her.”

***

Myka gives Helena credit because she waits until after dinner, after dessert. She even waits until after the table is cleared and the dishes are done. And it isn’t quite running, what she does. It’s more like a stealthily quiet exit while Myka and Kelly and Pete and Tracy and Claudia are settling into the living room to watch a movie.

Helena tells only Myka’s mother and Pete’s mother that she and Jeannie are going out and it’s logical, it just makes sense, because they are the only two offspring in this house over twenty-one and their friends are in town for the holiday and they’ll probably run into every single person they graduated high school with. So it just makes sense that Helena would runaway on a night like tonight, to escape, to find a way to _fix_ whatever it is she feels has broken.

They’re forty-five minutes into a movie that Myka hasn’t paid the least bit of her attention to because her thoughts are non-stop Helena. Where Helena is, what Helena is doing, who Helena is seeing, who she’ll run into, how much she’s drinking, how much of herself she will give away to someone else.

They are fifty minutes into that movie when Myka gets up, quietly, and heads to the kitchen, heads out of the sliding glass door and into the backyard. Her exit is mostly unnoticed because Tracy and Claudia and Kelly are passed out in the living room but fifty-two minutes into that movie, Pete is on her tail and he is in the backyard and he is sitting down beside her on a bench swing where she sits in silence, staring up at stars.

They are quiet for a long time, five or seven minutes, before Pete calls her name.

“It’ll be Giselle again,” Myka says softly. “I already know it will be Giselle. Even though she hurt her last time, it will be Giselle.”

“You don’t even know if Giselle is in town, Mykes.”

“She is,” Myka shrugs. “It’ll be her and Helena will spiral again and she’ll want to be  _gone_  again and I’m pretty sure it’s all my fault.”

“You know what I think is funny?” Pete asks and Myka turns to him expectantly but also suspiciously. “How you always blame yourself when H.G. runs away or disappears or gets hurt. You always put that on yourself but when she’s actually happy, or safe, when there are a million ways that you actually make that moody monster of a woman happy, you don’t realize that’s all you.”

“Well, I’m really good at making her moody, if you haven’t noticed.”

“No, Mykes, she’s just  _really_  moody,” Pete shakes his head. “And I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I’m just saying we’ve known H.G. for how long? We have been through this how many times? How many more times are we going to go through this?”

“Maybe every week until she leaves for London again,” Myka jokes.

“You know last summer, is that when Tracy was sick?” Myka gives a single nod. “Last summer, when you two were _practically_ together, or whatever the hell it was you guys had going on, both of you were tolerable. You both were happy, she was healthy. Things made sense.”

“What’s your point, Lattimer?”

“My point is that you two, right now, don’t make a single bit of sense,” Pete shakes his head, leans back and wraps an arm behind Myka’s shoulders. “So, I don’t know, maybe you guys should consider dropping all of the excuses and just making out. You’re allowed to be happy, Mykes. H.G. is allowed to be happy, too.”

Myka turns to look almost completely away, across the yard to nothing at all. To say nothing at all for the longest time.

“You and Amanda…”

“Done,” Pete says.

“I’m sorry.”

“This isn’t also your fault, Mykes,” Pete puffs out a laugh. “You don't need to apologize for that."  But Myka just shrugs and turns expectantly to Pete. 

"In a way, it could be," Myka pouts.

"She has disrespected you and H.G. both on so many occasions. She disrespected _my mom_ in the process. And as much as I can’t really stand  _Raquel_ , I can’t stand the childishness displayed with that one either.”

This gets Myka’s full attention, in the form of a questioning brow arch.

“Being childish and a goofball is one thing but being childish and harmful is a different thing altogether.”

Myka nods, leaning further into Pete’s grasp around her shoulder.

“You should give Kelly a chance,” she sighs, “she’s pretty awesome. She’s actually a lot like you, Pete.”

“That loud-mouthed little so-and-so is nothing like me,” he shakes his head.

“Even so, you should be nicer to her because she is also a lot like me, and like Helena,” Myka says turning back to Pete. “She’s been through a lot. A lot of the same, and a lot worse. She’s just doing what she can to stay afloat. To keep her head above water.”

“She should start by keeping her head out of her ass,” Pete jokes and Myka is already softly back slapping him against his chest. “Mykes, that was weak.”

Myka turns a playful glare on Pete before cracking a smile and leaning back again.

“Tracy told me to ask you what you’re doing after high school.”

Pete sighs and there is a long moment of silence that begins to give way to worry in Myka's mind.

“Well?” Myka turns to look back at him. “And just remember that Stretch Armstrong isn’t a career goal, Pete. We’ve had this conversation before.”

He chuckles softly, tells her, “I gave up those dreams long ago,” and he sounds truly disappointed by this.  Like an old man thrown from a path of righteousness.

“And so our new dream is…”

“I’m enlisting.”

That worry... it turns to panic.

“I'm sorry, you’re what?”  Myka questions putting space between them, making sure Pete gets the full effect of her bewildered facial expression.

"I'm signing up for the Army," he clarifies.

"Pete, you can't," and Myka laughs a disbelieving laugh when she concludes, "you can't join the _Army_.  What if there's a war?"

"That's kind of the point, Mykes."

"No, Pete," Myka shakes her head, "the point is that you could _die_.  Could you maybe pick a career where the retirement plan isn't _death_?"

“I’ve already heard it all from Mom, Mykes. And Junior and your mom, Tracy, and everybody."  Pete's hands are in the air, in a sort of surrender.  "But I’m doing it. I can still go to school and I’ll get paid. I can do something _worthwhile._ ”

“Pete--”

“Mom can’t afford to send me to college right now and let’s face it, Mykes, I’m not  _full ride_  material. Trace has two and a half years left before college and Junior will have finished her program by then, too… I’ve thought this out.”

“Pete!  It's like you’re already sacrificing yourself.  Like what you want doesn’t matter so you’re just going to do what’s easy–”

“I  _want_  to serve my country, Mykes,” Pete interrupts. “I want to do something I can be proud of, that mom and Jeannie can be proud of me for. Eventually. Dad would be proud.  He served before he fought fires and I know he would be proud of me.”

Myka sighs.  She sighs and she nods and she concedes, "You're right."  Still nodding, she adds, "He would be proud of you.  He _is_ proud of you."

“I really need your support, Mykes,” Pete reaches a hand to his forehead as if to rub an ache, “even if you don’t support me, can you please just fake it? I’m not going to get it from Mom, she’s already preparing for my funeral. She stopped talking to me for a week after I told her. Jeannie  _cried_  when Mom told her. Even your mom got all teary eyed. Even  _Claudia_ … and you know I crumble when that kid tears up.”

Myka actually chuckles at that thought for a second before shaking it away and turning entirely to face Pete.

“Pete, I love you and you know I support you, I just,” Myka nods, falls quiet for a moment longer before saying, “I support you, Pete. If it’s what you want to do.  It makes sense that you would want that... that you’d take up a career in protecting others.”

Pete sighs and it is a relief, Myka can tell, by the way he relaxes. He pulls her back into him, arm around her neck in some playful choke hold, and kisses the top of her head.

“You’re a horrible actor,” Pete breathes softly, “but thanks for trying.”

***

Myka opens her eyes at the sound of the back door opening, as Pete stirs beneath where she rests her head on his shoulder.

She hears the, “oh, hey H.G.” before she ever registers the presence of a third person on the porch.

“You okay?”

Myka thinks she must nod at this because she doesn’t hear an answer. What she does hear is, “Is she asleep?”

“I’m sure she’s just faking now,” and Myka feels a poke in her side that makes her squirm. “Hey.”

“Pete!” she’s groaning but mostly laughing as she swats his hand away and sits up straight.

“The cat came back,” Pete says softly, leaning into Myka’s space just before pulling himself up from the bench. Myka rolls her eyes and Pete winks at her, moves closer to H.G. and sets a hand on her shoulder. “Try not to kill her?”

Helena’s smile is small, her nod small, too, when Pete squeezes his hand on her shoulder just before heading inside and closing the door after him.

More silence fills the darkness between where Myka sits and where Helena still stands just to the side of the bench.

“We said we wouldn’t kill each other,” Myka says softly, breaking the silence.

“Again,” Helena’s voice is just as soft, “I made no such promise.”

Myka sighs, shakes her head and looks away.

“I think you had high hopes for this trip,” Helena says but her voice is lighthearted, even playful. “May I?”

Myka turns to find her pointing at the bench beside her and there’s another beat of silence before Myka reaches her hand out, before Helena takes her hand, and Myka tugs her toward the bench, leads the older girl to sit beside her.  Close enough to touch, arm to arm. Myka doesn’t let go of that hand in hers.

“Myka, I told you not to…” and it’s then that Myka sees the red already in those eyes, the tears already on those cheeks. Helena looks as though she is still looking for the words to finish that sentence, still searching for something to say, when Myka leans in close, pulls her even closer, and presses a kiss to those parted speechless lips.

It is neither quick nor eternal, that kiss, but it speaks to the words that Helena has yet to find. It is the length of a pause and a thought at the end of that imcomplete sentence. And when Myka moves slightly away, Helena presses her own lips together tight, swallows and then clears her throat.

“I didn’t do it for you,” and Myka’s words seem to catch Helena off guard, as though she had never thought of this possibility before now. “Not really,” Myka says, reaching her free hand to Helena’s cheek, wiping away tears and to the other to dry it, too. “I did it for her.”

Helena inhales deeply and exhales a slow, steady breath, the warmth of which reaches Myka’s lips. She says but isn’t really asking, “Did you.”

“She thinks I’m perfect,” Myka is shaking her head, smiling her amusement, though it better resembles disbelief, “and I am not that. I am not infallible.  I am so far from it. I just…”

Myka sits back on the bench and tilts her head back. Helena squeezes her grasp on Myka’s hand.

“I don’t expect anything from you, Helena,” Myka says with another shake of her head, sitting straight again. “I’m not asking for anything from you. I’m just happy you’re here. All I want is exactly this.  To sit beside you and talk to you and exist in the same space together.  To not be thousands of miles away from one another.  It's all I want.”

Myka falls quiet and lowers her head to watch Helena’s hand over hers, to watch as Helena laces her fingers with Myka’s.

“Can we… go see a movie tomorrow?”

Myka nods, “Yeah. Sure. Anything you want, Helena.”

“My treat,” Helena smiles.

“Are you going to make me wait until then,” Myka arches a brow, “to tell me why you’re crying?”

Helena tilts her head to the side, running a hand through her own hair, and shrugs, “I ran into someone I was not at all prepared to see. Actually, I feel rather foolish thinking I could go anywhere in this town whilst on holiday and not run into someone I don’t necessarily need or want to be running into.”

“Giselle?” Myka questions and Helena is already shaking her head, smiling.

“That would be simple. I almost wish it had been her,” Helena laughs softly, turning away from Myka to wipe more tears from her own face. “But no, not Giselle.” Helena turns back to Myka and gives her one defeated shrug and a half-hearted smile before slumping back into the bench. “Jules.”

***

They’re side-by-side, not watching a movie in the a very dark, rather empty theater when Helena tells Myka, “He wanted to talk, so we talked.”

“About?”

“Why he left so abruptly, without saying goodbye. About how sorry he was, how he wrote me, that I never wrote him back.”

“Did he write you?”

“No,” Helena says, “I mean, maybe. He told me to ask Charlie. I told him that wasn’t going to happen.”

Myka stays quiet.

“According to him, Charlie threatened him. After he found out about us. He wouldn’t let him see me before he moved away.”

“Threats are certainly Charlie’s thing,” Myka says softly. “So what is he doing here?”

Helena shrugs, “Master’s program at the university, as it turns out.”

“Jesus Christ.” Myka doesn’t mean to say it out loud. She also doesn’t mean to roll her eyes. But she does both of these things and the look that Helena gives her is somewhat amused. “He asked you out, right?”

Helena rolls  _her_  eyes now and turns to watch the screen before them. A movie that neither of them has any interest in seeing. That Helena is doing a very good job of pretending she’s suddenly interested in.

“It’s okay, Helena.” Myka is watching her profile, watches as the older girl squints her eyes and runs a hand through too-long hair. “By that I mean, I told you to come to me if you needed to talk. I told you this was better than you moving into those dark places. I told you I would never judge you. And I’m not. But if you want to see him–”

“Myka,” Helena laughs softly, turning to her, “literally every place we have talked has been dark and also, no, I do not necessarily want to _see_ him.”

“You know what I mean, Hel…  _Georgie_.” Myka reaches over to Helena’s leg and pinches her inner thigh gently, “Stop being a smarta-.”

“Myka!” It’s louder than Myka expects, when Helena yells her name and the older girl grabs at her hand, where it still pinches lightly at fabric, at the leg beneath that fabric. Helena holds that hand tight, pulls it slowly away.

It’s almost too hard to tell but from the little that Myka can see, Helena’s face is flushed. Her face is flushed and her eyes are wide and she takes in a deep breath and tightens her two-hand hold on Myka’s one offending hand, pulls that hand closer to her, into her belly. Then she’s pulling that hand into her chest, up to her lips.

She kisses the back of Myka’s hand lightly, kisses all of her knuckles, before resting their clasped hands back into her lap. She does not let go. Not even the tiniest bit.

“Oh…” and when this finally registers in Myka’s mind, when she finally figures out what this reaction of Helena’s is, _exactly_ , Myka’s face, too, becomes flushed, her eyes wide. “Oh, _Helena_ , I didn’t…”

Helena is shaking her head and biting down on her bottom lip, shushing Myka softly. And it’s almost awkward, Myka thinks. This is on the verge of awkward, on the verge of becoming more unnecessarily awkward than it needs to be. But it is also on the verge of something new and intriguing and beautiful, just as beautiful as the woman who sits with this unfamiliar mild frustration before her.

So Myka smirks and she asks Helena, “Inner thigh? Really?”

Helena turns a silent, suspicious glare on Myka.

“Mental note for the future.” Myka’s smile grows.

“You’ll be holding onto that mental note for a while, my love,” Helena says just above a whisper and Myka is sure she is trying very hard, very unsuccessfully, not to smile, not to blush even more than she already has been blushing. She is trying almost as hard as Myka is trying not to be overwhelmed by her.

“Forever, actually,” Myka corrects with a grin, tapping a finger to her temple.

It is her own grin, Myka thinks, or maybe the residual feeling of her hand on Helena’s thigh, that moves Helena to her. It is this particular moment of happiness that makes Helena let go of Myka’s hand just to bring her own hands to palm Myka’s cheeks. It is this particular moment that brings Helena closer to Myka.

Helena’s lips against hers, soft and sweet and  _sober_  and smiling, send waves through Myka’s resolve, melt her in Helena’s arms, further into Helena’s grasp. Still, somehow, Myka finds enough focus to lose one arm around Helena’s back in order to hold her closer, to reach that other hand back into Helena’s lap, over that sensitive spot on Helena’s thigh.

The second her grip tightens, the kiss deepens, a soft moan escapes Helena’s throat, loses itself somewhere beyond Myka’s lips, against a tongue not quite as lost as it once used to be, feeding a hunger Myka hasn’t felt since the last time they’d said goodbye at the airport. But Helena’s hands are moving from Myka’s face now, back to that stray hand in her lap, gripping it tight, pulling it away.

The second kiss is gentle, subtle, a soft peck of a thing. Myka opens her eyes to Helena’s still closed, to a soft smile on near swollen lips, to a jagged exhale and an almost inaudible whisper.

“When you’re eighteen,” Helena says softly, pressing her forehead to Myka’s, leaving a feather light kiss against her lips. “Not one day sooner.”

Myka smiles, “I see your bet and I raise you seventeen and a half.”

“Do not press your luck,” Helena says, laughing quietly into another kiss.

***

Eventually, Helena tells Myka that Jules  _had_  asked her out and, at first, Helena tells Myka, “I was fourteen when we were together. That’s almost a decade ago! As if I still have feelings for him,” to which Myka asks, “When was the last time you stopped loving someone that you used to love, even long ago?”

“I don’t love Alton,” Helena argues.

“Who in the world is  _Alton_?” Myka asks, suspicious but holding back a laugh.

“A boy I loved in kinder,” Helena glares.

“Okay,” Myka smiles and nods, “let’s just pretend for a minute that playing doctor in the corner is a true testament of love. How long did that relationship last? About nine recesses?” Helena cracks a smile. “When you separated, did he have to pay your alimony in Goldfish crackers and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?”

“Ants on a log,” Helena says pointedly, adding to Myka’s poor attempts not to laugh.

“Oh, of course,” Myka sighs her amusement, “what am I thinking? Why ever did you let that one go?”

“Maggie,” Helena also sighs.

“Magdalena,” Myka nods. It is both understanding and approval. “The beautiful curly brown haired love of your everlasting life, Magdalena.”

Helena’s smile turns coy and she turns that coy smile on Myka and she lets it linger for more than just a few seconds before she shakes her head and turns away. And Myka is sure that under her breath, on a whisper that is barely audible, she hears Helena say, “Not the only one.”

But whether she had or she had not does not matter because the next thing she tells Helena is, “You should go.”

And when Helena snaps her head back around as quickly as she does, Myka is almost certain she’ll be feeling it later. And, “Pardon?” is what Helena asks Myka who then tells her, “You should go out with Jules. I mean, if you want to. I’m not trying to say it as though I’m giving you permission–”

“Well, I should hope not, Myka,” Helena smirks, “I’m not exactly the type of woman who enjoys being tied down and told what to do.” Myka grins and Helena rolls her eyes, looks away with a slight blush and shake of her head, “Abigail _ruined_ you.”

“Abigail didn’t do anything to me,” Myka sighs. “Mostly, I ruined Abigail.”

“ _Ophelia_ ,” Helena scolds, turning back to her with wide eyes and shock all over her face.

“I didn’t mean it like  _that_!” Myka yells. “Jesus Christ, Helena. _Now_ who is ruined?”

“Well, love,” Helena begins, opting not to travel down the path upon which that conversation might be headed, “thank you but no thank you. Besides he seems to have grown into a bit of a prat.”

But it’s the Saturday night following Thanksgiving when Myka finds herself glaring at the back of Helena’s head as she and Kelly and Jeannie Jr. head out of the house, dressed in what Myka would consider almost nothing at all. Headed for some party at some bar in some part of town that Myka will not be present at but at which Jules, whoever this Jules guy even is or was or is trying to return to being to Helena, will most definitely be.

“No thank you, indeed,” Myka says to absolutely no one but herself. Her very green and envious self.

***

“You’re still up.”

Myka startles, looking up from her book to a smiling Helena standing just before her as Kelly and Jeannie Jr. greet her and then immediately bid her goodnight before disappearing into the hallway.

“I am,” Myka smiles softly in return.

“Were you waiting up for me?” Helena questions and it is in such a way that Myka cannot tell if Helena means that flirtatiously or with genuine concern. Myka pushes her curls back behind her ear and shakes her head, as if to shake away the very notion itself, before lowering her eyes to the book in her lap.

“Just reading,” she says softly and quiet follows for several long moments before Myka looks up to find Helena’s eyes on her, Helena’s smile softened, her head tilted slightly to the side. “How was your date?”

The question seems to pull Helena out of whatever reverie she’s lost herself in because she stands straight, her smile slips away from those lips which are now pursed and perhaps a bit put off.

For just a moment, Myka is certain Helena will be upset or offended, she’s certain Helena will have something _reactionary_ to say. Instead, Helena sits. She plops herself down next to Myka silently, unceremoniously, and almost  _on_  Myka because that is how close she is when she falls into the couch beside her.

“If you must know,” Helena begins by crossing one exposed leg over the other, and leaning further into Myka, “it went rather swimmingly.”

And if not for the sweet smell of her, of the perfume she wears mixed with the scent of her shampoo and the intoxicating aroma that has always just been Helena Wells, Myka might find herself capable of being more upset than she currently feels. Than she currently really wants to be.

But that sweet smell of her, it is so sweet. It is so very very sweet and intoxicating that Myka cannot help but to love her more.

“Sparks flew, doves soared,” Helena smiles wide, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling in a daze of thought and wonder and absolute beauty. “There was even a goodnight kiss.”

Myka rolls her eyes and lifts her book up to hide her face, to hide the jealousy she’s sure to be showing, behind it once more. “Well, that’s nice.”

The jealousy that exists in the tone of her voice is not so easily hidden.

“It was really nice,” Helena adds softly reaching up to grab the top of Myka’s book and pulling it from her hands. Helena narrows her eyes on Myka, gives her a coy smile as she sets the book on the couch behind her. “Jeannie and Jules really hit it off.”

Myka squints at Helena, “Excuse me?” Helena smirks.

“He really likes her,” Helena nods. “She really likes him and, rather serendipitously, he knows sign language quite well. Jeannie is beside herself.”

“ _Jeannie_  and Jules?”

Helena nods.

“I told you,” Helena’s voice falls to a whisper and she leans in closer to Myka, says very pointedly to Myka, “that I was not interested in _seeing_ Jules.”

Myka arches a brow and says, “Things that make you go hmm,” which both elicits a puff of laughter and earns her the tiniest peck of a kiss from Helena.

“So, were you in fact waiting up for me?” Helena asks again, this time with a sleepy smile pulling into those too perfect lips.

Myka turns away from Helena only to glare playfully at her from the corner of her eye. “Maybe I was.” And she turns entirely away now. “Maybe I wasn’t. What does it matter to you?”

“All that currently matters is that it's cold out and I’m in the mood for hot tea,” Helena says softly, resting her head on Myka’s shoulder. She kicks her heels off and pulls her legs onto the couch, bends and folds and fidgets until she finds some comfort where she leans into Myka. “Would you care to join me? Whenever I should find the energy to make it…”

Myka cannot help her amusement at the heavy yawn that escapes Helena just then. “I have an idea,” Myka tells her, setting a kiss atop her head and patting her thigh, “I’ll make your tea.  You rest.”

“Sounds splendid,” Helena yawns again.

Myka is in the kitchen boiling water, pulling two mugs from the cabinet, pulling two bags of tea from a tin that sits upon the counter that Pete, years ago, labeled “H.G.’s Flavored Sand Drink Mix”. She smiles as she returns the tin to its place on the counter, where it sits even when Helena is far far away.

By the time Myka returns to the living room with two hot cups of tea, Helena has spread herself out across the couch, closed her eyes, and presumably fallen asleep.

Myka sets the mugs on the coffee table, retrieves her book from beneath Helena’s legs and sits at the edge of the couch, just above where Helena’s head rests. She drops her hand over Helena’s head, fingers into Helena’s hair, and strokes dark strands, touches the tips of her fingers to Helena’s ear, as she returns to her reading.

It is five minutes before Helena stirs, yawns, wordlessly moves her head into Myka’s lap, and stills again.

“You make this too easy,” Myka says aloud, not expecting a response but Helena manages a soft, sleep-coated, “What’s easy?” that makes Myk too wide and almost too happily if such a thing were even possible in this moment.

“Loving you,” Myka whispers with a roll of her eyes, hand still lost in Helena’s hair, tips of fingers still stroking lightly against warm skin.

With apparent renewed energy, Helena turns to look up at Myka for long moments in silence before she reaches for that book again, pulls that book, once more, out of Myka’s hand and tosses the thing to the floor. Helena sits up, pulls Myka into her, against her, back down against the couch with her until they are both stretched out, front to front, on a piece of furniture that is barely wide enough to hold them.

Myka’s hands effortlessly find their way around Helena’s waist until she is sure that older girl is secure in her arms, until she’s sure that Helena won’t fall off of that couch. And Helena, for her part, leans further into Myka, rests her head against Myka’s shoulder and half of her body over Myka’s. Helena’s hands wrap around Myka’s back and hold tight, with little intention of letting go.

“I’ve missed you,” Helena says, “I love you, too.”

Myka tightens her grip, if it can possibly grow any more tight and presses her lips to Helena’s forehead to set a light kiss there. And Helena nuzzles closer, her lips finding the exposed skin of Myka’s shoulder, just above the collar of the shirt she wears, and her kiss is warm, gentle. Just the slightest bit ticklish where it moves against skin and lingers on Myka’s neck, where Helena presses her lips further into Myka’s neck and kisses again and again and again and…

Only when the kisses stop does Myka hear the soft sound of Helena’s breath, her light snoring. Only then does Myka feel the older girl relax in her arms.

“Night Georgie,” Myka whispers softly, closing her own eyes.

***

It is most likely the fact that Myka wakes up with her hands beneath Helena’s shirt, that Helena wakes up with her shirt pushed far up on her abdomen, that their legs are so severely intwined (not severely enough, if Myka is being honest), which prompts a family meeting wherein only Jane, Jeannie, Myka and Helena are in attendance.

It is in the bookstore, not too long after the fumigation tent has been lifted and the building cleared for re-entry. Myka is examining her books, the many stacks of books that Pete had taken saran wrap to _just in case_ , and the shelves, coated by a thin white layer of film.

“Fantastic,” Myka says sarcastically, beneath her breath. Only Helena, who is a step behind her in a far aisle of the store, hears this. Her smile, when Myka turns back to her at the sound of a soft laugh, is sympathetic. Her hand reaches out only to pat Myka’s arm in further display of that sympathy before it returns to its former position, crossed in front of her.

“I’m sure they’ll be fine,” Helena says reassuringly, in her _actually_ reassuring voice, with that _actually_ reassuring smile.

Myka nods in defeat and acceptance.

“I’ll help you dust,” Helena adds and at that, this further reassurance, Myka smiles and leans wordlessly in to kiss Helena, to whisper a thanks against those lips and take pride in the smile that appears as a result of that kiss and that thanks.

It’s then that Jane calls them to the front. And it is usually Jane. It is  _always_  Jane, Myka finds, that is doing the calling and the correcting and the gentle disciplining. In the beginning, it had been a nuisance but now… now Myka sees that it is all for her mother. Her mother who is still timid and apprehensive about the proper way to confront her own daughters. Her mother who has regained so much of her strength and confidence and sense of self worth through Jane. Her mother who loves Jane and who is loved so much  _by_  Jane that Jane does not hesitate to address the issues that need addressing on her behalf.

It starts with a, “Girls, can you come up here?” from where they stand at the front of the store.  And it leads into Jane sighing, Jane looking to Myka’s mother, Myka’s mother sending some last-minute silent plea to Jane with those eyes of hers. Those eyes of hers that are just like Myka’s eyes, all green with gold and sometimes blue in the right light. Sometimes blue, Helena would say, but always breathtaking.

Myka laughs now thinking of then because she had told Helena to shut up and she had meant it with a light heart, she had said it with a smile, but it had clearly hurt Helena’s feelings. Some stupid habit that Myka had picked up from Tracy but she had said it too often to Helena when she was trying to be sentimental. So Myka had forced herself to drop that habit of telling Helena, telling anyone at all that wasn’t herself or her own rambling mind, to shut up.

And shut up is exactly what she tells herself now as Jane begins to talk about things that neither Helena nor Myka can say they are too very surprised to hear her talk about.

“Your ages are a concern,” is the one that stings the most because Myka looks immediately to Helena whose expression is already sad, whose head is already hanging low, and she knows where this will lead. She knows already that Helena will run. And it may not be that she runs away to some actual other place. It may not be that she leaves or goes or stays gone but she will run, internally. She will _hide_ internally.

Helena will close up, she will run, she will shut down and it will take forever for Myka to find her again. It will take about a million years.

“We know you two have always been close,” Myka’s mother finds the courage to interrupt whatever Jane had been expressing of her concerns about their ages, to speak up and step forward. And Myka wants to hug this woman who had given birth to her, raised her even through hell, who had almost given up entirely on herself, because she sees Helena and she knows Helena, maybe better than Myka thinks she does.  She's certain even her mother knows that Helena will run.

So Myka’s mother steps forward and she puts a hand on Helena’s arms, still crossed in front of her, and another on Myka’s arm.

“I know you love each other,” Jeannie says and tilts her head, offers a sympathetic smile to Myka, “I just don’t want you to rush into anything before you’re ready. Before you can both be on the same page or close enough to it to know what the other truly wants.” Jeannie turns to Helena, who looks up at her with the most guilty look she has ever managed, “Five years may seem more like a million right now,” Jeannie nods, “but in two or three years… it will be nothing at all.”

Helena’s eyes find Myka’s eyes in that exact moment and, despite it all, they smile at one another. Knowing smiles, amused smiles, comforting smiles because they already knew what it was like, those one million years, that nothing at all. And for once Myka is sure that this will be okay. It will be all right. They can work with this because they already know.

“You’ve made it this far…” and Myka’s mother pauses, suddenly panicked by her curiosity, “…right? You’ve made it this far?”

Myka is groaning out a very reluctant “yes, Mother” as Helena’s barely audible voice squeaks out the beginnings of a plea, “I assure you, Mrs. Bering…” But Helena does not finish. There’s no need.

More sure of what she says now, Myka’s mother continues with a bit of a proud nod. “You’ve made it  _this_  far, I know you can wait another year and a half,” pause again, “at  _least_. To know what you both truly want out of this relationship.”

As if, Myka thinks and wants to say to her mother aloud but refrains, as if they don’t already know what the other truly wants.

***

Helena doesn’t run. In fact, Helena does the exact opposite of run.

Because so many words had been said between Jane and Jeannie and Helena and Myka but at the end of everything, at the end of it all, Jane tells them both, “If Helena were anyone else at all…” and they get the implication of that statement. If Helena were anyone else at all, there would be even more lectures, even more dissuading, and naysaying. But Helena  _is_  Helena. They know her, they love her, they  _trust_  her and they tell her just as much.

And Myka tells  _them_  both, “We aren’t together, if it makes you feel better,” but both Jane and Jeannie exchange knowing glances of extreme skepticism until Jane speaks the obvious.

“Not calling it a  _thing_  doesn’t make the thing _not_ a thing.”

Myka is sure that both she and Helena share similar expressions, a mixture of guilt and perplexity.

And Jane’s laughter, Myka’s mother’s laughter, the shake of their heads, the turning and the walking away and the whispered utterances of, “Were we ever that clueless?” and “Yes, Jean, for twenty years we were that clueless…” well, all of these things together bring about the conclusion to that conversation.

Helena doesn’t run away because now,  _now_  they are too busy moving and at a very high rate of speed to the back office in that bookstore. And once they are there, once they are behind that door, Myka is pulling Helena into her, against her and then pushing Helena against that closed door with her hands on Helena’s waist, with Helena’s hands in her hair. And their lips, their mouths, are together and rough and hungry and almost desperate.

It is fast. It is faster than anything Myka has ever done or wanted or expected, especially with Helena. It is too fast and then it is all thoughts of Myka’s mother and Jane and their words playing in the back of her mind and suddenly things slow. They slow down and they are way too slow and eventually they are screeching entirely to a stop.

For several seconds there is only heavy breathing and near breathlessness and Myka watching Helena, Helena watching Myka. Then Helena rolls her eyes up, throws her head back against the door and sighs. She says, “I cannot get their voices out of my head.”

Myka’s only response is laughter until Helena begins laughing, too. Suddenly they are together in this small space, Myka with Helena still pushed against the door, still with her hands on that older girl’s waist. And Helena still with one leg wrapping around Myka’s, still with her hands tangled in Myka’s hair.

“I love you,” Myka breathes and kisses Helena and laughs into that kiss which breaks off into a sigh before turning into another kiss. “I love you and I love this  _thing_  that we have which isn’t really a thing at all, I guess, but I’d like it to never end.”

Helena breathes back against Myka’s lips, “I love the thing, too. I love you with the thing and I agree with your mother and Jane that the precipice of this thing should only be conquered when you, who I love, and I, who... you love..." Helena pauses and Myka rolls her eyes before giving her a exaggerated nod, Helena laughs, "until we are on the exact same page.”

It isn’t what Myka wants to hear, this rambling thing that Helena says almost all at once, but it is better than the running and the hiding and the being gone. So Myka takes it. She takes Helena’s rambles and her logic and that godawful need of hers to be above it all, to do the right thing. But she also takes the kisses and the lingering gazes and the feel of Helena’s fingers in her curls, of fingernails against her scalp. And the feel of Helena’s teeth sinking into her lip and that tongue against her lips, in her mouth, searching and seeking and  _dancing_  with her own.

She takes it all and this  _thing_  and she takes Helena, too.

At least, she will… someday… take Helena. When they are on that exact same page.

***

It is two weeks later that they find themselves presumably alone in the Lattimer home. It is already dark, almost too quiet but there had been talks of attending the Christmas parade that evening and neither Helena nor Myka could bring themselves to want that. So they’d gone to the movies with Pete and Kelly, Jeannie Jr. and Tracy before the two of them, alone, had gone out to eat.

Now it is dark and it is quiet, save for the sound of Myka’s lips, wet and warm and hungry against Helena’s throat.  And the much sweeter sound of Helena's moans which she so unsuccessfully tries to bite back.

A gentle laugh from Helena brings Myka to her senses, enough to realize she’s closed her eyes and all but buried her face into Helena’s hair, fully against the side of her neck. Her nose to soft skin, inhaling that scent, breathing in deeply. Again and again and… Helena yawns.

“Sleepy,” Helena says softly.

“You old woman,” Myka teases.

“I concede to my fate,” Helena says with a smile, with heavy eyelids, "so long as I get to close my eyes very soon."

Myka won’t fight her on it, though. Myka only takes her hand and leads her down the hall to the guest bedroom and she opens the door and they are almost through it until a muffled cry draws them instead to Pete’s door.

Myka isn’t sure which thought strikes her first upon hearing that cry, there are so many but the one that sticks out more vividly than the rest is Tracy in the hospital, awake when she should not have been awake. In pain when she did not deserve that pain. And it is that thought and that thought alone that sends panic through Myka’s entire body. Panic enough to propel herself into Pete’s bedroom door, to open it even as Helena, behind her, is calling her name and telling her to wait and… it is too late. It is all too late.

The light is on, the door swinging away from Myka’s grasp but she sees too much, entirely too much of Pete and of Kelly, naked and together and one on top with the other below, before both of those bodies, nude and exposed and yelping and simultaneously (and quite appropriately) saying the word “fuck” go flying over the opposite end of the bed and to the floor and…

Myka wants to close the door but her hands are too busy covering her wide-open mouth. Her eyes too busy shutting tight, tighter and the tightest they possibly can, as if this action will actually keep all of those images that she has seen from further being seen, from seeping wholly into her too vivid memory.

It is entirely too late. Myka will  _die_  with that image, the image of Pete’s red ass and Kelly’s breasts in motion and  _them_  together… actually together… seared into her precious oversized genius of a brain.

Still, she gains enough composure, after much yelling for her to get out, to close the door, to “kill me now”, to say to Pete, in an almost cheer, “Way to blow off that steam, Lattimer.”

Helena pulls Myka back into her and shuts the door just before several stray action figures take flight in their direction.

***

It’s several weeks later, after Christmas, after New Years, after Helena has flown home and Kelly has made her peace with her cousin after a six week long absence, before Pete admits to Myka, to anyone at all, even himself, that he and Kelly now have their own  _thing_.

Myka and Pete are sitting next to one another at the back of a moving van, feet dangling over the edge, just outside of Myka’s new student living quarters. Everything is where it needs to be in her new space, a studio apartment that is entirely hers and hers alone. That had been a fight with the school for her to get at her age but in the end, she was already closer to her degree than half the adults, half of anybody, on campus and no longer qualified or required to live in the freshman dorms.

Pete has spent the entire day defeating a personal record for most lesbian themed U-Haul jokes told in the duration of one move.  His way of not talking about the plans he's made to meet up with Kelly later that evening.

“You’re a true pal,” Myka is rolling her eyes at his latest deflection to her inquiries into his budding relationship with a woman he once referred to as "the absolute worst human being on the face of all of the earth if she even qualified for human to begin with".  Which, in Pete speak, actually means "super hot and intimidating and I'm probably going to hit that eventually"... Myka has come to learn.

Myka had told him then, is telling him even now, how dramatic he has a tendancy to be. So, naturally, the conversation shifts to the topic of Helena. Of the woman who was not quite her girlfriend but certainly not much less than that.

“Speaking of dramatic... how’s H.G.?”

Myka smiles at the slightest mention of the woman's name these days, she nods.

“She’s well.”

"She's... Wells?"  Pete tries but Myka shakes her head.  "You're no fun."

"How can I be fun if you're not funny?"

"I can't carry all the comedic weight in this friendship, Bering," Pete sighs, "ya gotta give me _something_."

She gives him a punch in the arm.  "There you go, fresh off the press." 

"Mom told me to ask if H.G. resolved the thing we talked about after New Years Eve.”

“It's cool  She's fine.  She found someone to talk to,” Myka nods. “It’s helping, I think. I hope.”

***

It was a setback.

Helena had disappeared the morning of New Years Eve and Myka had seen it coming, hadn’t done enough, in her own mind, to stop it from happening. And the panic she felt, wondering where Helena’s thoughts had gone, what Helena could possibly be thinking of doing to punish herself now, where, in this world, Helena would possibly take that internal struggle… that panic was unbearable.

They’d checked the lake first, early that morning and she hadn’t been there but Myka couldn’t shake the thought, so she checked again, later in the evening, as the sun was setting over the hills and the cold began to turn to freeze.

Helena was there. Myka found her down their beach, standing barefoot in shallow water, dressed only in a tank top and shorts, staring across the stillness of the lake water at nothing at all.

“Helena.”

The older girl didn’t move. Did not even flinch.

“Georgie…” Myka removed her own shoes and socks, and moved into the space just behind Helena, into freezing cold water, and slowly, cautiously raised her hands to Helena’s arms. They were as cold as the air they’d presumably been exposed to for hours.

Myka stepped around Helena, stood in front of her as the older girl lowered her head to stare at the water below.

“Going for a swim?” Myka asked smiling softly, and Helena only shook her head before a sob broke free of that stoic façade.

"Myka, you're going to freeze."

"You're already freezing."

"Please get out of the water," Helena cried.

Myka shook her head, "You know that's not how this works, babe."

“Why do you do this?” Helena spoke through tears.

“Why do I do what, Helena?” Myka asked putting her hands back over Helena’s arms and running her hands up and down skin that was too cold to the touch.

“Come looking for me,” Helena choked out, reaching to wipe at her own tears but still never looking up to meet Myka’s eyes. “Why do you even bother with me?”

Myka’s hand on Helena’s cheek lifted the older girl’s gaze to hers and Myka smiled that crooked smile of hers and shook her head. “Why wouldn’t I, Helena? Come looking for you. I worry about you.”

“You shouldn’t,” Helena had told her, more tears cascading down red cheeks. “And I shouldn’t let you. I shouldn’t want you to.”

“Let me, Helena?” Myka’s laugh is soft and she begins pulling off the hooded sweatshirt she wears. “You don’t  _let_  me, Helena,” she pauses to lift the sweater over her head, then adds, “I just  _do_.”

Myka holds the sweater up to Helena and the older girl at first only looks at it, looks up at Myka with sad, disapproving eyes.

“Take it or else you’ll be dealing with a whole new side of me, Helena,” and Myka’s voice is stern, commanding. “A side of me that has come to understand that my love for you alone isn’t enough to beat this, whatever it is you’re going through, but if I have to  _drag_  you back home, I will do it, Helena Wells.”

She takes the sweater, puts it on over her head, adjusts it and her hair. It makes her look even smaller than what she truly is, which is truly small. Helena is swimming in that sweater but it is a start because she is warmer and Myka can tell how much it helps in the way Helena closes her eyes, lets her body relax.

"You told me you were okay," Myka says softly, "I told you to come to me, when the darkness closes in, but if you can't come to me, Helena... if it's too much--"

"I love you," Helena interrupts her and a smile pulls into Myka's lips.

"I love you, too."

"But I am not okay," Helena adds.

"I still love you," Myka tells her.

"Sometimes, most days, I feel fine," Helena wipes at her own tears, "but when all of the wrong things come together..." Helena shakes her head.  "Christmas and Claudia, Jules and Giselle, Claire and Vanessa.  My father and Charlie and...  _him._ "  Myka doesn't need to ask who "him" is, not the way Helena wraps her arms around herself, not with the way Helena's gaze falls away from Myka's and to some distant place across the lake.  Some far away place that is likely not nearly far enough away for Helena.

Myka knows.

"It's been  _years_ , Myka.  And I can't stop thinking... I can't get him out of my head."

"Helena," Myka's voice is soft and Helena's eyes meet Myka's eyes again.  "I still love you.  We all love you."

"I'm not okay," Helena shakes her head again.

"We'll work on it."

"Myka..."

"Together, Helena, we will work on it.  Okay?  We'll find help.   _Together_."

Helena just stares at Myka for the longest before she kisses her, before she begins wiping more tears away, before her eyes fall to their feet below freezing lake water.

"Let me take you home," Myka asks reaching to Helena's cheeks again, lifting her gaze up and leaning into another kiss.  "We can get your car tomorrow."

Helena nods silently and Myka smiles into another kiss.

"You'll be okay," Myka nods, "and even if you're not, even if you don't think you can be,  _we_ will still be okay.  Okay?"

"Okay."

Myka takes Helena's hands, takes up their shoes and socks in her other arm, walks her to the car.  They make one stop at a store, Myka runs in and buys four pairs of the thickest socks that she can possibly fine.  Back in the car, they each wear two pairs.  Helena smiles and it is enough for Myka, that tiny bit of evidence that Helena will be okay for now.  Myka leans over the center console of the car, Helena leans into her, and they share another small kiss.  

It is enough for now.

Myka takes Helena home.

***

"Seventeen."  Helena sounds exasperated through the phone.  "I don't know how this happened."

It is midnight on Myka's seventeenth birthday and Helena has just woken her up with a phone call.

"Happy birthday, my love."

Sweet Helena and these sentiments of hers could kill Myka because they aren't a thing, not by a long shot.  But it's like Jane had said... not calling it a thing doesn't make it not a thing.

"Thanks, Georgie," Myka yawns to hide her complete enamor.

"I apologize for the hour.  I couldn't help myself."  

Myka can hear her grinning through the phone and smiles, too.

"No, it's... it's not a problem."

"Did you get my gift?"

At that exact moment, Myka is reaching down to palm the Macbook that sits beside her on her bed, that Helena had purchased and had shipped to Pete who set it up, wrapped it up and then passed it along to Myka.  She had also sent a large envelope with a single Post-It not inside which simply read, "Welcome to the 21st Century".

"I did," Myka grins, thinking of the note, now stuck to the screen of her brand new laptop.  "And I am quite familiar with the 21st Century, thank you.  But also thank you, very much, because you didn't have to buy me a laptop.  I can't afford to pay you back-"

"It's a gift," Helena interrupts.  "You don't pay people back for gifts."

"Don't you?"  Myka smirks into the phone.  "I bet I could find a way."

Helena clears her throat, "Well."

"Well?"

"Well, there is another part to that gift.  It's in a file in your documents folder.  There's a subfolder there called Journal.  You should read it."

"Okay," Myka sighs, powering on the computer, "but slow down, I'm not sure my 20th Century brain can keep up with your 21st Century techno jargon."

"Shut up," Helena scolds.

 _Habit_ , Myka laughs to herself.

"Love, I have to go.  I'll send you a text message before I call later, okay?"

"Text message? Why that? Just _call_ , Helena."

"Goodnight, I love you," Helena is teasing, ignoring Myka's growing complaints against Helena's growing interest in advanced technologies stacked up next to Myka's growing disinterest in anything more complex than her clearly outdated flip phone.  And even then, she could live without the flip phone and without its numerous unsolicited text message notification  _pings_  throughout the day.

But Myka won't go there right now because it is midnight is just a little bit too late to avoid discussing technology with Helena "Fancy Phone" Wells.  "I love you, too.  Goodnight, Georgie."

Myka finds and opens that document just as she hangs up the phone.  There is a digital photo of Helena attached to it, smiling and gorgeous and happy, and below that one small, solitary paragraph of text.  A single paragraph of text that Myka is not even halfway done reading before her heart is pounding, nearly out of her chest, before she is almost jumping out of her bed, before she is reaching for her phone to call Helena back _right that instant_.

It is post-dated for June 15, 2001 in the approaching summer.

 _Dear diary,_ it reads, _today my gorgeous, brilliant, and quite clever girlfriend (pictured above as evidence of her gorgeousness) is returning to the states to be with me for an entire summer.  My love for her compounds every second, every minute of every day.  She truly is the most brilliant woman alive and I cannot wait to spend the summer bending to her every whim and desire.  Love, Myka._

"Did you find it?" is how Helena answers Myka's call.

"You are a menace, Helena Wells," Myka is laughing, wiping tears from her face, "and I love your stupid face."

"I love you, too," Helena whispers, as she tends to do, "and I'll see you in two months."


	18. 17/18 & 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is so much fluff, you might throw up. Don't worry, tossed a little angst in there to keep everyone grounded.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for events that occurred on 09/11/01. Also, apologies about the atrocious formatting. That's what I get for typing this chapter up in the new Notepad.

"Take me home." 

Myka, with her arms around Helena's back and her face pressed to Helena's cheek, lifts that older girl just the tiniest bit, just enough so that her feet are off the ground and for only two or three seconds. Long enough to tighten her hold on Helena. Long enough to take one very deep breath of that perfume that makes all the boys, and Myka, go crazy. Long enough to press her lips to Helena's cheek, to leave a lingering kiss on that cheek, soft and warm and perfect and absolutely _everything_. 

***

They are in baggage claim before Myka works up some additional courage to lean over and into Helena and lower her mouth to that mouth and kiss Helena, _really_ kiss Helena, in a way that makes the older girl's hands rise slowly up Myka's arms. And they rise up Myka's arms, over her shoulders, to her neck, to just under her chin. Then they are on Myka's cheeks and Helena is on the tips of her toes again, steadying herself at the base of this kiss, stretching on those toes to deepen this kiss. 

Helena lets go only to allow her backpack to fall to the floor behind her, before she brings her arms around Myka's neck. 

Now, she can stretch just the tiniest bit higher on the tips of those toes. Now, she pulls Myka just the tiniest bit closer. 

"Your parents would be ashamed," comes low and whispered and quickly from somewhere beside them. Helena tenses and pulls in Myka's arms but Myka tightens her hold and it's meant to be reassuring. That gesture is meant to speak so many things to Helena at once but first and foremost it is meant to say, "I've got you." 

Their kiss only breaks when Myka smiles, when Myka laughs into that kiss against lips, suddenly cold and then distant and too far away.

Myka bends further into Helena, rests her forehead against Helena's forehead and, still laughing, turns to the source of that accusation and tells that source, with a smile, "I don't believe either of my mothers would care."

It's a stretch of the truth but it is still, somehow, truthful.

There is an affronted grunt or a groan or a gasp or _whatever_ it is and Myka stands straight, still with one arm wrapped tightly around Helena. Myka straightens and she is looming over this woman, this stranger, who has the nerve to grasp the child by her side as if Myka or Helena or both of them intends to snatch that child right out of her arms. 

This thought, too, makes Myka laugh and she tells that small child, "I'm sorry that your mother cares so much," and then to the mother, "but, you know, my abusive, alcoholic father might agree with you." 

The woman is gone mostly before Myka can even finish speaking, so she turns back to Helena who is arching a single, curious brow at her, and she bites down on her lip for several moments before she apologizes to her and her alone. 

Helena shakes her head, "I'm just... impressed?" and still shaking her head, she tries again, "Enamored... by you." Then under her breath, with a gentle smile, "Seventeen?"

Myka wants to grin. She wants her smile to be as big as her heart feels in this moment. As big as her heart swells at the way Helena is looking at her in this way that almost convinces Myka that Helena might think her just as beautiful as she finds Helena to be. 

A loud buzz sounds behind them as the baggage carousel kicks on and luggage begins falling onto the conveyer belt. 

Helena is still gazing up at Myka quietly when Myka leans down into another kiss. This one small but no less of a kiss than the previous one. This kiss, just a quick, chaste thing and then Myka is pulling her arm from Helena's arm and her body from where Helena is pressed up against her, and her lips from Helena's as she says, "I'll get your bag."

Myka is almost sure Helena is going to fall forward as she steps away from her and to the carousel. She is almost sure Helena is not going to let go of the sudden grip she has on Myka's hand. 

And even when she does, Myka is almost sure that look on Helena's face could not simply be love. Could not only be love. It could not _just_ be love... but longing, as well. 

Myka feels it, too. 

***

It is longing which causes Myka's hand to search blindly behind her for Helena's hand as Myka adjusts that backpack of Helena's on her own shoulders and tilts her oversized luggage onto its two wheels. 

"Myka, love, let me carry that," Helena is reaching for the straps of her backpack on Myka's back but it is longing which causes Myka to say "no" and to also say, aloud this time, "I've got you." Because she knows where the car is parked exactly, how to get to that place, and the fastest route at that. 

They need the _fastest_ route out of here. 

It is longing which brings Helena's hand to wrap securely around Myka's wrist as Myka drives them, in Helena's car, to the university campus, not even ten minutes from the airport. But it is ten minutes of contact that they haven't had in six months. It is ten too short minutes stacked against six too long months, this longing to touch, and it is everything it can possibly be in that moment. 

It is longing which compels Myka to abandon Helena's backpack somewhere just inside the door of her studio apartment, to then reach for that older girl, that woman, and pull her to the couch and onto the couch and into her arms. Completely and entirely into her arms. 

But it is something else entirely which gives them both pause. 

***

"That woman," and it's as Helena is saying this that Myka realizes exactly how much she anticipated hearing it, "at the airport..."

"She's nothing," Myka tells Helena. "She's no one. I've missed you and I need to ask you again because asking you on an instant messenger, when we're thousands of miles away, isn't the same as asking you like this..."

  
_Like this_ means with Myka sat back into an over cushioned couch. _Like this_ means with Helena seated beside her, facing her, and propped up against one hand as she leans over Myka's lap, leans into Myka. Like _this_ means with Myka's fingertips drawing lines and circles up and then down Helena's bare arm, over goosebumps and tiny hairs that stand on end. With Helena's sighs, one after another, exhaling warm air against Myka's neck, and Helena's lips eventually pressing into Myka's. 

"Ask me," Helena says just after that kiss and just before another. "Go on."

"Did you mean it?" Myka does, eventually, ask. "About being my girlfriend? Because I thought... I thought that you wanted to _wait_... until I was eighteen."

"I meant it," Helena says with a small nod, a growing smile. "I _mean_ it," she corrects, "as long as it's what you want. As long as you're ready."

Myka wants to tell Helena to _shut up_ because of course it is what she wants. It is what she has always wanted. 

Whether she is ready or not ready, Myka doesn't even want to think about. 

Not now. 

***

"When I said ready," Myka is having déjà vu as these words are leaving Helena's mouth, between kisses, between touches, between the gentle tugging of clothes, "I didn't mean... like _this_..." Myka is grasping _that spot_ on that thigh and Helena is gasping into her mouth, biting down on Myka's lip. "Myka... _stop_."

"What?" it sounds harsh so Myka immediately says again, less exasperated, less frustrated, "What's wrong?"

"Not like this," Helena whispers against her cheek. Helena kisses that cheek and falls beside her on the couch, moves a hand to Myka's lap as the other moves her bra strap, falling just below the sleeve of her shirt, into place on her shoulder. "Not... not yet."

"Then when?" 

Helena's brows immediately furrow into something a little too close to anger. It has been less than an hour and already she's pissed Helena off. But soon those brows fall into something like incredulity. One arched brow remains on that perfect face when Helena shakes her head and sits back on the couch and falls into Myka's side. 

"I just got here," Helena says softly, resting her head against Myka's shoulder. "That used to be enough for you."

Myka sighs and moves to wrap her arm over Helena's shoulder, Helena falling further into her, Helena's forehead falling to rest against her neck and Helena's hand still in her lap, reaching for Myka's other hand, lacing their fingers together. 

"You, here?" Myka whispers, moving to press a kiss against Helena's head, "This is more than I deserve."

Helena's nose moves against Myka's neck followed by lips and a gentle kiss that rises from against her throat, to against her jaw, and just over her ear to whisper, "I've missed you, too."

Helena yawns. 

"I'm awful," Myka whispers back, moving so that they are now both leaning sideways into the couch, face to face. Myka lifts a hand to push back Helena's hair, to tuck that hair behind her ears and run her fingertips across Helena's jaw, below Helena's chin. "You should sleep."

"I will," Helena says, her voice close to inaudible. "Just let me... stare at you... for a little while."

Myka smiles wide and crooked and laughs softly when Helena's eyelids grow heavy and near to closing. 

"I must look really good behind closed eyes," Myka teases. 

"You're beautiful... that smile," Helena sighs, eyes completely shut. "My prince."

Myka kisses sleepy lips. Sleepy lips that lazily kiss her back for only a second or two before they still beneath the touch. 

"Goodnight, princess," Myka whispers.

***

Helena is still such a small thing to Myka. Too small in some ways. Just small enough in other ways. 

Myka, when she lifts Helena from the couch and into her arms, finds it to be near effortless. Myka finds that the most difficult thing about lifting Helena from that couch and into her arms is the way the woman's head lulls toward her and into her, the way Helena, perhaps instinctively, moves her arms around Myka's neck to secure her hold. 

The second most difficult thing about lifting Helena into her arms is the lost contact when she sets her down in the bed. 

Helena curls into one of Myka's pillows, pulls that pillow entirely into her grasp and buries her nose into it. 

"Is this real?" Myka barely hears the soft muffled whisper. "Are you here?"

Myka leans in to put a kiss on those sleepy questioning lips, and whispers to them, " _You_ are _here._ "

"Semantics," Helena sighs. "I'm so tired but I love you."

Myka is pulling off Helena's shoes and setting them on the floor just beside the bed, then rolls onto the bed herself, closer to Helena, to whisper back, "I, of course, love you, too."

***

It's almost three in the morning when Myka opens blurry eyes to the sound of a toilet flushing, to water running in the sink, to Helena's bare feet padding against hardwood floors. 

Helena's shadow appears just beyond a shelving unit partition that separates Myka's bed from the rest of her apartment. It is minutes more before Helena is at that partition, making her way toward the bed, sitting down on the edge of it. 

Even with no glasses on, Myka can see that Helena has, apparently, left her pajamas in London again. 

"You okay?" Myka asks, her voice comes out groggily, more so than expected as she reaches across the bed to where Helena turns a small smile on her and reaches back across that bed to grasp Myka's hand. To give it a reassuring squeeze. 

"I'm okay," Helena says softly. "My clock is just a bit off, is all." Helena climbs into the bed beside Myka, moves close, close enough to wrap her arms around Myka's neck and rest her head over Myka's shoulder. 

Myka's hand against Helena's back brings them even closer together. 

"I'll stay up with you," Myka yawns. 

"You won't last," Helena smiles, kissing her cheek, "but I won't hold it against you."

Myka argues for approximately ten additional seconds before she is asleep again. 

***

"Myka, you have no food," Helena is saying from the fridge before closing the door and turning an expectant gaze on Myka. "What do you eat?"

"Usually Mom and Jane come up and--"

"They're going to repossess you from yourself, Myka," Helena's expectant gaze turns into an accusing squint. She turns to the cabinets then, opens every one of them. "You were saying... about your mom and Jane?"

"I was saying, _dear_ , that they've been busy. With Pete graduating and preparing for bootcamp, moving Jeannie home, and Tracy is handful enough," Myka shrugs from where she sits at her very small breakfast bar, covered almost entirely in textbooks. "Plus, with all the custodial issues with Josh and Claudia... it's fine. We have a cafeteria."

Helena makes a face. "I am not eating cafeteria food," and it is perhaps one of the first times, in a long time, that Helena's privilege has shown through like a shining light on what she is and isn't willing to lower her standards for. 

"Don't be spoiled," Myka teases.

"Myka, if you need money--"

"I don't need money," Myka interrupts quickly. A little too quickly, maybe. Helena makes another face at her. This one also expectant. "The bookstore is doing really well and mom's ahead of the bills, so I actually get to pay myself something. I don't need money."

"Okay, well, we're going shopping," Helena says closing those cabinets. " _After_ we get breakfast."

***

Something about Helena and domesticity makes Myka want to kiss her and kiss her and never stop kissing her.

So when they are in the grocery store and Helena is reading nutrition labels and picking out vegetables and asking Myka what she wants for dinner, Myka kisses her. And each time after she kisses her, she just stares at her longer and with more of that same longing. 

And when they are back at the apartment on campus and Helena is tidying up, which consists mostly of putting books onto bookshelves and stacking books neatly on the coffee table and more books on side tables and even more books in night stands, Myka kisses her. Helena's immediate response to that kiss is to tell Myka, "I'd be surprised if you left any books at the store at all."

To which Myka simply smiles and says, "I did," before kissing Helena again. 

Helena makes them sandwiches for lunch and as she is meticulously cutting the crust from each sandwich, Myka slips into that space behind her, wraps her arms around Helena's waist and kisses her cheek. 

"I'm not nine anymore," Myka tells her, "I eat the crust now. Technically, I always ate the crust but I wasn't going to stop you from cutting it off."

Helena sighs and playfully shrugs Myka off of her, "Allow me my routines, okay?"

Myka kisses Helena when she turns to glare at her and that glare, any hint of it at all, washes entirely away from Helena's expression. The look she gives Myka is almost shy until she sighs again and returns to cutting. 

Helena is exhausted before mid-afternoon. So they sit to watch a movie and it's mostly a ruse to get Helena, who is trying to stay awake to combat the time difference, to take a nap. 

"If I sleep now, I'll surely sleep through dinner," Helena protests but the movie is already playing and she is already leaning into Myka's hold. 

"Stop being domestic for five seconds, woman."

Helena sighs, as her head lulls to the side and comes to rest against Myka's chest. 

"Fine."

Five seconds is exactly how much time passes before Myka hears a soft snore from the woman in her arms. 

***

Helena doesn't sleep through dinner but Myka's sure she wishes she had because Myka cannot take her hands off of that woman in her tiny kitchen. She's pulling out pots and pans that have only been touched by Myka's own mother, by Jane, and one skillet by the occasional grilled cheese sandwich when Myka finds herself particularly desperate to not leave the apartment. 

Myka lets Helena go when she moves to the stove, reclaims her hold on her when she moves back to the counter to chop or dice or any number of other things Myka never knew Helena knew how to do. 

"Myka," Helena is shrugging her off again, "darling, I do love you but if you make me cut myself or you..."

"Are you threatening to shank me?" Myka questions stepping away from Helena with her hands up in surrender. 

"Accidentally, of course," Helena smirks and holds up the knife that is in her hand. Only then does Myka put further space between them, round the breakfast bar and take a seat across from Helena. 

"You're irresistible," Myka tells her quietly. Helena smiles but only glances momentarily to Myka, still focused on her task. "Do you need any help?"

Helena stops what she's doing now to smile that smile fully at Myka. "You've just spent twenty minutes not resisting me while I cook and _now_ , Myka Bering, you want to know how you can help?"

Myka offers her something akin to a grimace and Helena tries, she tries really hard not to laugh but she doesn't try hard enough. She laughs and she says, "Come here," while leaning across the counter and Myka leans across that counter, too. Helena laughs, even into their kiss and Myka smiles into that same kiss until they part and wordlessly return to what they'd been doing before. 

Helena is chopping vegetables and Myka is staring at her with all of the love in the world that she can possibly muster for any one person. 

***

Helena tells Myka after dinner, when she is straddling Myka's lap where she sits on the couch and leaning into kiss after kiss after kiss with Myka's hands at her waist and falling lower, much lower, than that, "This can't really happen until you're eighteen."

"You won't be here when I'm eighteen," Myka tells her. "You'll be here tonight and tomorrow and next week. You'll be here until I'm seventeen and a half and then you'll be gone."

"I will be back," but Helena doesn't sound sure of that and Myka knows it isn't a sure thing. 

"You start your graduate program this fall, I start mine next year," Myka whispers, arching an accusing brow at her now, "like we'll have time to come back to this anytime soon."

"I'll make time," Helena insists against Myka's lips, closing her eyes, as if to shield Myka from seeing that she isn't entirely sure of that. "I can make time."

"Helena," Myka stills and Helena stills above her, sits straight and waits, gazes down at Myka with anticipation. "I'm sorry, I'm not trying to press it, I just--"

"I made a promise," Helena pouts a little. "I promised your mother."

"Like I said," Myka, with her hands on Helena's cheeks, brings her into a quick kiss, "I'm not pressing it. I'm sorry, I know that it's an issue. I just... if we're like this... every night? If you can't stop us, Georgie, how do you expect I can? I don't think I'll be able to."

***

They try very hard to not be like _that_ every night.

It helps when Myka takes Helena back into town to visit with the family at the end of that first weekend. It helps when Myka's mother insists that they spend a week at home because Pete is leaving for bootcamp too soon, Jeannie has just moved back for summer, Tracy is feeling particularly agreeable, and Claudia is home with them for however long they can keep Josh's fiancé at bay. 

On top of all that, the one year anniversary of the accident is swiftly approaching and several people in town are planning a memorial.

So they are home and they are together and the number of people who tell them "it's about time," or "finally," or "I told you so," extends beyond just their family but it is especially bad, that teasing, with their family.

***

Tracy makes a toast and everyone is automatically suspicious when she stands, water glass in hand, fork clink-clinking against it to gather everyone's attentions. 

"I propose a toast," she says, raising her glass.

"Here we go," their mother responds below her breath, though not low enough to avoid a glare from Tracy or several soft laughs from everyone else.

"I'm _toasting_ ," Tracy says, putting the emphasis on 'toasting' in their mother's direction, "to these two idiots finally figuring out what the rest of us have known for the past ten years."

" _Fifteen_ years," Myka's mother pipes in behind a glass of wine.

"That if Myka gives H.G. puppy dog eyes long enough, she'll eventually break down and date her?" Pete offers to a room full of laughter.

"I don't give Helena puppy dog eyes," Myka protests, rolling her eyes.

"Yes, you do," Tracy says using that exact moment to mimic the face.

"And she finally fell for it," Pete teases patting Myka's shoulder. "But _hey_ , at least you didn't die!"

Myka turns an annoyed look on Helena who smiles and shrugs and says, "You do, at times, have a bit of a puppy dog stare, love."

"Traitor," Myka winks at her.

"Love? So sweet," Jane says shaking her head, sipping her wine. "What if I called you love?" she asks turning to Jeannie who says nothing but shakes her head. "Where has the romance gone?"

"Mom! Gross!" Pete and Jeannie Jr. protest in unison.

"Neither of you has room to talk about gross," Jane says rolling her eyes and pointing at Pete. "You especially. For all the laundry I have to..."

"Okay, wow," Jeannie, Myka's mother, is interrupting and Pete offers only a shrug. "That's enough talk of chores and romance, hm?"

"Mykes, if you need me to sign off on that U-Haul for you, I'll just consider that your wedding present and... ow."

A dinner roll to the head shuts Pete up rather quickly.

"This is why I don't always come home," Myka nods, with wide and telling eyes, clamping her lips shut. She points at Pete, at Jane and her mother, and several times, in a jabbing motion, at Tracy.

"Myka," Helena laughs softly and sets a hand on her leg beneath the table. "How are you not used to this by now?"

"It's only funny because you react so theatrically, Ophelia," her mother smiles, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. "You're just giving your sister ammo."

"Ophie knows I'm teasing," Tracy says walking around the table to Myka and wrapping her arms around her sister's neck, pinching her cheek, "don't you, my beautiful lesbian sister?"

"I will hurt you," Myka says coolly.

"So, are you done toasting?" Jane asks. "Can we eat?"

"Oh, yes!" Tracy stands straight and claps her hands together. "To my beautiful lesbian sister who puppy-dog eyed her way into my gorgeous bisexual sister in-law's heart. May U-Haul live in the same house with three cats and be the cool child-free aunts to my future children, forever and ever. Amen."

"Thank you, Tracy," Helena smiles when Tracy bends forward again to hug her, to put a sloppy wet kiss on the side of her face.

Myka's elbow, soon after that, is jabbing swiftly into Tracy's side. It may or may not be an accident. 

The jury is still out.

***

One family dinner is enough to last them the month. The _year_.

Sometime mid-week, Myka and Helena walk hand-in-hand to the diner where a sixteen year old Leena seats them with a giant grin on her face. 

"Not one word," Myka tells her. 

"I wasn't gonna say anything," Leena insists with a shake of her head, not bothering with menus. "The usual?"

Myka is rolling her eyes and Helena is moving closer to her in that booth they sit in so often together and sometimes, but no longer, apart. 

"Yes, please," Helena tells Leena, "and just one shake."

Leena winks before she disappears. 

***

Just one shake turns into a lot of laughter and snuggling and tiny kisses and smiles and more laughter but then Helena falls quiet and her hand is over Myka's left hand, fingering that ring on Myka's ring finger that used to be hers. 

Helena sighs heavily and before Myka can say anything, before she can offer that ring up to Helena again, Helena is turning into her, pressing their lips together in a kiss. Even seated side by side, Helena has to tilt her head and up back just a bit for Myka's mouth to easily find hers. But Myka takes no issue with searching for that mouth. 

Myka would kiss every inch of that face in search of that mouth if she truly had to. 

When they part, Helena lowers her head, lowers her voice, too. She brings her own hand to touch her forehead, to rub her eyes, then lowers that hand to Myka's lap. 

"Talk to me," Myka says softly. 

"I um... I've been avoiding..." Helena turns a guilty expression up to Myka, "something I'm supposed to be doing. Something that was suggested I do by... by my therapist... the minute I arrived."

" _Okay_ ," Myka speaks slowly, cautiously. "Which is?"

"To talk to you, to be up front with you," Helena clears her throat, "about things that have happened in the past, about the affect those things might have on me now. My perception of everything. And there are things I haven't told you... or have been too ashamed to tell you."

"Helena, you don't have to... tell me all of your secrets, if that's what that is about? If you're apprehensive or if you aren't ready, you don't--"

"No," Helena shakes her head, "I just... I have felt guilty for the longest time about my feelings for you. About the way I feel about you and having known you for so long... having been this person you used to see as an older sister..."

Myka puffs out a soft laugh at that and to Helena she says, first, "Georgie," and then, "I have never quite seen you as an older sister. Not really. If that makes you feel any better."

Helena is quiet and lowers her head to stare at her hand over Myka's thigh and Myka takes that hand in her left hand, grasps onto it tightly. 

"Whatever you need to say," Myka nods, "I'm all ears."

"Take me home," she hears Helena whisper. And when Helena looks up at Myka again, her eyes are wet and reddening. She says even softer, "Please?"

Myka nods and kisses her. 

"Okay."

***

Myka has been wiping away Helena's tears for fourteen minutes. Helena has been talking through those tears for most of that time. 

She says, "I love you and I don't want to lose you," first and foremost. "I love you and I want you but I don't want to lose you and I don't want to hurt you. It's just that I've loved you for a very long time and..."

Myka can't help but to kiss her then. She cannot find the words to say to express this extraordinary swell of her heart, so she kisses Helena and wipes away more tears. And Helena calms down enough to continue. 

Her first confession, "You were the reason Giselle and I broke up," is followed by a quick correction, "not you specifically, not anything that you did. It was my fault. Entirely my fault."

"How?" because Myka truly wants to know. 

"I um... I may have said your name... at the most inappropriate time..." 

They are sitting in near dark in Myka's old bedroom, still mostly her bedroom, and Helena turns to look somewhere else, somewhere away from Myka. Anywhere at all, it seems, where Myka isn't. 

"What, like during an argument?" Myka is asking and Helena turns to her with a mixture of amusement and frustration on her face. 

"No, Myka, not during an _argument_ ," Helena says rather pointedly before rolling her eyes. "This is exactly why... I can't..."

"You mean like... oh," a smile begins to pull into Myka's lips, "You... said my name while you two were... while you were..."

"Myka, this is difficult enough," Helena says moving to stand from Myka's bed but Myka catches her arm and pulls her back into that bed and into her again. 

"I'm sorry. I'm listening. What happened?"

"It just slipped out..."

" _Afterward_ ," Myka clarifies. 

"We got into a big fight," Helena says with a sad voice. "She said a lot of mean things... because you were fourteen. She didn't believe me when I told her that we had never... that you and I have never..." Helena sighs and repeats, "She said _a lot_ of mean things."

"Why?"

"Why... didn't she believe me? Myka? Do you really need to ask?" Helena manages an amused smile.

"No," Myka clamps her lips shut for a moment and moves her hands to Helena's hair to push it from her face. "Why... did you say my name?"

That amused smile falls. Helena's eyes fall, too, to the space between them where their hands touch and hold and mostly refuse to let go. 

Helena's eyes are all over Myka and Helena's hand reaches instinctively to grasp at the locket around her neck. Her fingers maneuver the thing open and closed, open, closed. 

"Helena--"

"I don't know."

Myka allows her gaze to linger. 

"I _don't know_ ," Helena repeats.

"Okay," Myka lets it go. "It's okay, see? Because I still love you. Actually, I might love you even more for that."

It's a light hearted tease but Helena is somewhere else, still playing with the clasp of that locket, still opening and closing. So Myka brings her palm to Helena's cheek to draw the older girl's attention to her and away from the nothing she seems to be stuck in. 

"I have an idea," she begins. "Instead of you unloading all of these... _confessions_ all at once... we'll just take them as they come."

Helena is nodding, slowly at first and then more sure of herself. 

"Okay?" Myka taps her thumb to Helena's chin. 

"Okay." 

***

Helena's head rests over Myka's chest, rising and falling with every steady breath that Myka takes.

Myka is twirling that ring between the fingers of her right hand, holding Helena close to her with her left arm wrapped around her. 

They are this way, quietly, for too long, way too long, when Myka's hand reaches to Helena's left hand, resting just over her abdomen, and slips that ring onto Helena's finger where it belongs. 

Helena catches Myka's hand in hers before she can pull it entirely away and when she stretches her neck to look up at Myka, her expression is anything but a thing that can be put into words. 

And wordlessly, appropriately, Helena pulls herself higher, pulls herself up and over Myka, pulls herself into a kiss. 

Myka's hands at Helena's waist, on her hips where they so blessedly and so often find their perch, seem to sway Helena into a straddling position. Myka's hands moving to Helena's thighs pull her closer, draw her near, until she can't possibly come any closer. 

"Helena," Myka manages some breathless attempt at calling her name but Helena is already shaking her head. "Helena, you can't."

"I don't care, Myka," she whispers against Myka's lips as warm tears fall against Myka's cheeks, "I don't care."

"I do, Helena," Myka says sitting up suddenly, forcing Helena to sit up in her lap. "I care about what this means to you."

Helena bends forward into Myka, face buried into Myka's shoulder, into curly hair and the crook of a neck, and begins to sob. 

***

They are trying so very hard not to walk that fine line between seventeen and eighteen. Between promises and broken promises. Between loving one another... and making love to one another. 

They are still trying so very _very_ hard.

***

The next confession comes when they are back on campus, back in the apartment and alone, seated on the couch and barely paying attention to a movie. 

"I use sex as a coping mechanism."

It comes out of nowhere and Myka turns to Helena and waits for anything at all to follow that sentence. But Helena continues staring at the television screen, as though she hadn't said anything at all. 

Myka turns back to the movie, eventually, slipping her hand into Helena's hand that rests just slightly within her reach, and grasping it tightly. 

Helena clears her throat and Myka only glances at her. Helena still doesn't look away from the movie when she adds, "I don't... just want to _cope_ in our relationship. I don't want to _have_ to cope. I want it to be strong, I want us to talk and face our problems head-on. I want to have confidence in us, in my ability to love you without... sex." Helena does turn to Myka then, just for a moment, then away again, back to the television, when she says, "As I always have, as we've always been."

Myka turns back to Helena, allowing her brows to furrow at these words, with these thoughts. Of Helena loving her this much, in this way. Of her being, somehow, different... than everyone else Helena has been with or tried being with. Or maybe it is just that now Helena is trying. Maybe it is just perfect timing, that Myka should be the one Helena tries with.

Either way, Myka is in awe because Myka has read almost all of Helena's life story and still, somehow, has so much to learn about her. 

"Helena..." and when Helena turns to her with those too familiar wet and red eyes, those so sad eyebrows, Myka can't find any other thing to say. 

"That's all I have," Helena says softly. 

Myka gives her a single nod and tightens her grip on Helena's hand before she pulls her closer, pulls until Helena leans against her shoulder. 

They pretend to watch the rest of the movie in silence. 

***

Summer classes begin eventually and Myka has only signed up for one, compared to her usual three, to give herself more time with Helena. 

She's up early, too early some days, but Helena is up with her, making her breakfast, readying her book bag, kissing her goodbye. And by the time she gets home in the afternoon most days, Helena has tidied up, had lunch with whatever old friends she can find, and fallen back into Myka's bed to take a nap. 

Myka drops her bag to the floor the second she's in the door but then she's seeing her apartment and how tidy it is, how tired that girl so fast asleep in her bed is, too. She picks up her bag and sets it by her desk, unpacks her books and sets them neatly atop that desk. Plugs in her laptop and sets that neatly somewhere, too. 

When she falls on the bed beside Helena, the older girl wakes long enough to say, "I missed you," and "just resting my eyes."

And some days she'll say, "there's lunch in the fridge," other days she'll say, "please tell me you'll settle for pizza."

But every day, every day except for those days where another confession comes bubbling to the surface, she'll stay awake long enough to give Myka one lingering kiss and then fall fast asleep again. 

***

Today is a confession day and Helena is waiting, wide-eyed, for Myka to fall into bed beside her. Helena, Myka can tell, has been waiting for a while. 

"I was pregnant."

This catches Myka's immediate attention and she wants to ask Helena what and when and who and where and _how_ , though she knows _how_ but... but Myka has learned that talking, when these confessions are being made, is counter productive. Talking will only prolong the confession. Make the confessor crawl back into herself for fear of judgement, of ridicule. 

Even with Myka, Helena seems to hold onto that fear. 

So Myka is quiet and she keeps her face straight, too, or she tries as much as humanly possible to keep that face straight. Because that look, the curious or judging or angry or frustrated look, those get to Helena, too. Even when Myka does mean to make her face look any particular way, they get to Helena. Make her run inside of herself. 

Today, Myka tries extra hard to keep her face straight because this... this isn't Helena confessing to yelling Myka's name whilst in the throes of passion with her high school girlfriend. And this isn't Helena telling everyone, back at the _dance_ club she used to work at, that she had a girlfriend named Myka, just to keep the regulars and the male staff off of her case. 

This... this was much bigger than _that_. 

"After Jules," Helena eventually clarifies after a longer than usual silence. "It wasn't viable."

Helena. Pregnant. Myka supposed it isn't a reach, really. Helena had never really mentioned, had never really talked about the details of her sex life. Not about condoms or birth control or pregnancy scares or... a wealth of other things that Myka did not understand. Things that Myka could not even classify as foreign language because foreign languages, she understood. 

_This_ , she most certainly did not.

"Vanessa is the only one that knows," Helena adds softly, almost guiltily, "and now you."

Helena falls quiet and Myka watches her eyes drift from the walls just behind her and to her eyes with some hint of expectation, or anticipation.

Eventually, "Say something, please?"

"You were pregnant," is all Myka can think to say. To echo her words, it is the safest thing Myka can think to say. And Helena is close to rolling over on that bed and away from Myka in that way she tends to do, when Myka says, "You are beautiful." This stills Helena, brings Helena's eyes back to Myka's. "You are... a beautiful woman and you, Helena, are my girlfriend. You're _mine_ , I love you. And you were pregnant." Another pause, Myka licks her lips. "You are _still_ mine. I _still_ love you and I am not going anywhere."

That fine line, between seventeen and eighteen, between lovemaking and not... it is growing thinner and thinner every night. Every day. 

*** 

It's the anniversary of the accident and Myka doesn't go to class. She doesn't set her alarm, doesn't wake up early, doesn't wake Helena up either. 

When Myka does wake up, when Helena is still asleep in her bed, she tidies up, she makes breakfast, she boils water for Helena's tea. 

Myka is seated at the breakfast bar reading when Helena wakes up and shuffles straight to her, into her arms, and hugs her tight. Myka returns that hug, wrapping Helena securely in her arms, squeezing her at her waist gently. 

"I love you. _Thank_ you."

Myka kisses her cheek wordlessly and Helena, just as silently, shuffles her way into the bathroom and closes the door. 

***

They're rushing to head out the door to make it to the memorial back in town when there's a light knock.

Helena answers and is immediately beside herself but still manages a very soft utterance of Kelly's name before she is pulling her friend into her arms and hugging her tight. 

"I thought you were in Texas for the summer?"

"Well," she starts. 

"Finally," Myka is sighing from behind where Helena still stands, holding tight to Kelly, in the doorway and Helena immediately turns to Myka, curiosity taking over that beautiful concerned face. "I was running out of reasons to stall."

" _You_ did this?"

"Not exactly," Myka smirks.

Helena turns back to Kelly who shrugs, just a little dismissively, and says, "I promised that mute munchkin that I'd be there. A promise is a promise. My _'uela_ has always said that."

"Yes," Helena says softly, turning back to Myka and presenting her with a slight brow arch, a small and knowing smirk, "keeping promises seems to be a popular theme this summer."

Myka can't resist kissing that mischievous smile before ushering both Kelly and Helena out of the door as they fall into the beginnings of conversation that, for Myka, never ever seems to end. 

"I think of you two," Kelly says when Myka is starting the car, "every time I see a bright-as-fuck rainbow in the sky."

***

Mr. Cho leads this memorial and the entire Cho family is present. They are one of many families in town who are. And neither Myka's mother nor Jane are terribly religious or any bit of religious at all but the Donovans had been. They attended church with the Chos, so it seemed only right...

Laila and even Leila greet Myka with huge hugs. Laila tells her how much she misses her, Leila is less forthcoming about such sentiments but does ask where she's been.

When they see Claudia, they are both wrapping themselves entirely around her, holding her tight. They don't let go until Mrs. Cho calls them over, waves a hello at Myka in the process. 

For the first time since last year, Abigail smiles at Myka. She smiles and then squints at the older girl by Myka's side, at their hands joined between them, before throwing her arms around Myka and whispering into her ear, "Told you so."

They part wordlessly and she slips away to stand with her mother, brothers, and sisters as Mr. Cho begins the ceremony. 

***

It's been a year since she's seen him but he is there. Clean, full of guilt, wearing the appearance of sobriety. He is nearly unrecognizable and he is hidden several yards away, in the shadows of two trees, not quite behind the trunk of one of those trees but leaning a hand into it. 

Myka hears her mother's whispers to Jane first, Jane's whispers to her mother, then several other whispers and several other questions. She sees the glances and follows those glances back to him. Her father. The reason they are all here to begin with.

Myka turns and she doesn't quite know she's walking or how fast until she hears Helena call out to her, reach for her hand, just barely miss being able to grasp it, and call again. Her voice so very far behind Myka.

She is only feet away from him when she stops, when she narrows her eyes on him and says, "You don't get to be here."

"I'm sure your mother told you," he ignores her, "about my heart attack ."

"You're a drunk. If you didn't drink so much, maybe your heart would be capable of functioning properly, long enough, _well_ enough to _operate_ a car. To not kill entire families, to not cripple your so-called friends or sponsors or cover stories, whatever the case may be." Myka feels herself growing warm and it is already warm enough outside but she is much warmer, heated emotionally and physically. "Maybe then your heart would be capable of caring about someone, anyone at all, other than yourself."

"I haven't had a drop since the accident."

"Congratulations," she spits out. "How much did you have _before_ the accident?"

"Rebecca has forgiven me, even when there was nothing to forgive. I don't know why you can't. Your mother has, for everything, and you can't forgive your own father."

"I don't even _know_ my own father. I only know a man who thinks love is a balled up fist or a slap to the face. My lack of forgiveness should not come as a surprise to you!" Myka's voice rises and she immediately lowers it. "You are not a father to me, you're a sperm donor. You are terrifying and you are angry, you've made _me_ angry, and the only thing I know about you, other than that, is that you did not hesitate, not one single second, when you tried to _kill_ me."

His response to this is to look away, to reach a hand to the back of his neck. He doesn't even raise his voice when he says, "That wasn't really me."

"Right," Myka is laughing, she turns to walk away but walks immediately back, "and I suppose it was the boogeyman then, who pushed me to the ground, who sat on top of me, who thought nothing at all of me.. before trying to _strangle_ me!"

"That wasn't _me_. Not really. And I'm sorry you don't know who I am because you have no memory of my sobriety. But that wasn't me. _This_ is me. This, as I am right now, is your father. Who you take after. Where you get your love of books--"

"Try calling yourself my father again," Myka steps closer to him. "I don't _have_ a father."

"Myka--"

"You do not get to be here!" 

Helena is by her side, slipping her hand into Myka's, lifting her other hand to Myka's cheek and turning Myka to face her. 

"Baby," she says softly, and Myka knows it is purposeful, that pet name. It is purposeful in the presence of her father because Helena has never used it before but even now, on those lips, from that mouth, that voice in her ears... Myka shuts her eyes tight at the sound of that device, more for her father than anything else. It moves her, in some small way, it breaks through all of this anger and frustration and maddening thought, and it moves her in a way that makes her heart swell. She turns to Helena, lowers her head into that hand at her cheek, reaches for Helena's wrist to hold that hand in place... to steady her, to keep her grounded. 

"It's okay," Helena whispers and Myka opens her eyes to worried brown eyes, those too sad and concentrated brows. "Let him stay in the shadows. He belongs there."

Her mother's hands are soon on her shoulders, Jane is soon moving to stand in front of her, Kelly just behind Jane, Pete, Tracy, Jeannie, all nearby, too. 

And Claudia, little tiny Claudia, steps up beside Myka and reaches to her until Myka drops her hand to her side. Claudia slips her tiny hand into Myka's from where she stands and squeezes that tiny hand around Myka's. 

"He can stay."

Everyone turns to Claudia, to the sound of that tiny voice that hasn't said anything for almost one year. They turn and they wait and Claudia looks up to Myka, to Jane and Kelly, and finally to Myka's father. 

"Let him stay, I won't let him hurt you," and she follows that threat with a cold and quiet glare in Myka's father's direction. 

Kelly bends to Claudia and lifts that girl into her arms. And Claudia isn't all that much smaller than Kelly to begin with, Claudia is almost eight and she is growing like a weed, but Kelly lifts her up and holds her close and she carries her, with everyone else eventually trailing close behind them, back to the gravesite of her mother, her father. Her older sister. 

***

" _Preciosa_ ," Kelly is telling Claudia who smiles up at her from where they lie side by side in the guest bed that is swiftly becoming Claudia's room at the Lattimer home. 

"Precious?" Claudia questions with her own tiny arched brow and Kelly nods a single nod to her. 

"You are above us all," Kelly says softly and kisses her forehead. "You are an angel."

Claudia turns away at that and her smile isn't so much a smile anymore. She says, "I don't believe in angels."

Helena's arms squeeze gently around Myka's waist, where she sits on the side of that bed, Helena sitting just behind her and resting her chin over Myka's shoulder. 

"That's okay." Kelly touches a finger to Claudia's little ear and the girl smiles again, holds back a small laugh, before turning back to Kelly. 

"Is it really okay?"

Kelly nods. 

"It's just that Pastor Cho says Mom and Dad and Claire are angels. He says they're in heaven together and they're happy and they're smiling down on me but..." 

They wait, quietly, for Claudia to collect her thoughts. They wait quietly because it has been a year since they've heard this tiny voice and they do not want to stop hearing it. And for Kelly, she has never heard this voice before today but she and Claudia, even in her silence, had formed a bond like Myka had never seen. Like they'd known each other forever. So they wait in silence because it is the least they can do. 

If Claudia can wait one year in silence for everyone, for everything, they can wait ten seconds. 

"But why would they be so happy without me, why would they be smiling when I'm not there, too? When they left me alone down here?"

Helena moves her face into Myka's back at that moment and Myka reaches her hand to Helena's, still at her waist, and laces their fingers together. The heavy exhale that is muffled against her back comes as no surprise. Myka herself seems to have _something_ in her eye because they well up, warm and stinging with tears. 

"I know he's just trying to make me feel better." 

"You're not alone," Kelly whispers to her because Kelly is so much better at this. Kelly, who lost her own parents at such a young age in much of a similar manner, is brought so much closer to Claudia by this. "You are never alone, Munchkin. You hear me?"

Claudia nods, smiles, wraps her tiny arms around Kelly then extends one of those tiny arms to reach for Myka, to Helena, too. 

"I don't think Claire is an angel but I think if she were, she _would_ be happy that I have five big sisters and one big brother taking care of me now."

They are a mess of tears. 

It isn't until the drive home, the drive back to the city, that anyone brings up the fact that they all know she means Pete, when she speaks of her older brother, and not Josh. 

***

Myka gives the bed to Helena and Kelly while she takes up space on the couch. Sleep evades her most of the night, she turns and turns and turns to her everlasting discomfort. 

It's after midnight, judging by Myka's watch, when she is half asleep and waking to the sound of a toilet flushing. Of running water. Of the familiar sound of footsteps against soft hardwood. And in seconds there is a warm body climbing onto the couch next to her, a head coming to rest over her shoulder, a hand falling just over her heart. 

Myka makes room for Helena, scoots back on that couch, holds Helena closer to her. 

"Can't sleep?" she asks of the older girl, _her_ older girl. The thought makes her smile. Helena shakes her head and pushes her nose into Myka's neck, kisses her there. 

"I thought of you," Helena whispers. 

"Don't you always?" Myka teases, gently poking a finger into Helena's side.

"Love," Helena squirms only slightly and there is fleeting amusement in her voice. "I'm being honest."

"Is this another confession?" is Myka's whispered response. 

"Yes."

"You thought of me?"

"With Giselle," it is almost too soft for Myka to hear, "when I said your name."

"When you _yelled_ my name?"

"When I _cried_ your name."

"You were crying," Myka exhales. 

"Please tell me that's okay," Helena whispers. 

Myka is quiet because she is lost in that thought of how very okay it is but Helena's hand on her arm, Helena saying her name, breaks into her thoughts. Brings her back to the current place and time, where her over worried girlfriend is waiting for some sort of validation that there is nothing wrong with her.

Helena, it seems, is always and forever and perpetually awaiting this validation. 

"Myka--"

"It's okay."

Helena kisses her jaw before resting against Myka again. 

"I tried not to love you," Helena says softly, "I really did but after... and after Charlie..." Helena is shaking her head, even against Myka's shoulder, and her hand, still on Myka's arm, squeezes gently, her thumb slowly stroking the skin there.

Myka sighs, "I wish with all of my heart that you didn't have to go through those things to realize how irresistible I am." Myka feels Helena laughing softly in the way her body moves against hers, in the way Helena then moves closer to her. Myka reaches her fingers into Helena's hair and adds, more seriously, "I know you think that one of these days you're going to say something that scares me off."

Helena's eyes meet Myka's, even in near darkness those too sad eyebrows tug at Myka's heart. Even in near darkness, Myka can see the smirk that tries so very hard to pull across those lips.

"I'm really good at scaring people off," Helena says softly. "If you haven't noticed."

"Babe," Myka sighs, closing her eyes and leaning her forehead into Helena's. "Try me." 

Myka presses a kiss to sleepy, lazy lips that really do seem to try but a tiny nasally whimper escapes Helena just before a soft, apologetic whisper. And that is soon followed by the tiniest snore which is followed by a snore that is not quite as tiny as that. 

Myka can't help but smile. She can't help the puff of laughter that escapes her just as she presses another kiss into those sleepy lips.

"Goodnight, Helena."

***

Kelly's grandmother, the one who raised her, is suddenly ill and Kelly tries to play it off as though it's not imperative that she return home the second she gets that call from her sister but Helena is insistent she leaves. Helena even offers to pay for her ticket home, to fly home with her. 

At first, Kelly refuses but when the second call comes, not long after she decides she will, at least, fly home early, it moves her in a way that Myka has never seen of Kelly before.

Pete comes up for the weekend to see her off and it isn't the first time they've been open about the thing they've had between them for the past seven months, but it is the first time it has ever looked so very real. And it is more than just this goodbye because Pete is leaving for bootcamp soon and Kelly likely will not be back before he does. So it is more than just _this_ goodbye but it is also somewhat indefinite.

So Pete and Kelly _disappear_ for what Myka assumes will be most of the night because they don't say anything, they don't leave any note. They are one minute making out in the area that is designated as Myka's living room and the next minute gone.

Helena refuses to let Kelly go home alone, to deal with what might be a very difficult time all by herself or with only her older sister who would be more useful if she did absolutely nothing at all, so Helena is packing a much smaller suitcase, borrowed from Myka. That suitcase is on the bed and Helena is on one side of the bed, throwing clothes into it while Myka is on the opposite end of the bed, reaching in to fold the clothes that are so haphazardly being thrown into it.

"How can someone so tidy be so awful at packing?" Myka jokes as she drops another article of Helena's clothing into the suitcase. Helena is quiet but looks across the bed at Myka with a single brow arched in her direction. 

The next shirt she throws lands, conveniently, over Myka's head.

"You're just proving me right," Myka grins innocently back at Helena.

Helena squints her eyes, holds up a finger to wordlessly beckon Myka over to her. And Myka laughs softly because she goes to her so willingly. She would always, _will_ always go to this woman _this_ willingly. But where she's sure Helena would expect her to stop and to wait as Helena tilts her head to gaze almost disapprovingly at Myka, she does not stop.

Myka doesn't stop. She _reaches_ until her hands are on hips and pulling Helena into her and she _leans_ into Helena until her lips are over lips in this, one of so many, casual kisses that sends her head and her heart and her entire being reeling out into an abyss of love and splendor and even some sliver of what she's sure is a false hope of eternity. 

Helena smiles when they are apart and brings her arms around Myka's neck, rests her forehead against Myka's cheek.

"I have another confession," Helena sighs softly.

"Let me guess," Myka smiles, pulling her closer, "you're gonna miss me? Like, a lot?"

"I _am_ going to miss you," Helena nods, "but that isn't what I have to confess."

"So get to confessing then," Myka whispers.

"Vanessa," Helena begins, Myka is already pulling slightly away, "doesn't live very far from Kelly's grandmother..." Myka's hands fall away from Helena's hips. "Myka, I just... want to go say hi, it's not anything more than that."

Myka nods and lowers her head, looks away from Helena, anywhere that isn't at Helena because she wants this to not feel like it's a bad idea. She wants this to not feel like it hurts and she wants to be able to truly and happily tell Helena that she's free to do whatever she wants. Helena is free to do whatever she wants but _this_ of all the things Helena should want... _this_...

So Myka looks away when she says, "It's okay, Helena," because she wants Helena to know that it is okay, she doesn't want Helena to see that it is most definitely not all that okay. 

Helena is reaching to Myka now, pulling Myka into her, kissing Myka's cheek. 

"It's just a quick visit, Myka, I told you we aren't... not anymore... never really were," and Helena kisses her cheek again and whispers after a long moment of silence, after several long moments standing there with her eyes on Myka, "I think, maybe, I've found that thing... that scares you away." Helena tugs her closer, "Please don't run." 

Helena kisses her and Myka sighs against those lips of hers as they part, as Helena's hand comes to the sleeve of Myka's shirt and tugs just a little.

"I love you, I've waited a long time for you," Helena swallows, lowering her own head for a moment before looking up expectantly once again. "Myka?"

"I'm not running, Helena" Myka tells her, meeting her gaze. "I'm not scared."

One of these things is a lie. 

"You're upset."

"I'll get over it."

"Myka, I don't want you to be upset, if it upsets you... I won't go. I'll just--"

"Helena, I can't help the way it makes me feel," Myka is turning away from Helena, returning to her side of the bed, folding and packing clothes that had already been folded and packed. "I trust you. Regardless of how I feel. So go, please. I'm not going to be the person who stops you from doing what you want to do or visiting people that you love just... just because we're... _together_."

It sounds strange aloud, when she says it. When she acknowledges with those words that they _are_ together. It sounds weird and untrue and it makes the way she feels, about her _girlfriend_ going to visit some other woman she'd once had sex with, that she'd once used to cope with _whatever_ , seem almost asinine. 

"Please, go visit Ms. Calder," Myka eventually sighs, "I still love you. I'll still be here when you come home."

Myka doesn't look up at Helena, doesn't see how Helena moves to her until she is almost on her, pushing against her, stepping on the tips of her own toes to kiss Myka, pushing back curls, pushing _her_ back until she is flush against the bathroom door, pushing her mouth against Myka's mouth, her tongue, also, against Myka's. 

They part breathlessly, eventually, and Helena, who is giving Myka the most enraptured look Myka has ever seen from those brown eyes, says, "I wish," and breathes, heavily, then, "I want so badly to show you, Myka..." she seems to lose herself in the thought, eyes moving all over the features of Myka's face, eyes finding Myka's eyes again. "To show you how very much I want _you_. And no one else. But I...."

With a shake of her head, Helena pushes herself away from Myka and returns to the other side of the bed, resumes stuffing her clothes into her suitcase.

Myka, across from her, resumes folding those clothes and neatly placing those clothes into Helena's suitcase... until the next thing Helena tosses at her are pajama bottoms and Myka smiles and holds them up and gives Helena a look that she hopes is as playful as she means for it to be. 

"I'm happy to see that you won't be leaving your pajamas in London," Myka tells her with a coy smile. 

It works to deescalate this situation, to cut out most of the tension, because Helena smiles and allows herself a low laugh, an eyeroll, while reaching to tug the article of clothing from Myka's hands. 

"Shut up," Helena says throwing the pajamas back at her and sighing, tilting her head to the side. "I love you, Myka. Okay?"

"I know you do," Myka smiles. "Please, finish packing so we can get this thing off the bed and get ourselves into it."

***

It takes a stupidly long time for Myka to let go of Helena, for Pete to do the same with Kelly, only to watch them disappear down that long corridor together, to look back and wave and smile, to test both Pete's and Myka's ability to stay put and watch them go.

They are back in the apartment, both of them sinking sullenly into that overstuffed couch, when Myka says, "I can't even imagine how much worse this is going to be when she goes back to London."

Pete points to himself and says, "This much worse, Mykes."

"I'm sorry, Pete," Myka is shaking her head. "Why does becoming an adult have to suck so much?"

"Mykes," Pete sighs, slapping his hand to her leg, "tonight sounds like a good night for ordering in, watching movies, and catching up... wouldn't you say?"

"As long as we're not ordering from that godawful Chinese place up the street and I don't have to sit through you playing video games, I _am_ game."

"You're the worst little sister," Pete says side-eyeing her. "Claud could spend an entire weekend watching me play video games. She loves it."

"She doesn't _love it_. She's waiting for you to let her play, Pete. And the only reason you don't is because you know she'll probably annihilate you." Pete only shrugs at the accusation.

"Well, lucky for her since I'm giving her all my games when I leave. Kid's gotta do something to keep herself entertained, what with everyone slowly moving out," Pete is looking around the couch, beneath cushions, behind the couch, turns to Myka and asks, "Don't you have a phone around here somewhere?"

"I don't keep my phone _in the couch_." She hands him her cell phone. "Call for pizza, I'm going to shower."

***

One pizza and two movies later, Pete has fallen into a food coma, snuggled up to a pillow on the floor, and Myka is half-asleep on the couch when she hears the muffled ringing of her cell phone.

It takes her a good three rings to find it, squished somewhere between the couch cushions of course, and answer Helena's call.

"Hey, hi," she answers. "You made it safely?"

"Yes, Myka... are you okay?"

"I'm fine. I just had to fish my phone out of the couch is all," Myka laughs softly, retreating to her bed and falling lazily onto it. "Is Kelly okay? Any word on her grandmother?"

"We came straight to the hospital," Helena sighs. "Her sister... was not very comprehensive in relaying just how bad their grandmother's condition is." Helena lowers her voice when she also says, "She has _hours,_ Myka."

"She hasn't been away from home for even two weeks, did she know she was ill already?"

"I haven't been able to get that much out of her but I suspect she thought she could make it go away but avoiding it altogether," Helena sighs on the phone. "Anyway, I just wanted to call and let you know we are here and we'll probably be in the hospital quite a bit, so I won't be able to answer my phone right away."

"Yeah, of course, that's okay, I'll just leave a message or," Myka rolls her eyes at herself, shrugs for no reason in particular, "just wait for you to call me."

"All right. I'll let you go," Helena's voice softens even more. "Get some sleep."

"I don't think I'll be able to sleep without you snoring in my ear," Myka teases and it's meant to be sarcastic, that tease, but after they say their goodbyes, after Helena tells Myka, "I love you" and Myka tells Helena how much she loves her, how much of a saint she is for being there in Texas with Kelly, Myka closes her eyes and tries very hard to fall asleep in that bed without Helena beside her. 

But these pillows smell like Helena and these blankets and sheets are too neat and it's oddly cold without that other body beside her, despite that other body's frosty hands and feet constantly finding warmth against Myka's own stomach and legs. 

So Myka is wide awake for the longest and finally, at three in the morning, she sends Helena a text message. It takes her a while to navigate the numbers and their associated letters but eventually she manages:

**_Dear Diary. I miss Helena's snoring._**

And she sets the phone on her nightstand to stare up at the ceiling, at absolutely nothing at all until the response, that she almost isn't expecting, comes:

**_Dear Diary, I miss Myka's incessant night coughing._ **

It makes Myka smile. 

**_Dear Diary, I miss Helena's freezing hands on my ribcage._ **

****

**_Diary, I miss Myka always pushing the blankets off of me._ **

****

**_I miss Helena taking up 88.7% of the bed._ **

****

**_I miss Myka's stealing of kisses when she thinks I'm fast asleep._ **

****

**_I miss Helena's very bad impression of being fast asleep._ **

Myka thinks Helena must _actually_ be asleep because the next text doesn't come immediately. But almost half an hour later...

**_Miss you. Zzz. xo_ **

****

It wouldn't be the first time Helena's fallen asleep with her phone in her hands. 

****

**_Goodnight, Helena._ **

Myka grabs one of those Helena scented pillows from her bed and moves to the couch where she falls asleep in no time at all. 

***

It takes two nights of bad sleep for Myka to realize she is better off on the couch than she is in that empty bed. The night after that, she doesn't sleep at all because Kelly's grandmother passes away and Helena is on the phone, unable to sleep with Kelly curled up beside her, having cried herself to sleep. And Helena doesn't say it but Myka knows that Helena cried right along with her. 

What Helena does say is a lot of things about loss and death and she slips back into this space where her thoughts are on the Donovans, on Claire, even little Claudia. So Myka doesn't sleep because she is on the phone with Helena, mostly to keep her talking long enough to move through these thoughts, to explore them and talk them out and move past them so that, when they are no longer on the phone, she isn't lying in bed thinking of nothing but these thoughts. 

She does eventually find some ray of hope in all of this, in the fact that when she gets home and back to Myka, they'll still have nearly a month and a half together. 

"I'm okay now," Helena reassures Myka whose eyelids are heavy, who has had to struggle to keep up with the flow of Helena's thoughts. "I'll stop talking your ear off. Go to bed."

"Helena," Myka smiles sleepily, "never stop talking my ear off. It helps me sleep."

"You are a brat," Helena tells her and is quiet a moment more. "I love you. Get some sleep."

"I'll see you in a week?"

"Abouts."

"Okay, call me if you need to talk more."

"You mean when you're ready for a nap?" Myka hears the soft laugh, the smile in her voice.

"Then, too, but also if you just need to talk. I'm a great listener."

"Of course you are, you've been listening to me bitch and moan about everything for your entire life." 

Myka can't help but laugh at that. At how very true that statement is but also about how she very certainly has been listening to Helena talk for almost that long. 

How she would listen to Helena talk for the rest of her life. 

***

"I'm at Vanessa's tonight," Helena is telling her a week and a half later. One and a half weeks worth of restless, couch-sleeping nights later. "She's going to take me to the airport in the morning. I'll email you the itinerary."

"All right..."

That same feeling begins to set into Myka's core again. But when she speaks, it is with a mask because Helena is an adult and Helena is an independent person and Helena can do whatever she likes with whoever she wants to do that thing with.

"...tell her I say hello..."

Except, Myka thinks, in the case where Helena cannot do such things with _her_ and has historically found ways to compensate for this lack of things by seeking them out elsewhere...

"...and Hugo, too, I guess."

Suddenly, Myka's voice is not very well masked at all. 

"Oh," Helena says and pauses but the way she says that 'oh'... Myka thinks saying anything more would be pointless because Myka already expects to hear what Helena then says afterward, "Vanessa and Hugo... separated."

"Of course they did," Myka meant to say under breath, if not only in her head. 

" _Myka_ ," it's the beginnings of that scolding tone. 

"It's just really convenient," Myka is rolling her eyes, mostly at herself, because she did not want to go here. She didn't want it to get to this point, she did not want to vocalize her thoughts or touch this subject, not even with a fifty foot pole. "That's all."

"I asked if you were upset about this, Myka. I told you..."

"And I said I would get over it and I will, Helena. Just go and have fun and whatever happens or doesn't happen, I'll worry about it later."

"Myka, do you really have that little trust in me?" Helena sounds rightfully affronted. 

"You told me once that you use sex to cope--"

"No." 

Myka stops. 

"You do not get to use these things, that I tell you in confidence because I _love_ you and because I _trust_ you, against me, Myka."

"I'm sorry, it's just you've chosen wrong before. You told me that yourself, Helena." Myka wants, somehow, to stop talking. To take back everything she's saying as she is saying it. But she also, somehow, cannot seem to stop these thoughts from materializing, from turning to words, from escaping her. "You told me..."

"I also told you that it's not like that anymore. I told you that it's not even... you can't just take some of the things that I say without taking all of the things that I say." Helena sighs, frustrated. Myka can already picture her pushing her hair back in that frustration, strangling the air with that same hand while trying to think of some _thing_ to say. But all that comes is another deep frustrated sigh of Myka's name. 

"You weren't exactly forthcoming with this information," Myka accuses. "How long have you known they were separated? Since before you left? Is that the _reason_ you're visiting her?"

Helena is quiet. 

"Right. You can't just tell me some of the story and not all of the story. Helena."

"I didn't want you to _freak out_ about it, Myka. Much like what you're doing right now."

"So why even tell me? Why not just continue to keep it to yourself?"

"Myka, have you not been paying attention to what I have been saying?" Myka can hear her voice break, can imagine the tears already. "I am _trying_ to be open and honest with you. It has to be better for us, in the long run. You have been my friend for so long, you know more about me than _anyone_ , Myka. I don't want that to change just because... just because we are..." Another frustrated sigh and Myka imagines Helena rolling her eyes, throwing an arm out in surrender. "A million _bloody_ years apart."

A long silence follows where Myka is wiping away her own tears, biting down on her own lip, pushing curls out of her face. Helena lets go of another sigh and is suddenly apologetic. 

"I'm sorry, Myka," and Myka listens only to her unsteady breathing for several long seconds. "I'm sorry, I should have just told you from the start. I'm trying and I'm doing this all wrong."

"Helena--"

"I'll stay here with Kelly, at her grandmother's. I'll have Kelly's sister take me to the airport."

"Helena, no."

"Vanessa will understand. She _understands_... how much this means to me..."

Myka sighs because she understands, too, even despite herself, how much Vanessa means to Helena. How much that friendship, no matter how fragile, has always meant to Helena. Even if only in some small way now. She understands and she wants Helena to know she understands. 

"Helena, please go see Vanessa," Myka says softly, "I guess I am just not over that part of your past yet. But I meant what I said, I don't want to keep you from anyone. I am not trying to control you. I am in no position to ask or expect anything from you."

"The part that you don't get, Myka, is that you _are_ in that position. You are in _exactly_ that position and because that's where you are, when it comes to loyalty and... monogamy or _whatever_ it is you want to call it, you don't _have_ to ask me for it. Myka, you have it. I am _yours_." 

***

No one says a word to them when they kiss and it is long and perfect and everything at the end of that corridor where Helena wastes no time dropping her backpack this time, to stretch immediately up and into Myka's arms and Myka's arms, waiting and ready and reaching, wrap Helena securely against her. 

There is no wait for luggage this time. Myka takes the handle of Helena's borrowed carry-on suitcase into one hand, takes Helena's hand into her other. And she leads them out of that place, to the parking lot, to the car and eventually home. To what they happily call _their_ home. 

***

They try. 

Myka would give herself a pat on the back for how very hard they try not to walk, or run, down this long-forbidden path. She would give Helena a pat on the back, too. Except...

There is a trail of evidence which leads from her very front door, starting with that suitcase, Helena's backpack... and moving through the living area with Myka's keys, Helena's cardigan, two discarded hair ties... just beside that partition two abandoned pairs of shoes, four socks... on the floor beside the bathroom, Myka's glasses, tossed carelessly aside by Helena who is very insistent that they can always buy a new pair whenever, wherever, _whatever_...

They try and in the end, they don't really have to try so hard because...

"That pair is special," Myka tells Helena between very persistent kisses followed by a very long pause and an arch of Helena's brow. "You bought them for me."

"You need to make an eye appointment so you can get new glasses before I go," Helena tells Myka, who returns that arched brow and a smile. 

Myka is rolling onto her back, away from Helena, palming her forehead, "How dare you mention the time which we do not speak of."

"Myka." Helena side-eyes her. "When is the last time you even saw a doctor?"

"I'm not sick."

"That night cough, Myka..."

"Are we really having this conversation right now?" Helena sighs wordlessly and pushes down the skirt she wears, that Myka's hands had not long ago pushed up along very sensitive thighs. Myka sits up to turn a smirk on Helena, "Clever."

"What?" Helena asks affronted, and Myka laughs at how very _English_ Helena sounds in that moment.

"You're purposely changing the topic. I'm sorry," Myka leans back into Helena and sets a kiss on her forehead. "I should be better at not wanting to touch every inch of you."

"It's not the touching or the every inch that is the problem," Helena says as she sits up and moves off of the bed, to Myka's drawers where her clothes take up half of that space. "It's drawing the line somewhere before those last couple of inches that is the problem." Helena's back is facing Myka when she slumps her shoulders, digging through that drawer, and sighs again. "I don't know where..."

She falls quiet, too quiet, and seconds later, Myka is moving into the space behind her, hands on Helena's waist, wrapping around that waist. Myka's lips falling to the back of Helena's neck, kissing that neck. 

"I'm starting not to care and that scares me," Helena says softly. 

"Why does it scare you?" 

Helena turns in Myka's arms, holding the clothes she's retrieved from the drawer tight against her chest, lowering her head just before looking up at Myka again. 

"I don't want to hurt you," Helena says softly. "I don't want to push you or encourage you or ask it of you because I don't want to find out, years from now, that I've hurt you... in some way... _this_ way."

"Hmm," Myka hums and nods slowly. 

"Even if it isn't your age," Helena continues, "even if it's just that we are together and it's for all the wrong reasons. If I'm with you for all the wrong reasons. If I'm just coping again... like always... because it... this, _us_ , makes me feel good and, to me, that feels like coping. It feels unrealistic. It feels like a temporary solution and..." Helena closes her eyes tight and shakes her head, as if to shake her thoughts into submission, as if trying to rearrange them entirely in her mind, until finally, "it feels like a feeling that isn't meant for me, that I don't deserve to feel."

Helena opens glistening eyes to Myka and runs her hand through her hair, exhales one long candlestick breath through parted lips. Myka's hands rise to the sides of Helena's face, to push her hair behind her ears, to pull Helena into her until they are close enough that their lips brush softly together. The kiss that Myka gives Helena is just as soft, just as light as that touch and when they part, Myka bites down on her own lip, smiles down on Helena. 

"Are you happy?" Myka asks her in a whisper and Helena nods, slowly and cautiously. "I'm happy," Myka tells her. "You know what it feels like, when someone takes advantage of you. When someone is hurting you. Does it feel like happiness? Does it feel like love? _All_ of the time?" Helena's expression turns thoughtful and curious and she shakes her head. Myka smiles and nods, "I know what that feels like, too," Myka says softly, " _this_ does not feel like _that_." Helena takes in a deep breath, her mouth falling open as if to speak but she says nothing, only watches Myka, searches those eyes, clamps her lips tightly together again. "Okay?"

Helena nods slowly again and Myka places another feathered kiss against now parted lips, and on the bridge of Helena's nose, a third on her forehead. 

"I love you, Helena," Myka tells her. "We'll get there when we're ready, both of us, and not one day sooner than that. And by ready I don't mean eighteen, I mean _really_ ready. Emotionally ready. Even if it takes until my thirtieth birthday--"

Helena gasps and narrows her eyes at Myka, "Well, now you just sound like a lunatic."

Myka shakes her head and laughs softly as Helena laughs, and she kisses that laugh, that smile, that playful expression that breaks through the worry and the guilt and insecurity. 

"Maybe not thirty," she whispers against Helena's lips and Myka kisses that smile again, once and twice before she sighs and steps back, puts space between the two of them and sits back on her bed.

"Maybe twenty-one," Helena winks falling into Myka's lap and kissing her again. "Maybe... nineteen."

Myka's hands move to Helena's waist, to hold her closer and pull her further into her lap as she whispers into that older woman's ear with a smile on her own lips, "Or maybe even seventeen and a third."

Helena rolls her eyes but kisses Myka anyway, tells her softly, "I'm going to shower," and stands quickly to her feet, with her clothes in hand, "I would ask you to join me, if I thought you could keep your hands to yourself."

" _Yeah_ ," Myka grins and Helena is already tugging off that skirt, letting it fall to the floor, stepping out of it and toward the bathroom, "probably not."

"Okay," Helena smiles, bending to pick up Myka's glasses from the floor and tossing them back on the bed behind her, "you should really take care of these, love. I bought them just for you. They're very special." Helena winks before slipping into the bathroom and closing the door behind her.

Myka just smiles and shakes her head as she goes. 

***

They concede to one more family dinner the week Myka's Fall classes begin and the week before Helena is to return home. 

This dinner is much smaller than the one hosted at Jane's house because this dinner is hosted in Myka's tiny apartment. This dinner's attendees are limited only to Jane, Myka's mother, Claudia, Myka, and one very overdue Helena Wells. 

"Where is Helena?" Myka's mother asks. And she asks at least two more times before she starts into cooking that dinner, one she'd planned out with Helena over the phone, without her. It is halfway through cooking that dinner, when Jane is halfway through a glass of wine and Claudia is halfway through one of Myka's many not shelved books, that Helena finally arrives. 

Perfect timing, as Myka was just about to call her phone for the fifth time in fifty minutes. 

"Well well, Wells," Myka is teasing her as she comes through the door. 

"I'm sorry, love," Helena is dropping a purse to the floor, throwing her keys on top of Myka's desk and hurrying into the kitchen to wash her hands. "Jane, Jeannie, I'm so so sorry. I had lunch with Kelly and she kind of kidnapped me to one of her _cousin's_ cousin's baby showers across the city and _the traffic_... oh my god." Helena sighs, "I apologize."

"It's okay, girl. Calm down," Jane waves her off and takes another sip of her wine. "Kelly didn't want to join us?"

Helena is rolling her eyes and exhaling another deep breath when she says, "She is on her own program right now."

"Well that's a shame but I think I've got just about everything going, Helena," Jeannie smiles, greeting her with a hug and a kiss to the forehead. "Why don't you go get washed up or changed or whatever you need to do."

"You're a saint," Helena tells Myka's mother while turning to greet Myka. "Hi," she adds softly, leaning into a kiss. "I'm going to go change out of these..." she tugs on her clothes. Clothes that Myka can find absolutely nothing wrong with. 

"All right," Myka smiles. 

"I'll pour you a glass," Jane calls after Helena as she heads toward the bathroom, stopping just beside a couch-dwelling Claudia who is completely lost in her book until Helena drops her hand on her head and a kiss shortly after that. 

"Hello, Claud," Helena smiles patting her head. "What did you manage to get your hands on this time?"

"Hi H.G.," Claudia says turning only momentarily to smile back up at her. "Just another one of Myka's weirdo nerd books."

"Says the girl who devours all of my weirdo nerd books," Myka counters. 

Helena flashes a coy smile at Myka and tells Claudia, "Speaking of weirdo nerd books, I have a belated birthday present for you, I'll give it to you after dinner, okay?"

Claudia smiles and nods, returning to the book she is currently reading as Helena disappears into the bathroom. 

"Do you even know if you can read that?" Myka asks. 

"It has words," Claudia says without ever looking away from the book, "I can read it."

Myka turns a slightly annoyed eye on her mother who only shrugs and smiles. Myka tells her, "You two are rubbing off on her."

"What? It's a book. _It has words_. Let her read it," her mother shrugs, waving Myka off.

"Yeah, it's not like you have anything inappropriate or say, _adult_ around here," Jane says with a severe emphasis on that _adult_. Myka can't tell really if it's meant as sarcasm or as a warning until her mother shakes her head from where she stands in the kitchen over a boiling pot of water. 

"Myka is not interested in reading stuff like that," Jeannie says waving Jane off. "Are you Myka?"

Jane turns immediately to Myka with an expectant look on her face that soon gives way to a smile and, the longer Myka is silent, the harder Jane is trying not to laugh. 

It isn't until Jane can no longer hold that laugh in that Jeannie looks up to eye her daughter. 

"Myka?"

"Mom, we have a really good relationship right now. Please just... don't rock the boat."

Jeannie frowns as Jane's laughter grows, as Jane holds out her hand to Myka's mother and tells her, "Pay up, little lady."

Myka's mouth falls when her own mother, betrayer of all betrayers, pulls a ten dollar bill from her back pocket and slaps it into Jane's hand. This only makes Jane laugh even more and shake her head and wipe tears from her eyes. 

"You two..." Myka starts. 

"Bless your mother's heart for having so much faith in your innocence," Jane says as she calms down a bit and takes another sip of her wine. "If she'd had a boy..."

"I have _Tracy_ , Jane," Myka's mother scoffs. "If you'd asked me that same question about Tracy, there would be no bet."

"Tracy hates reading," Myka says softly. 

"Tracy would probably write her own book," her mother adds with a shake of her head. "And then only read it on audio cassettes, of course."

"They make books on CD now, Mom," Myka informs, her mother waves off the mere notion.

"Oh, but there would be a bet," Jane smiles. "On whether or not you'll make fifty before she makes you a grandmother."

"I wish I could argue that," Jeannie sighs, "I really do."

"You are both _awful_ ," Myka announces before she moves to the couch to sit down next to Claudia.

And Claudia, with all the seriousness and innocence that Myka's own mother, that Pete's mother, too, had long ago lost their hold on, asks Myka, "Why are there books for only adults? Does it have swear words?"

Myka looks back to where her mother and Jane are currently pretending they did not just hear that question coming from that tiny mouth. 

"Sometimes," Myka says, turning back to Claudia, "but mostly it's because adults are foolish and out of their minds."

"Oh, I see," Claudia nods. "Like your mom and Ms. Jane."

Myka smiles when both older women protest in unison and nods down at Claudia, "Yes, Pip. That is exactly right."

***

It is the night before Helena's flight and she should be asleep. Myka, too, should be asleep. But Helena is mostly awake, lying in bed on her back, with her arms and her hands propped under her head. And Myka is mostly awake, seated between Helena's long legs with her own legs crossed in front of her and with those long legs of Helena's folded up on either side of her.

She is leaning from side to side, kissing those knees. Trailing long fingers, and gentle fingertips, slowly, experimentally, up Helena's thighs. 

Myka sighs and presses her lips to the inside of Helena's right knee for several seconds, then just below that, against her inner-thigh, for several seconds more. And she is not quite at that spot, nowhere near it in fact, still... a sleepy, nasally whine escapes the woman who rests so lazily, so exposed in only a tank top and her cherished _knickers_ , just in front of her. 

"Go to sleep," Myka whispers softly to her, trailing her left hand over Helena's right knee. "This will be a lot easier for me to ignore if you just close your eyes."

"No," is all Helena offers to Myka before pulling her hands from under her head and reaching for Myka's hands. And with Myka's hands in her hands, Helena moves them low along her inner thighs, guides them carefully over that spot on one side which is mirrored by a similar spot on the other side. "Maybe I don't want you to ignore it."

That whisper induces goosebumps all along her arms, makes the hairs of Myka's skin rise.

"Helena," Myka's voice falls even more softly. "You don't want this." But when Helena removes her hands from Myka's hands, still over the inner part of her thighs, Myka doesn't move her hands away. Instead she watches Helena, watches Helena smile softly, watches Helena close her eyes and tilt her head to the side. Watches Helena's lips move as she tells Myka, with that voice that Myka used to call her Giselle voice, the one that Myka now calls her _Ophelia_ voice, " _This_... is not that."

Myka smiles and moves onto her knees, her hands never moving away from those thighs, and it is when she settles there, on her knees, between Helena's legs and with her hands on Helena's thighs, that she challenges that older woman. Because no, this is not _that_. It is not that at all... but it is not very far from that. It is almost _exactly_ that. 

"Where is the line?" Myka asks her. "Because I think, in all of these nights, we are as close to it now as we have ever been."

"Hmm," Helena hums softly, turning all at once to eye Myka through the slits of barely-open eyelids. With that look which is searching for more and with that voice which is already thick and needy. 

Helena's smile grows, wide and mischievous, and Myka knows that she is done for.

"Are we too close... _Einstein_?"

Myka grins. 

She grips those thighs tight and she has barely gripped those thighs at all before this sound, this beautiful soft moan of a sound, escapes Helena. And Myka is pulling Helena to her and firmly against her by that grip she has on those thighs and this, too, elicits some sweet sound from those lips that she has never heard before. 

Not even from Abigail has she heard that sound. Not even through Abigail has she seen the way a woman's body can bend and shudder and squirm beneath her touch. 

Not like this. Not with barely a touch. 

It's startling at first. She wants to ask Helena if she's okay, if this is okay, like she'd always done with Abigail. Like Abigail had always done with her. But something in the way Helena stretches out, in the way Helena's hips rise toward that grip that Myka has on her thighs, something about all of this tells her that Helena is okay. That Helena is _more_ than okay. 

It is another confession, the way Helena's body moves at Myka's touch. It is another confession and Myka doesn't want to speak to that confessor, does not dare to interrupt that confession. Not yet. 

Helena slips somehow further away and Myka grips her thighs again, pulls that woman back into her until Helena's ass is in Myka's lap and Helena's legs are straddling Myka's torso and Helena's precious _knickers_ are just below Myka's hands on her thighs, just at the edge of her fingertips. 

"Myka," Helena breathes. And it isn't a plea or a question or a cry induced by some sad thought of a fourteen year old girl who had once saved her life. It is a demand, the way Helena says her name. It is that scolding tone that Helena loves to use on her and it is also the most reassuring thing that Helena has spoken to her in years. 

"Is this the line?" Myka asks her, making sure to keep her voice low and gentle, so as to not scare this confessor away. Helena is quiet, she is biting down on her lip, shaking her head, breathing out the word "no."

"It can't be..." she breathes. "I can't..." 

Myka leans into Helena, moves entirely over her, and when her thigh happens to press more firmly into the sensitive nature of Helena's current state, it is most definitely not accidental. But the sound... the soft whimper... the tone of that voice which cries her name... the feel of Helena's hot breath against Myka's cheek...

Myka rests entirely on top of Helena, her belly to Helena's belly, her chest to Helena's chest, her thigh to those cherished knickers of Helena's that are proving rather useless in this moment. So useless, in fact, that Myka thinks of just ripping them off of Helena entirely. Wonders exactly how upset Helena would be if she did. If she would even be upset at all.

She laughs only to herself, masking her amusement at these thoughts behind the flash of a smile. 

Myka moves her mouth to that woman's neck and her tongue against that skin, against the salty taste of building perspiration. Mouth wide and wet and warm and sucking, yielding whimpers and moans and, eventually, the pleas come. When Myka kisses that wet spot just below Helena's chin, rakes her tongue against the side of Helena's neck, bites gently at the skin below Helena's jaw, adds just the tiniest bit of pressure where her thigh rests against this woman below her...

The pleas come. 

"Is _this_ the line?" Myka asks Helena with a whisper in her ear, teeth tugging at her earlobe, a soft kiss against her cheek. 

Helena shakes her head but no words come, not even Myka's name, before Helena's mouth is moving to Myka's mouth and begging to be kissed, nipping at Myka's chin, her lips, her tongue, and eventually pressing into that mouth with a desperation that Myka has never known. 

So many things that Myka has never known. So many things that Myka has only ever tried to imagine and even then... even her imagination could not compare, could not live up...

But there is one thing that Myka does know, as she drops her hand back down to Helena's leg, to grip that sensitive spot on her thigh, to trace feather soft lines with the tips of her fingers to the even more sensitive spot between Helena's legs. Over precious knickers that Helena will have no time to wash, between the silk of that cloth and the skin of her own thigh, now red and wet, and whether that is from her own sweating form or Helena, Myka does not know. Does not care one single bit about. She walks her fingers lightly to the edge of that precious silk cloth, just below Helena's naval, to stretch that precious cloth back, and slip her hand slowly, carefully into it. 

This time, there are no threats over the elasticity of ones overpriced panties. 

And when her hand is there over small curls and tender tissue and muscle, nestled between wet heat and damp silk, where it has longed to be so many nights before, all Myka can focus on is the way Helena's breath changes, the way her legs tighten around Myka's torso, the way her arms, too, pull Myka closer and into her and against her. And the way Helena's voice sounds when she finally _finally_ tells Myka, with tears streaming down her face, "Do not. Stop."

***

This is not Abigail. 

Helena is not Abigail by a million miles, by a million years, and Myka can't get her mind to stop working, to stop thinking long enough to not think of all the ways in which Helena Wells, literally wrapped around her fingers, is not Abigail Cho. 

Abigail had been quiet. Ironically, Myka thinks, Abigail had been so quiet and speechless and thoughtful, with such a concentrated look on her face. And there had been sounds and heavy breath and she moved in her own ways, Abigail did, but she was not _this_. 

Helena is less constrictive. Vocally, physically, sexually. The way her body stretches and twists and reaches and tightens, even against Myka's inexperienced fingers. The way these sounds escape her, somehow soft but still echoing against the walls of Myka's suddenly too-tiny apartment with its paper thin walls. And when those sweet sounds aren't escaping her lips, Helena pulls Myka into her, kisses her, draws her lips to Myka's ear. 

"Is this okay?" Helena asks her. "Does it feel wrong? Myka, I don't..." she bites down on her lip and closes her eyes. "I don't want to hurt you."

It catches Myka off guard, that she speaks. That she can speak. And that she cries, too. But Myka smiles and leans in to kiss tear drenched cheeks, to whisper into her ear, "I love you, Helena. You're perfect. _This_... is perfect."

Helena climbs. With her head back, with her mouth open wide, with that arch in her spine and a trembling form, Helena climbs to the peak of this night and when she falls, when she _soars_ , it is with a cry that Myka cannot decipher as either part of the pleasure or part of some unspoken pain. 

***

"Are you okay," Helena asks in a whisper and Myka smiles and nods but she wants to laugh, and a lot, because her fingers are lost inside of Helena Wells, quite literally the woman of her dreams, and _she_ is asking if Myka is okay. 

"Are _you_?" Myka asks in return, wiping away Helena's tears with her truly free hand, an action that seems only to produce even more tears. "You're crying."

"Not because I'm sad," Helena says softly. "Just... emotional." Myka nods and kisses her and brushes her lips to Helena's cheek before resting against her, lying her head down over Helena's shoulder. 

Myka slowly removes her hand from wet and warm and precious knickers to palm that hip bone that was made especially for her, to wrap her arms entirely around Helena's waist. 

"It's almost time for me to go," Helena tells her, moving her hands into Myka's curls to push them out of Myka's face, then wrapping her arms around Myka's neck. 

"Shhh," Myka hushes her, sitting up slightly to move her mouth over Helena's mouth, before she can say even one more thing about it. Helena smiles into that kiss, the remnants of tiny whimpers escaping her lips and rising against Myka's. "I'm not letting you go _now_." 

But Myka closes her eyes against the pull of her own exhaustion. Cannot seem to want to open them again. 

"Hmm," Helena hums and rolls onto her side until Myka rolls with her and onto her own back, pulling Helena over her. 

"Better," Myka manages just before she feels Helena's lips on her chin, against her cheek, over her eyelid and the bridge of her nose. 

"I'm going to shower," she hears the soft whisper. 

"Take me with you," Myka murmurs. 

"I would gladly, my love, but you don't seem to be very awake," and Helena kisses her lips again and brushes her hand over Myka's forehead, pushes aside her curls. "Get some sleep."

Helena slips away and Myka does manage to follow her into that shower... but only in her dreams. 

***

Myka almost doesn't go to class that day because her eyes are still red and wet and puffy from all of the crying, from all of the goodbyes and the I love yous and the not wanting to let Helena go. But Myka walks to class. 

She is almost to her class when several people run past her, whispering, crying, shouting at others they pass bye. And suddenly there is a rush of students, her peers, even a few professors, toward the media center. 

She follows, curious. She follows and it is then, in that crowd of people staring at television monitors at a burning sky rise in New York City, that her world, _the_ world, the entire course of history changes.

Because the first plane is a tragic accident. Navigation equipment gone wrong. Thrown off of its course. _Whatever_ reason they couldn't possibly think of at this moment.

But the second plane is an act of war.

***

_Helena just left. She's only been in the air one hour. She's nowhere near New York City. She's nowhere near New York yet._

Myka sprints back to her apartment, it's the most running she's done since she graduated high school and left all of those sports behind. She is in the car and racing back to the airport before she can pull a single coherent thought together about _what_ she is doing. 

_Maybe there was a delay in her flight. Maybe they never took off. She's probably waiting for me. I'm coming, Helena._

The airport is locked down. There is no getting in. There is no getting out. There is no talking to anyone, no asking questions, no getting answers. 

Myka calls Helena's phone ten times in under five minutes. Every single time, it goes straight to her voicemail. 

_She would have called, if she were on the ground. She would have at least answered her phone._

She isn't the only one who came back, who is asking questions, who is looking for answers. She overhears a man talking to a woman. 

"All they're saying is that all flights to that region have been diverted. They're not giving up anymore information."

"That's hopeful, right? All the flights have been diverted means all the flights are accounted for..."

"So far. Who knows. I heard two more planes went down outside of New York and who knows where they came from."

_Outside of New York. Who knows where they came from. She would have called..._

Myka's phone rings.

"Myka!"

Her mother.

"Has Helena left yet? Have you seen the news?"

"I'm at the airport, I don't think she's here. Her flight left earlier but I don't think she got that far. They said all the planes are being diverted. Mom, they won't say anything else. They're not telling anyone anythi--"

"Myka, nobody knows what's going on but it'll be okay. I just... want you to go back to your apartment and stay off of the road. All right?"

"I need to find Helena. I need to find out if her plane... she was supposed to meet her dad in New York, I just..."

"Baby, calm down? I'm sure Helena is okay. When did her plane take off?"

"Maybe an hour and a half ago?"

"She wouldn't have made it that far."

"What if there are more? Mom, what if Helena... she would have called by now."

"Myka, she'll call you when she can. Leave the airport, go back to your apartment. Do _not_ go to class. Stay off the road, okay?"

Myka nods. 

"Okay, Ophelia?"

"Okay."

_Leave the airport. Don't go to class. Stay off the road. Don't go to class. Stay off the road._

Myka is walking into her apartment when her phone rings again and she blindly answers, "Mom, I want to come home."

"Myka, are you okay?"

_Helena._

"Oh god, Georgie," Myka cries. "I thought the worst... I thought... are _you_ okay? Where are you?"

"I'm okay, our plane was diverted. They refused to say why until we were on the ground. Are you all right? Is there something happening there?"

"I'm _fine_. There's nothing. I just... I had no idea where you were or if you were... if your plane was..."

"I'm good, love. Okay? It's just... a circus here and they aren't letting anyone leave."

"Where _are_ you?"

"Wichita... Kansas. Myka, I can't get ahold of my father. All the phone lines in New York are down or busy. His office is right in the heart... and I can't..."

"I'm coming to get you."

"Myka, no. I have asked, it's a seven hour drive."

"I will be there in five."

"Myka, I'm fine. I'm just going to... see about a hotel when I can and wait until I hear from my father, okay?"

"I'm already in the car, Helena. I am coming to get you."

"Myka Ophelia Bering, don't you da--"

Myka will apologize for hanging up on her later.

***

Myka makes it in five hours and forty-five.

It takes her another hour to get to the airport, to get Helena to answer her phone, for Helena to track her down. 

"Six hours, Myka Bering. How fast were you driving?" 

Helena is pissed and crying and standing with crossed arms on the curb just outside of a very packed boarding drop-off where no one at all is being dropped off but absolutely everyone is being picked up.

"Less than a hundred miles per hour," Myka tells her with tears still in her own eyes, popping the trunk on the car.

"You could have gotten yourself killed," Helena quips like the motherly little thing that she is. 

All flights are suspended. All flights to the North East are rerouted. All U.S. airspace closed. 

Helena isn't going anywhere and Myka can't tell if this is why she is truly mad, if it is because Myka drove to her after she called her repeatedly and told her not to, or if she is just really _really_ shaken up.

"For an hour, Helena, I thought you _had_ been killed."

Myka only glares at her from the corner of her eyes as she's throwing Helena's baggage into Helena's car. And Helena is still standing there, glaring back at Myka with tears running down her face.

Myka closes the trunk and comes to stand directly in front of Helena and tells her, "I'm sorry, Helena, but I'm not leaving you alone in _Kansas_ during a national fucking crisis, when you can be safe at home with me."

Only then does Helena's resolve break and soften, only then does Helena fall completely and entirely, sobbing into Myka's arms. 

***

They decide to stay in Wichita that night and with the added advantage of having a car, they're able to book a room in a hotel far _far_ away from the airport, where every room is already almost booked out by displaced travelers. 

They are seated next to one another, on the edge of the hotel bed, Helena leaning into Myka with her head against Myka's shoulder, when Helena's phone rings. 

"It's your mother," Helena says softly, holding the phone to Myka. 

"I'm not here," Myka responds and Helena rolls her eyes and answers the phone. 

"Hi Jeannie," Helena smiles and nods, wiping tears from her eyes, "Oh thank God." To Myka she says, "My father's okay," and Myka smiles, reaches to Helena's lap to hold her hand, to lace their fingers together and offer a gentle squeeze. 

Helena arches a brow and smiles at Myka, "Yes, I've spoken with her. She, in fact, is sitting right next to me." 

Myka's eyes get big as Helena leans in to kiss her cheek, covers the phone with her hand. 

"I'm not lying to your mother," she says softly, and even softer, in Myka's ear, "I've already defiled her daughter."

Myka smiles and offers her a somewhat defeated shrug before whispering, just as softly, in return, "Actually, I think her daughter defiled _you_."

Helena narrows her eyes for only a moment before leaving a quick kiss against Myka's crooked smile. 

"Wichita... no, trust me, I told her not to come. She hung up on me," Helena glares momentarily at Myka again, "but she's here and we're fine and I am... so thankful to have her." The look Helena gives Myka now is something like relief and content. Even just a little bit longing. "We're at a hotel downtown for the night. I'll have her drive back tomorrow when there's plenty of daylight."

"You're coming with me," Myka protests. 

"Myka, I'm supposed to be going home." Helena sighs and says into the phone, "Please talk some sense into your daughter."

Helena hands the phone to Myka and when she takes it, Helena is on her feet, leaning down for only a second to place a kiss atop Myka's head before disappearing into the bathroom. 

Her mother and Jane have her on speaker phone. It is the most efficient way for them to lecture her, she supposes. But also they are easy on her because Helena _is_ Helena and they'd expect nothing less from Myka than to drive across state lines, across the entire United States if she had to, to be with her. 

"You're still grounded," Jeannie tells her. 

"How are you going to ground me?" Myka asks trying hard not to laugh. "I'm in Kansas of all places, don't you think this is torture enough?"

"In Kansas in a hotel room with your _very_ beautiful twenty-one year old girlfriend whom you have pined over since you were two," her mother clarifies. "I'm sure you are so very tortured, Myka Ophelia."

"I'm sure you owe me another ten dollars," Jane attempts to whisper. 

"Goodbye, both of you." Myka says hanging up the phone and falling back on the bed and turning to muffle a frustrated scream into a pillow.

***

Helena is standing in the doorway of the hotel bathroom when Myka turns to the soft sound of her name on an unsure voice. Myka's goes immediately to her, stands across from her in that doorway, as Helena holds up her hands, shaking, trembling, in front of her. 

"I guess," she says, "I was more worried about my father than I thought."

Myka offers her a gentle smile and then takes those trembling hands in her hands and pulls them to her lips, kisses those fingers that now grasp onto her. 

"You're strong, Helena," Myka whispers, pulling her closer, placing Helena's hands on her shoulders and letting go. "But you don't have to do everything alone." Myka moves her hands to Helena's waist, to her hips, and steps closer. "You are not alone anymore, Georgie."

The tears return but Helena does not turn away. She wraps her arms around Myka's neck, and moves in close and whispers into Myka's ear, "I have another confession..."

Myka doesn't speak to that confessor, to ask about that confession. Myka silently wraps her arms around her back and pulls her in close, hugs her tight. Until Helena relaxes in her arms and sighs a heavy warm breath against her ear. 

"I love you," Helena whispers and moves to place her forehead against Myka's forehead. "I _need_ you."

Myka's sigh is unsteady, she closes her eyes as soft lips brush against hers and kiss her so very lightly, so very delicately that the kiss is just another breath between her lips. Helena's sigh, too, is just another breath between Myka's lips when she asks, when she _pleads_ with Myka, "Take me home."

***

Home is Myka's lips against Helena's lips, against a tender neck, around long slender fingers. Home is Myka's tongue against salty skin, tasting sweat and tears, leaving wet trails across the dips and valleys of Helena's naked body. Across places Myka never knew, had never known, she could _taste_. Home is Myka's teeth on Helena's jaw, biting gently into Helena's neck, nipping lightly anywhere, _everywhere_ that her mouth just happens to land. 

Home is the way Helena's body moves beneath her touch, reaching and stretching, arching and shaking. Home is every sound that Helena makes that hits Myka's ears like a heavy pulse through her already swollen heart, her already fragile resolve. 

Home is Helena whispering into Myka's ear...

"I love you," and "I need you," and "take me home," again and again and again. 

Home is Myka whispering back to the woman above her...

"I love you," and "I'm yours," and "don't let go."

Home is Helena falling beside Myka, exhausted and crying. It is Myka asking her what's wrong and Helena shaking her head, unable to answer, unable to speak, but curling into Myka, wrapping her arms tight around Myka's torso and burying her face, wet with tears and sweat, into Myka's curls. 

Home is Helena's lips pressed into Myka's neck, kissing and kissing and kissing until neither of them can keep their eyes open for one second longer. 

"I'm sorry," Helena finally whispers. "I am so weak and I am so _so_ terribly sorry."

It is a confession. And Myka turns her head to that confessor, opens her eyes just wide enough to find that confessor's mouth, to press her lips to sleepy lips, to press a lazy kiss to that beautiful mouth, and say, against those lips and that mouth, to this gorgeous woman in her arms, "you're wrong," and "you are _so_ strong," and finally, " _this_ is home."

***

"Marry me."

Helena turns a soft smile in Myka's direction and presses her lips together in what Myka is sure is pure amusement but, if Helena thinks it is a joke, she does not say anything at all about it. 

Instead, she leans in to Myka and kisses her and then turns away, to stare back out across still water, across _their_ lake, to look at almost nothing at all. 

They are home. It is Helena's twenty-second birthday, and Myka is lost in a vast love that she will never ever escape from. 

"Helena," Myka says softly and Helena's smile falls away now. She runs a hand through her hair and bites down on that lip of hers before turning back to Myka with an open mouth and no words to show for it. 

She sighs and Myka sighs, too. Because for Myka this is an obvious next step. This is an obvious thing that needs to happen. It just makes sense, that she loves Helena, that Helena loves her. It _makes sense_. 

But Helena hesitates. And not so much hesitates as just falls completely and utterly speechless. 

_Speechless_ , Myka thinks. _She's just speechless._

Myka kisses that mouth with its lack of words and she kisses and kisses until she's sure that Helena still loves her. That the way Helena kisses her too is still familiar and still as it has always been and still feels like _home_. 

"Helen--"

"Myka," Helena finally speaks and her smile returns and she is already shaking her head, Myka is already bracing her too fragile heart.

"I love you," Myka tries. 

"And I love you," Helena says with no hesitation at all, "but love alone is not a reason to marry."

"That's _exactly_ the reason," Myka wants to laugh. 

"Myka, you're seventeen," Helena sighs. "Do you think that, when I was your age, I didn't want to marry Giselle? That when I was fourteen, I didn't want to marry Jules?"

Myka sighs and looks away, to that spot of nothingness across that lake which Helena is always staring at. She looks and she looks hard through the silence that takes up space between her and Helena, between her and that nothing that is across the lake.

"Where do you think I would I be now if I had? If it had just been that easy?"

Myka shakes her head, says softly, "It's not exactly the same."

"It's not exactly different."

Helena is reaching to Myka's cheeks before Myka cares enough to realize that she's crying. 

"Myka, I love you," Helena adds, making her voice soft, "I really do. I love you enough that I would want to... that I think I could spend my life with you," this gets Myka's attention and Helena smiles when their eyes meet, when Myka sees that she is crying, too, "but you are not asking me to marry you, Myka Bering. Not right now."

Myka's eyes are on Helena's eyes for several seconds more and it is almost unnerving how much those eyes say with no words at all. How much Myka can say, too, with no words at all. 

"Tell me you still love me," Helena asks now with furrowing brows and concern in her voice. "That you _can_ still love me without wanting to be married to me."

Myka nods and leans in to Helena and presses her lips to Helena's in a soft kiss with her fingers just below Helena's chin and her other hand wrapping around Helena's wrist. And when they part, it is with another small kiss, with Myka's gentle and understanding smile. 

"This is not the thing that scares me away," Myka tilts her head when she gives Helena another small kiss against smiling lips. "I still love you. You're still mine. So keep trying."

Two days later, Helena is safe, at home, in London. 

***

On Myka’s eighteenth birthday, _she_ wakes _Helena_ with a phone call.

“You’re slacking on your duties, girlfriend."

“I’m sorry, good morning. Happy birthday, my love,” follows a thinly veiled yawn. “I’m not on holiday like some people, if you’ll remember.”

“Right. I'm sorry. Do you want to know what Mom and Jane put on my birthday cake?”

Helena already sounds amused, “Let me guess. A picture of me?”

“A picture of you,” Myka repeats, sounding annoyed but not thoroughly. “How did you know?”

“Jane emailed me a couple of days ago asking--”

“Well, do you know what it said, in icing, on that picture of you which was on my _eighteenth_ birthday cake?”

“I don’t know, Myka, why don’t you just tell me,” Helena says through another yawn.

“It said _FINA-FUCKING-LY._ With an emphasis on _fucking_ and quite the series of exclamation marks to follow,” and there’s a loud, indistinct clambering sound on the other end of the line, the distant sound of laughter, “ _Hello_?”

“Sorry, I dropped the phone,” Helena is still laughing. “They did _not_.”

"I have pictures," Myka nods, even if Helena cannot see. "Managed to get a few before Pete, who is home for the week and says hello by the way, devoured almost the entire thing."

"Oh Myka. Darling, your family..."

"And by _almost_ , I mean he left the piece of the cake that had your boobs on it just for me."

Helena is still laughing on the other end of the phone, "I don't know if I should be extremely offended or extremely turned on by that."

"Which one will be most helpful in convincing you to come home?" Myka tries.

"Myka," Helena puffs out a another soft laugh, "I am just on the cusp of being a functional adult in this program, there is no way..."

"I know, I'm sorry," Myka shakes off the question. "I was just trying my luck."

" _Again_ ," Helena says and Myka knows she is smiling, despite that tone.

"Did they tell you what they were going to use your photo for?”

“I assumed… a birthday present…” Myka can hear the giant smile still in that voice, it makes her smile, too. “I didn’t know the nature of that birthday present until now.”

“ _Claudia_ asked me what it meant,” Myka groans. “I told them I wasn’t even going there. I don’t know what has gotten into these women, Helena, but it’s like the older they get the more immature they act.”

“You love it,” Helena accuses.

“I… don’t hate it... entirely. Considering how things used to be...” Myka sighs, shaking her head, “but that is beside the point.”

“ _So_ ,” Helena starts, “are you planning on ever actually _consuming_ the rest of me?”

“No, it’s way too much sugar...“ Myka starts and then immediately stops and rolls her eyes at the sound of Helena laughing again, several thousand miles away. “ _You_. You are _awful_.”

“But you still love me,” Helena sighs off that laughter. “Don’t you?”

“Jesus Christ,” Myka says, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, “I do."


	19. 18/19 & 22/23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dreams! Night terrors! London! Adventures in Sexual Discomforts! Sass! Drama! More sex! More drama!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Myka recalls some of her never-before-mentioned abuses from her childhood when the issue of her father pops up toward the end of this chapter.

Helena is there and Myka has no idea why.

Helena doesn't say a word, not one single word, when she walks into this new space that is Myka's new room in an old apartment above a bookstore in the middle of town.  Helena does not say a word but she pauses just before Myka's bed and she smiles and she reaches, wordlessly, with her arms crossed in front of her and with her hands to the bottom of the shirt she wears, and lifts that shirt up, all the way up, and over her head.

Myka smiles and Helena takes one single step closer to her, moves her hands to the elastic waistline of the skirt she wears and tugs it down, all the way, until it falls entirely on its own to pool on the floor around Helena's feet.

One single arch of Myka's brow draws Helena two more steps closer, as she kicks her feet out of that skirt and kicks the fabric away from her path.

Helena is standing just before Myka, still seated on the bed, when she lifts her hands to her own hair, pulls that long black hair into a ponytail, and turns around, wordlessly still, so that her back is facing Myka.  It takes one glance, Helena looking over her shoulder, smiling softly at Myka, for Myka to move, to stand, to pull herself into that space behind Helena, so obediently and already knowing her part.  Already knowing, by that look alone, her current purpose in Helena's life.

Myka's fingers turn entirely to jelly at the clasp of Helena's bra. She pulls and pushes and tugs and tugs and tugs and yanks and tries to manipulate that clasp into submission but her fingers, somehow, do not seem to want to work.  And she's sure hours will pass, are passing, have passed, by the time Helena reaches one single hand behind her, allowing her hair to fall mostly into place over her exposed shoulder, and with that one single hand, with one single, swift motion of her fingers, Helena sets herself free of that bra.

Myka reaches her hands to Helena's shoulders, to push the straps of that offensive piece of cloth away from soft skin, to tug that bra entirely away from Helena's arms, to toss it unceremoniously across the room to hopefully never be seen or heard from again.  Now free and bare and absolutely everything that Myka loves most about Helena's body (that it is there, that it is naked, that she is able to touch it), Myka presses a kiss to those shoulders, pushes aside hair, presses a kiss to the back of Helena's neck.

She closes her eyes, presses her nose to the nape of Helena's neck, inhales the familiar scent of Helena's shampoo mixed with Helena's soap mixed with the barely-there remnants of Helena's perfume.  That perfume that drives Myka absolutely crazy. That has always driven Myka absolutely crazy.

Myka kisses that neck again, kisses the space between Helena's shoulder blades, kisses further down the trail along Helena's spine, until Myka is seated again, on her bed, and kissing Helena's lower back, kissing skin where it meets the elastic edge of cherished knickers.  Myka, her hands on Helena's hips, turns the woman before her just enough to kiss that hip, her waist, and turns her just enough more, to press her lips against Helena's belly, over Helena's naval.

"I have a confession," Myka tells her, glancing up at the woman above her, only to be met with a soft and understanding smile, with hands that rise and reach to her shoulders, with a gentle nod urging her to go on. Myka pulls her lower lip between her teeth, softly bites back a shy smile, though there is nothing to be done about the heat that rises into her cheeks, about the way she is quite sure her cheeks flush bright red.

Myka kisses that woman's naval again, hooks two of her fingers, one left and one right, into that elastic band of Helena's underwear, and tugs gently, slowly, not entirely sure of herself.  Not entirely sure of what she's doing.  So she tugs, only enough to press a kiss to the space below Helena's waist, just beside soft curls, just above that precipice that Helena had fought so gallantly, once upon a time, to prolong the claiming of.

"I want," Myka sighs into another kiss of that sensitive skin that causes Helena's knees to weaken and to bend, that brings Helena to straddle Myka's lap where she sits at the edge of the be, brings Helena almost eye-level to Myka, "so much more of you."  Myka swallows hard.  Clears her throat.  " _All_ of you."

Helena kisses her, with one hand at the back of Myka's neck and the other hand pushing through curls atop Myka's head, Helena leans down and presses her lips to Myka's lips in a biting kiss and Helena rakes her tongue against Myka's tongue, against the roof of Myka's mouth, and in that space between Myka's teeth and Myka's lips, both above and below, and Myka loses herself. She is so absolutely lost in this kiss that she lets go and she leaves it to Helena, who is pushing her back on that bed, who is now hovering over Myka, pushing her hands against Myka's shoulders, pushing Myka back against that mattress, kissing Myka, in sudden darkness, into some oblivion that Myka has never known.

Myka lets go and it isn't until Helena is breaking free of that kiss in soft gasps and nearly inaudible moans, it isn't until Helena's body, above her, begins to quiver in that way Myka has come to know and love so well, it isn't until Helena cries her name in much the same way, Myka imagines, she had once done with Giselle, that Myka finds herself. 

Myka finds herself in a hand that is buried in still cool and dampened silk. Myka finds herself in tender fingers entirely lost in wet heat.  She finds herself in the way her own thigh, against the back of her hand, pushes that hand further into and against this precipice that had long ago been conquered.  Further into the core of the woman she loves.  Further against the very center of Helena Wells' resolve.

Helena falls into her, even before she reaches that climax, she is falling into Myka and she is pressing her mouth to Myka's ear, with warm breath and wet lips, and Helena is whispering into that ear, "I am yours." Again, "I'm yours," and again, "I am _all_ yours."

And when Helena is done falling, when Helena has fallen, when Helena is entirely limp in Myka's arms, she then whispers, "I, too, have a confession."

Myka turns her head to press a lazy smile, an even lazier kiss, to Helena's cheek and says softly to her, "Confess away."

Helena's hand is pushing its way beneath Myka's shirt, over Myka's stomach, up Myka's abdomen, burning an invisible path across Myka's skin along the way, until Helena's mouth, still wet and brushing against Myka's ear, finally says, "None of this is true."

Myka wants to roll her eyes, even as Helena presses a warm kiss to her ear, even as Helena is pulling away from her and soon, almost too soon, entirely off of her, standing before her again in a well lit room, and already with those knickers of hers in place, with that bra found and on and clasped, and Helena bending down to pick her skirt up off of the floor.

"Claudia needs you," Helena says as she walks across the room, toward the bathroom, finding her shirt along the way.  Myka tries to say something, anything at all, but no words escape her mouth.  No sound accompanies the thoughts she is trying to vocalize.  No "where are you going?" no "what are you talking about?" no "do not make me drag you back into this bed". 

Helena smiles, when she looks over her shoulder, and she tosses her shirt back at Myka and tells her, in a voice that almost manages to sound more harsh than her typical mothering tone, "Wake up, my love."

That shirt lands over Myka's head.  Cloaks her in darkness.  Isolates her in silence.  She doesn't even need to see to know that Helena is gone but her voice still echoes, harshly now, in the distance.

"Wake up!"

***

"Mama!"

"Wake up, Claudia!"

Myka is sitting up, pulling herself out of her bed, out of her bedroom door, running into the hallway before she has even fully awaken, before she even fully registers what has happened or what is happening.

"Claudia?"

Myka flicks on the light to Tracy's bedroom as she pushes the door open and finds Kelly cradling Claudia who is sobbing and crying out, yelling "mama" at the top of her lungs, again and again and... 

"It's okay, it's okay," Myka says, taking in a deep breath, a poor attempt at calming her own nerves, as she comes to Kelly's side and gently pulls Claudia into her arms.  "Hey Pip, it's me," Myka whispers into a tiny ear as she pulls Claudia closer, into her, and holds tight to her arms that are reaching out.  And she is still reaching, even as her cries quiet, even as her sobs turn into whimpers.  "It's Myka.  I'm here."  Myka hushes her, rocks her in her arms, pushes sweat-drenched strands of red hair out of her face, away from her forehead.

Kelly's hand on Myka's back startles her but Myka nods, still rocking an ever-quieting Claudia in her arms.

"I've got her, she'll be fine," Myka says, "it's just... it's that time of year."  Kelly nods, understanding, because the memorial had been less than a week ago and it had happened much the same way last year. 

It had been worse in the weeks after the funeral.  But this by comparison to that, this was much more manageable.  Myka could deal with this on her own, without her mother or Jane coming to save her. She would have to, anyway, as neither her mother nor Jane were even there to begin with.

"She'll quiet down, she won't even remember."  Myka says it more for herself than she does for Kelly, then presses a kiss to Claudia's temple and almost as if on cue, the small girl relaxes in her hold.

"I'll get you some water," Kelly nods once again, momentarily setting the backs of her fingers against Myka’s flushed cheeks, before heading out of the room.

Myka pulls herself onto Claudia's bed and rolls Claudia back onto that bed beside her and allows her head to rest against Claudia's.  She closes her eyes, sighs into the now quiet atmosphere of her sister’s bedroom, catches her breath just a little bit more.

With exception to Kelly's moving around in the kitchen, the apartment is still. Myka eyes her watch, sighs her relief that it's only minutes past midnight.  When Kelly returns with that glass of water, with concern still draped all over her face, Myka sits up on the side of that bed where Claudia rests, she pats the bed beside her and Kelly sits, hands Myka the glass.

"I used to have night terrors," Kelly says softly.

Myka pulls that glass to her lips, sips cold water slowly and hands that glass back to Kelly, who also takes a sip.  It helps, to calm her nerves, to draw her into reality, away from the dream, from the disappointing realization that Helena still wasn't here. That she had not been here for almost a year. 

"My _'uela_ ,” Kelly sighs, “she used to blame my night terrors on this old woman who lived on our street. Because she could never have children of her own, my _'uela_ and all the other old ladies, too, always said she gave each and every child in our neighborhood the _ojo_.

“Every child.  All of our parents, all of us grandkids, even some of the great grandkids.  Three generations of babies given the _ojo_ by one lonely old woman who probably just didn't want anything to do with a bunch of gossiping old housewives," Kelly laughs softly, but she turns to look back at Claudia, sleeping peacefully now behind them, and she sets the palm of her hand against Claudia's back.

"The eye?"  Myka questions softly.  "Is that the one that curses babies?  That you have to rub out with a raw egg?"

Kelly nods, her eyes still lingering on Claudia, full of concern and concentration.  When she speaks, it is with a sort of disconnection from reality, as if she is back there in Texas, in that time with her grandmother - her _abuela_ \- and this old woman giving all of these three generations of children the eye. 

Giving that eye to Claudia. 

" _La Bruja Mala_ they would call her, of course," and a small smile appears on Kelly's lips, "not even just a witch but the bad witch."  Kelly sighs, shakes her head.  "She was blamed for every badly born baby. My _'uela_ even blamed her for my mother's death.  For my father..."  Kelly stops only for a moment, to bite down on her lip, to let go of a sigh.  "It was almost a joke with all of us kids, that if anything bad happened to anyone, it was because of her.  We would rub eggs on each other, all the time, and then throw them at her house.

“We were so mean to her."  Kelly shakes her head again, as if to shake it all away, and finally pulls herself out of that time that she's lost herself in, almost entirely away from those thoughts, and to the present.  "Sometimes, I'm certain that old lady must have given us the _ojo_ all over again from her grave. There's not a single one of us kids, who lived in that neighborhood, who didn't have bad shit happen to them."

There is a long lingering silence between the two of them before Myka finally smirks, sets her hand over Kelly's hand, still on Claudia's back, and says, "I think, maybe, you just lived in a really shitty neighborhood."

Simultaneously, both Kelly and Myka exhale small puffs of laughter. 

"Nevertheless," Kelly says, her smile wide and reaching now.  She hands Myka that glass of water in her other hand, reaches into the pocket of her pajamas and pulls out a fresh egg. "It can't possibly hurt."

Myka can't help but grin before asking Kelly, "Who puts an egg in their pocket?"

"Concerned older sisters do, Myka," Kelly tells her.  "Don't think I don't feel ridiculous but it worked, when my _'uela_ did it to me, to get rid of my bad dreams.  It really did work."

Myka holds her hands up in surrender.  "I'm not going to say no," she stands and sets that glass of water down on a nearby dresser, "but I wouldn't put so much faith into an old wives tale."

"It's a _Mexican_ old wives tale," Kelly smirks, already pushing at Claudia’s shirt and setting that egg to her bare back, "it will work."

***

Myka has every intention of returning to bed after saying goodnight to Kelly but wide awake as she is when she makes it back to her room, she decides to open up her laptop, see if Helena is hanging around online. 

She's instantly greeted with an hours old, still-blinking notification from her instant messenger.

_Georgie: Have a good night. <3_

Myka smiles.

_Ophie: good morning beautiful stranger who is randomly soliciting me online._

Almost immediately, that instant messenger shows Helena, presumably Helena, Myka's biggest fear had always been that it might not actually _be_ Helena, typing a message...

_Georgie: Morning, my love?_

Helena doesn't even need to ask, with that questioning mark.  Myka already knows what she wants to know.

_Ophie: claudia had another bad dream._

_Georgie: Poor thing. Is she feeling better?_

_Ophie: out like a light. kelly gave her the_ huevo _._

_Georgie: Tell Kelly that Claudia does not have the evil eye and that old woman is not still cursing her from beyond the grave!!_

Myka laughs, even as she types.

_Ophie: lol_

_Georgie: At any rate, how are you, my love? How is it being back in the apartment?_

_Ophie: weird, to be honest._

_Ophie: now that i'm in mom's room, which is weird enough, i keep having that same dream over and over and that's even more weird._

_Ophie: i mean, hot… but weird._

_Georgie: The one where you can't manage getting my bra off? ;)_

_Ophie: yes, that one._

_Ophie: it's like the room is telling me that mom knows. that we… you know?_

_Georgie: At least it isn't a problem you have in actuality.  
Georgie: Had sex? Myka. It’s okay to say it._

_Georgie: Also. Your mother definitely knows._  
Georgie: That we had sex.  
Ophie: yes, that. 

_Ophie: what? why would you say that?_

_Georgie: I am rolling my eyes at you, Myka Bering._

_Ophie: how does she know?_

_Georgie: Do you recall, last year, allowing your mother to do your laundry shortly after I returned to London? Recall your mother returning your laundry, clean and folded? Recall a particular pair of my knickers, which you refuse to return to me, were also clean and folded along with your laundry? You said they were right at the very top of the pile…_

_Ophie: OH GOD._

_Georgie: Right._

_Ophie: but she couldn't know from that alone. they could have easily been mine._

_Ophie: and i’m not refusing to return them.  i just don’t see the point in paying all of that postage for a pair of panties you can get back when you come home!_

_Georgie: Could they have been yours?  Really, Ophelia?_

_Georgie: Because I’ve seen your top drawer.  It’s full of Joe Boxers._

_Georgie: Emphasis on “Boxers”._

_Ophie: … shut up._

_Georgie: The next time we spoke, she told me she didn't really believe we would last that long._

_Ophie: WHEN WAS THIS?_

_Ophie: WHY WOULD SHE TALK TO YOU ABOUT THAT?_

_Georgie: She's known me a long time, Myka. Longer than she has known her own daughters._

_Georgie: She is embarrassingly open with me now that she knows._

_Georgie: Which actually reminds me to remind you to make an appointment for a pap._

_Georgie: Care of your mother._

_Georgie: You’re welcome._

_Ophie: SHE MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT!_

_Georgie: She also said you owe her a PowerPoint presentation?_

Even where she sits, alone in her new bedroom, in her mother's old bedroom, Myka is sure she's blushing.

_Ophie: oh god, she's been making jokes about us. i thought they were just jokes..._

_Ophie: i am going to strangle her._

_Georgie: I really do wish I could see your face right now._

Myka takes a photo of herself with the webcam, hands on her cheeks, mouth wide open in horrific surprise, and sends it to Helena.

_Georgie: Oh how I miss that face.  
Georgie: Not, necessarily, this specific face... _

_Ophie: come visit that face. i’ll still look this way by the time you get here._

_Georgie: That face should consider visiting me._

_Ophie: maybe._

_Ophie: maybe not. i mean, my program is just as demanding as yours._

_Georgie: You haven't even started yet._

_Georgie: I know very well that you could and likely will, (1) finish your degree before I do and (2) with your eyes closed and your hands tied behind your back._

_Ophie: i bet you would like me that way._

_Georgie: ??_

_Ophie: eyes closed, hands tied._

_Georgie: Love. I would like you absolutely any way at all. If that meant I could actually put my hands on you._

_Ophie: wells. you sweet talker._

_Georgie: I wish I could sweet talk some more but I need to head out soon._

_Georgie: Is Kelly settling in fine with you and Tracy? And your mother, with Jane?_

_Ophie: everyone is fine, the move was fine. mom tried to act like she was scared to live with jane but I can't even get the woman to come do my laundry anymore._

_Ophie: she even does PETE’S laundry when he’s home._

_Georgie: Probably for the best, my love. Should you try sneaking some other older woman into your bedroom in my absence, you’d surely be caught. Again._

_Ophie: well I have been turning them down left and right. you never know when the right one will show up._

_Georgie: Gillian Anderson is never knocking on your door, love._

_Ophie: one can dream._

_Georgie: Nor is Mrs. Cho, speaking of paps._

_Ophie: that's the last time I play truth or dare with you._

Myka puffs out another small laugh and checks the time.  Almost one o’clock and she really should be going to bed but Helena, as always, is worth the sleep deprivation.  And really, what did she have to do in the morning? She'd taken the summer off, for once.

_Georgie: Rolling my eyes._

_Ophie: they're going to get stuck that way._

_Georgie: I’m showering. Go to bed._

_Ophie: take me with you._

There is a long pause before a file accept notice appears on Myka's screen and she, of course, clicks yes.  It takes minutes and in that time, Helena says:

_Georgie: I would. If I could._

_Georgie: Sweet dreams, love._

_Georgie: I'll call you this weekend._

_Georgie: xxoo_

The file, when it appears, makes Myka grin.  Because Helena is getting ready to shower and Helena has already let her hair down, already lost her shirt, already unclasped that treacherous bra, left it falling from her shoulders.  She can’t see anything lower than that, but Myka knows that body well, has learned to fill in the blanks.  But the smile that is on Helena’s face, the look that is in her eye… Myka doesn't know how she can look that way just taking a photo, looking at nothing but a webcam.

Myka gives Helena and her love for twenty-first century technology all the credit in the world because without that, without this, she's not sure she would ever survive the distance.

_Georgie: You should probably delete that photo when you're done with it._

_Ophie: right. i’m definitely going to do that…_

_Georgie: I love you, liar._

_Ophie: I love you, too, hot stuff._

And with that…

_Georgie has signed off._

**

“You’re worrying about her.”

Myka looks up at Kelly over the rim of her glasses from where she sits at the kitchen table, only to find Kelly looking back at her with a suspicious brow arch, her arms crossed in front of her, tapping at her own side with a spatula held tight in one hand.

It’s a fitting look for her, Myka thinks.  A familiar one lately, too.  Because ever since Jeannie Jr. had decided to move in with Jules, since Pete had enlisted and gone to boot camp and then been stationed out at the base, things had shifted.  _Everything_ had shifted.

Myka’s mother, Jeannie, had shifted most of her evenings to Jane’s house, had shifted most of her belongings there, too.  And eventually, after so many of her things had been quietly shifted in that direction, they began to talk about it out loud with each other and with Myka and, also eventually, everyone else, too.

What they had resolved to do was move Myka home (it helped that she had graduated with her Bachelor’s Degree, that she no longer qualified for student housing, that her scholarship was a thing of the past), so Myka moved home and into her mother’s now-empty bedroom.  And Kelly, also graduated, also in desperate need of some place to live, any place at all that wasn’t her aunt’s house with her alcoholic cousin and his collection of Beanie Babies – or was it Treasure Trolls? Myka could never really remember – moved in, too, to Myka’s old bedroom.

Tracy, after a week of pleading and arguing and crying and so many other absurd behaviors that Myka hadn’t witnessed from her little sister since before she’d been hospitalized, was also allowed to stay at the apartment. Conditionally, their mother had told her. Grades had to stay up, boyfriends had to stay out, and working the bookstore counter for the duration of summer was non-negotiable.

And it was in these past five weeks of living together, Myka and Kelly and Tracy and occasionally Claudia, because Jane and Jeannie were more than just determined to enjoy that empty nest (there was no syndrome to be had), that this sight, of Kelly by the stove, of Kelly with a spatula in her hand, of Kelly turning a maternal eye on Myka, had become so very familiar. This look had become so very familial and fitting and perfect in its own way.

“Am I ever not worried about her?” Myka finally asks Kelly in return, a soft smirk playing across her lips, just barely parting with the puff of nervous laughter that she also breathes out.

“It’s especially bad when you bring out the hot tea,” Kelly says narrowing her eyes on the mug in Myka’s hands.  Myka lowers her eyes to that mug, cradled between her hands, heat seeping through ceramic and slowly warming her palms, steam rising steadily from it. She brings the mug to her lips and blows on the hot liquid to cool it down.

“Maybe I just like hot tea,” Myka says, eyeing Kelly over the top of that mug as she takes a cautious sip.

“ _Maybe_.  Except it’s almost ninety degrees outside,” Kelly smiles and shakes her head, turning back to the stove.  “Just _call_ her.”

“I think it was the hot tea that did it,” Myka says absent-mindedly, staring at the green of that mug, at still-rising steam from that mug, at her fingers that wrap entirely around it, gripping tightly, even against the burn of too-hot ceramic.  “That made her want to be with me.” Myka’s eyes rise to Kelly who is shaking her head, tending to the food that cooks on the stove but does not turn around when she responds.

“I’m not listening.”

But Kelly is listening, Myka has learned in their five weeks together. Kelly is always listening and she is listening, especially, when she says she is not.

“The last time she came, not last summer but the Christmas before,” Myka bites down on her lip, “when I would make her tea and then we would just sit together, reading and sometimes talking?  That did it.  The look she would give me, whenever I brought out these mugs.”  Myka laughs softly to herself.   “And then she would just set her hand over my thigh and carry on reading her book.  I think that’s when she really stopped seeing me as a child. I think that’s when she began to see me as someone she could actually be with.”

Kelly still has her back turned to Myka but she is motionless now. That spatula is resting on the stove, her palms flat against the counter top, head tilted downward, hair falling to the side.  She is motionless and she is listening, waiting for Myka to continue.

“This tea is magic, Kelly,” Myka smiles.

“It’s just tea,” Kelly says softly, reaching for that spatula again.

“I should send her some tea,” Myka nods.

“You think she doesn’t have better tea in London?”  Kelly finally turns to Myka now, even if only to give her the most absurdly incredulous expression that Myka has ever seen cross that girl’s face. It makes Myka smile and she laughs into her mug as she takes another sip of hot tea.

“I know, I’m just feeling a little disconnected from her right now. It’s been almost a year since we’ve seen one another and things are starting to feel really… _forced_.  Maybe strained would be a better word.”

“Myka, look,” and Myka does because Kelly drops that spatula now and she turns down the burners on the stove and _she_ turns to Myka, slaps her hands on the table just beside where Myka sits, and leans into her space. “I get that you guys have an issue being honest about the way you feel for one another and that it has been that way for eternity. So, fine, whatever. But I’ve heard the same shit from both of you for two years now.  You think she doesn’t love you, she’s using you as a security blanket because you grew up together, that she’ll just suddenly throw you away. She thinks she’s traumatizing you because _she_ doesn’t know what it means to have a healthy relationship with someone who isn’t her exact age.  She’s sure you’ll regret her when you’re older. She’s sure that one day you’ll wake up and…”

Kelly stops there.  She stops talking and she clamps her lips shut tight and her eyes too and she’s lifting her hands from that table, standing straight, running a hand through her hair – Myka is certain she picked up that habit from Helena, because she does it in the exact same way that Helena does – and she returns to that space beside the stove.

“And what?” Myka asks after a long moment of silence.  And Kelly picks up that spatula again, waves it around in the air as she appears to search for that right thing to say, as if the spatula, like some magic wand, is going to make that word just appear, suspended in oxygen just beside her.  “Kelly?”  Myka urges.

“That you’ll wake up one day and hate her.”

“Why would I--”

“ _Call_ her,” Kelly interrupts abruptly.

Myka sighs and slumps back into her seat, tapping anxious fingers against ceramic for several quiet moments before finally reaching across the table for her phone and her keys.

“I’ll be downstairs.”

***

“Hey...Hi, Helena,” Myka pauses, unnecessarily, unsure of what she intends to say, what she wants to say,  “I um… I know you’ve been really busy with your program but it’s been about two weeks since we last talked and I just wanted to check in on you.  Make sure that you’re all right… that you know I’m thinking of you.  I guess, just give me a call back when you can.” Another long pause.  “And I love you.”

Myka ends the call there and drops her cell phone on the counter, where she sits in the closed bookstore,  just behind the register. She heaves out a deep sigh and rolls her eyes, mostly at herself, at her anxiety, at the fact that she doesn’t even know what she’s anxious about.

Helena had, at the very least, left her a handful of instant messages here and there to let Myka know that she was, in fact, still alive.  There had even been an email which, Myka imagines, was written with teary eyes and Helena’s steadily crumbling resolve. But the email had been a week ago already, and the last of those messages?  Three very long days back. 

Since then, Myka had been anxiously – nervously? – awaiting Helena’s phone call.

***

Kelly sets a plate of food beside the laptop on Myka’s desk in the back office where Myka has tucked herself into a less than comfortable office chair in near dark. She has only an old desk lamp and the barely-there trickle of light through a small window, covered almost entirely by a large bookshelf, to accompany her in her current mood.

The atmosphere of this office is one-hundred percent her father. The dim lamp, the bookshelf in front of the window.  She keeps telling herself to change it, to make it a more pleasant space to be in, to get rid of that shelf and allow the light to flow in, but she hasn’t yet found the motivation to do it.  It is, in some small way, comforting, this small dark hidden space at the back of the store. 

She supposes this is one of those few things she has in common with her father.

She often imagines him holed up in this space, drinking from the glass tumbler that Myka had found hidden at the very back of a desk drawer, emptying the contents of a flask she’d found tucked behind stacks of old mail on the book shelf. And there had been bottles hidden there, too.  Myka had always known her father to enjoy his scotch but she hadn’t known exactly how much, or exactly which brands, until she’d taken on the task of cleaning out the office closet.

She looks now, to the large cardboard box that sits on the floor just beside her desk.  It is filled with empty glass bottles.  And even despite his preference for scotch, there had been plenty of evidence in that box of her father’s indiscriminate drinking.  Of the love affair her father had had with alcohol for the majority of her ever broadening life.

“Did you call her?” Kelly’s voice cuts through Myka’s thoughts and Myka turns her attention back to the older girl standing just beside her.

“No answer,” Myka says softly and she’s sure she’s pouting. She’s sure she must look absolutely ridiculous to Kelly but she’s also sure she should not have taken the summer off only to sit around waiting, impatiently, to hear from her girlfriend. To mope in a tiny office space that she refuses to clean.  To stare at a box full of empty bottles that had given birth to the person she is today, in this very moment.  “Left a message.”

“Give it a rest, _Romeo_ ,” Kelly nods, and it isn’t a demand. Not so much as it is a plea, Myka thinks, on her own behalf.

“Yeah,” Myka nods, sitting up straight in her chair and leaning in close to inspect the contents of that plate, to look back up at Kelly and offer a gentle smile. “Thanks, Kelly. You’re a very good surrogate wife.”

“You really wish you could have this,” Kelly smirks, leaning in to kiss Myka’s forehead.  “The mail truck is parked out front, by the way.  Think you have another big delivery coming in.”

“Great,” Myka grins, palming the desk and standing, almost too fast, to pull herself away from this space, “a distraction.”

***

Myka walks to Claudia’s school to pick her up from her summer program at around noon everyday for the past two weeks because Jane and Myka’s mother have shifted into this exciting new world where all of their children are grown and they have been afforded new ways and opportunities to enjoy each other’s company.

Myka tells her mother, when Jeannie asks her to watch Claudia at the beginning of these latest two weeks of their enjoyed company, that she doesn’t want to know the details.  That they should go and enjoy their summer off and have a great time and most definitely not tell Myka any of the details.

So they go and they’ve been gone and Myka watches Claudia during the week, takes her to her brother’s place on the weekends, because that is the latest arrangement they’ve made, it is the latest arrangement that suits the dragonness that is Joshua’s now soon-to-be wife, Ingrid.

“Pip!” Myka greets a grinning Claudia who returns that greeting with a tight hug. “You ready to go home, little bug?” Claudia only offers her a nod and slips her hand into Myka’s hand as they start off back toward the bookstore. “Are we talking today or…”

“Yes,” Claudia laughs, bending forward and then into Myka, and that laugh, tiny as it may be, is so infectious that Myka cannot help but laugh, too. If she had an inclination not to, if she had been in any mood other than happy before now, there would be no standing up to that laughter. There would be only giving in.

“Okay, I’m just making sure,” Myka tells her, tugging her forward gently. “So we got a couple of packages in the mail today.”

“More books?” Claudia perks up, stands just a little bit straighter, her expression expectant with wide eyes and raised brows.  “Anything that I can read?”

“Yes, more books but also quite a few of the packages were addressed to you,” and Myka grins when Claudia’s tiny brow arches with a hint of curiosity.

“Me?”

“Yep,” Myka nods.

“What are they?”

“I have _no_ idea, bug. But we’ll find out when we get home, won’t we?”

Just then, Myka’s phone buzzes in her pocket and a quick glance at the screen, when she eventually tugs the thing free of her jeans, has her heart racing, skipping beats.

“Helena,” she breathes out her relief through a growing smile.  It’s a text that reads:

_Got your msg. Calling soon._

“C’mon Pip, I’ll race you home.”  Myka is already speed walking ahead, Claudia bubbling over with laughter, then swiftly on her heels.

***

Claudia is all smiles, seated at a table in the bookstore as she opens box after box of computer pieces and hardware that, to Myka, looks as though it might be a bit more useful had it all been put together when it arrived.  But Myka is all smiles, seated across from her and Kelly, because Helena is just barely managing to contain her excitement as she tells a not-so-tiny Claudia, over speaker phone, about how very perfect this early birthday gift will turn out to be for her.

“What are we supposed to do with a bunch of computer bits?”  Kelly is echoing Myka’s unspoken sentiments when she asks this, her expression, Myka’s certain, is likely a mirror image of her own.

“Claudia will know what to do with those computer bits, won’t you, darling?”

“Yep!”

“You should see her smile,” Myka says, unable to resist smiling herself.

“You should see _Myka’s_ smile,” Kelly adds with a slight roll of her eyes.  “Thank God you called because I was beginning to feel bad for her, _Julieta_.  You know how much I hate feeling bad for this one.”

Myka kicks Kelly beneath the table.

“Excuse you,” Kelly narrows her eyes on Myka.

“Play nice,” Myka tells her in response.

“Stop fighting, ladies,” Claudia tells them both, without ever removing her eyes from the box of gadgetry she holds up in display, in the palm of her hands, like a sacrificial offering.

“Wow,” Helena speaks over the phone, “that was exactly Jane’s tone.”

“I told you,” Myka shakes her head, “they are grooming her into their perfect daughter.  Did I not tell you that?”

“You have been saying that,” Helena’s voice softens.   

“Myka, can I put the computer together tonight?”  Claudia asks hopefully.

Myka shrugs, “I don’t see why not.”

“School night is why not,” Kelly glares, though it is rather weak, at Myka then turning back to Claudia, she tells the younger girl, “ _after_ dinner and only until it’s time for you to go to bed.”

“I can live with that.”  Claudia doesn’t seem to mind at all.  She is standing and collecting some boxes into her small grasp and telling both Kelly and Myka, “I’m going to take these _bits_ upstairs.  Can one of you bring up the chassis?”

Myka and Kelly exchange the same lost expression.

“The big box,” Claudia clarifies, pointing to it, where it sits still on the floor beside the table..

“Oh, right!  I’ll bring it up in a minute,” and Myka waves her off.

“That,” Kelly starts, turning to Claudia, “means we might as well do it ourselves.”  And she’s moving out of her seat, toward that box, lifting it off of the ground in no time. She turns an eye on Myka, “I don’t want to have to strangle you in your sleep, so make it a good conversation. We’ll be upstairs.” And again, to Claudia , “Let’s go, _muñeca_.”  

And with that they disappear up the stairs.

***

“What was that all about?” 

Myka is taking the phone off of speaker, bringing it to her ear and standing, when she tells Helena, “She’s joking.  I mean, I hope she is, it’s hard to tell with that one,” as she retreats back into the darkness of her father’s former office. 

“I do miss that one,” Helena sighs on the line.

“Yes, well,” Myka smiles, sitting at her desk, tapping at the keys of her laptop to get it to wake up, “you can have her.”  And there is a moment of pause on either end of the line before Helena says, just under her breath, “I want _you_ ,” and it makes Myka grin to hear that voice, to hear what sounds like nervousness in Helena’s voice when she says these things over the phone.

Myka tells her, “You know where to find me,” and Helena sighs in her ear.

“In three years?”  Helena questions.  “You’ll have left me for Mrs. Cho by then.”  Myka rolls her eyes but she cannot help her laughter, cannot help her blush either. It’s the one and only time she’s ever been thankful for the so many thousands of miles between them.

“Or Gillian Anderson?”  Myka grins.

“In your dreams.”

“There is, currently, only one woman plaguing my dreams right now,” Myka says softly, turning her attention back to her laptop and clicking her way through folders.

“Oh, I know,” Helena actually giggles before offering, “Mrs. Frederic.”

“Principal Frederic?”

“No, you handsome fool,” but Helena is full on laughing now, “Leena’s mother.”

“Oh,” and Myka shrugs.

“You aren’t even protesting!”

“You’re the one offering up the suggestions,” Myka teases, clicking into a document on her laptop and waiting for it to load, “when you know very well who I’m talking about.”

“I know.”  Myka can hear Helena’s smile, she can hear that it is soft and unyielding.  She can only imagine Helena rolling her eyes up, in that way she does.  Running a hand through her hair, in that way she does.  “I know.”

“So, where have you been all this week, that you haven’t been able to call?”

“Making friends in the program.”

“None too special, I hope.”

“No,” Helena sounds thoughtful now, “not too special.”

***

Helena’s therapist, she says, refers her to a counselor who, Helena also says, she suspects has, at some point in his lifetime, met and traded notes with Giselle on the benefits (or not, Helena says, too) of pulling people, kicking and screaming, out of their comfort zones.

“He suggested I actually attempt to make friends with the people in my program,” and when Helena says this and sounds so put off by it, it makes Myka smile because she had never known Helena to be so opposed to socializing, to meeting new people, to making new friends.  Helena had been popular in high school or, at the least, she had been quite well known.

Myka supposes _now_ that Helena’s relationship with Giselle may have had more to do with that than any fondness or willingness on Helena’s part to be friends with any percentage at all of the student body.  Any percentage higher than that which was made up by Myka and Pete, Claire and Jeannie Jr., and Giselle, too, of course.

“Are you?  Attempting?”

Helena let’s go of a deep deep sigh and Myka laughs then, too, because she knows Helena well enough to see that exaggerated eye roll.

“There is this American boy named Liam who seems reasonably tolerable.”

“One tolerable person, Helena,” Myka grins, “have you at least given him the time of day?”

“Well, I have, even to the point that I’ve considered joining him and some others in a winter semester abroad,” Helena concedes, “hence my preoccupation these last few days.  He happens to enjoy socializing.  He happens to have made many friends in the program who also enjoy socializing. He also happens to have made friends with me.  So, as it stands, I am now friends with a social butterfly and that, by association, makes me a social butterfly, too.”

“A winter abroad?”  Myka questions.  “ _This_ winter?”

“Next winter, love,” Helena corrects.

“Oh, so plenty of time to plan?  That sounds like something you should definitely consider.  And I’m very proud of you,” Myka laughs softly. “My beautiful, one-winged, semi-social butterfly.”

“Don’t be cheeky.”

***

In September, only weeks after the start of school, Myka is hit with the cruel reality of how very busy Helena has been all summer long. Because in those few weeks after school starts, she speaks to Helena once on the phone, a handful of times online. And when they do find that time to talk, it is late for Helena, it is the middle of the day for Myka, who is between classes.

So Myka tells Helena, “I love you and I’ll call you on your birthday,” and Helena tells Myka, “I love you, too, but please don’t be upset if I don’t answer.”

Myka gets it.  She understands. She also, in all of her very busy days and weeks to follow, forgets to call Helena on her birthday.

***

Helena calls Myka the following weekend.

“Helena, I am _so_ sorry.”

“I don’t care that you forgot my birthday, Myka.  _I_ forgot my birthday.  I just… needed to hear your voice, that’s all.”

Myka immediately responds with, “Three months.”

“Three months?”

“Okay, more like three months, one week, five hours, and I’ve lost count of the minutes. I had Mom call your dad because I wanted it to be a surprise but I forgot to call you on your birthday and now it’s not as romantic as I’d originally planned.  Not that very much can be romantic over the phone but _this_ … this is obviously the exact opposite of romantic.  I just have been holding it in since March and now I finally get to tell you. So,” Myka takes in a long, very deep breath, breathes out a sigh, “in three months, I will make it up to you.”

“How are you making it up to me, again?”  Helena questions quietly, curiously.

“By holding you and kissing you and not letting go of you for three very long, very cold weeks in London.  With you.”

“You’re coming to London?”

“Christmas, New Years.”

“Myka Bering, I do not have time for games,” Helena begins.

“Happy birthday, Helena,” Myka tells her, still breathless, “I love you and I have no reason to lie to you or even to myself.  Mom and Jane said if I came up with enough cash to support the trip, they would buy my plane ticket.  It took me three months, Helena, but I sold every book I could find.  Half of dad’s first editions.  I even went on _eBay_ , Helena George Wells… _eBay_!”  Myka pauses only a second for a breath, “I am coming for you in December.  You had better be ready for me.”

There is a long pause on the line and Myka is sure she hears a sniffle or a gasp or anything at all that is Helena’s breath, Helena breathing, but Helena not speaking, Helena unable to speak. 

Finally, “I have been ready for you my entire life,” finds its way into Myka’s ear on a whispered breath with a not-quite-steady resolve.

***

It almost doesn’t happen.

Myka has never cried so much in her life.  Myka cannot remember a time where she has cried more than Helena has cried and she had cursed the gods and the goddesses and _the_ god himself, just in case that ever actually pans out one day. But all the cursing and crying in the world was not going to change the fact that this was almost not happening.

It is a week before the thing is to happen when Myka comes home from dropping Kelly and Pete off at the airport only to find Claudia standing beneath the awning of the bookstore, just barely out of the rain.  She has her backpack on, her rolling suitcase by her side, her head is lowered to the ground until Myka calls her name and then she is waving, her little arm still tight against her side, guilty look on her face.

“Claudia? What are you doing here?”

She’s meant to be at her brother’s place in the city for Christmas break but it isn’t as though Claudia has never run away from that place before. It isn’t as though she hasn’t, somehow, found her way back to town on the train and walked the short distance from the train station to the bookstore.  So that Claudia has run away is Myka’s first thought because the child is resilient and efficient and has certainly kept them all on their toes.

The suitcase throws Myka off, though.  As efficient as Claudia can be, she has never packed her own suitcase before running away.

Myka is unlocking the door, picking up that suitcase and ushering Claudia inside when she asks, “How did you get here?”  And Claudia, with that guilty look, lowers her head again but does not say anything.  “Did you run away? Did that woman say something mean to you again?”

Claudia shakes her head and when she looks back up at Myka, it is with tears in her eyes that she refuses, Myka knows she is refusing, to let fall.

“Okay, come upstairs and warm up while I call your brother.”

There is no answer for Joshua.  Not on his home phone, not on his cell phone.  Not on the cell phone that belongs to his new wife, either.   And Myka is no fool because it also isn’t the first time Claudia has been returned by her brother, by his wife, before the predesignated time.

“They dropped you off here didn’t they?”

Claudia, where she sits on the couch, reading a book and looking up at Myka with that still guilty expression, nods.

“Where did they go?”

Claudia shrugs.

“Claudia Donovan, I am not mad at you.  I am mad at your brother and his idiot wife.  So please, tell me, and be honest with me, where they went that they couldn’t take you with them.”

“California.”

“ _California_?” it comes out a bit more harsh than Myka had intended but she had expected to hear something not quite as far away as that.  Something not entirely outside of state lines.

Claudia’s only response to that is a slight nod.

“ _Great_.”

It is not great. 

It is the exact opposite of great because _everyone_ is gone.  Jane and Jeannie are already on break and had flown to Vancouver, of all places, for a week-long Alaskan cruise sandwiched between two weeks of what they had referred to as, “Don’t worry about it.”  Tracy left with the Chos to Hawai’i just the day before, and Kelly and Pete are, Myka looks at her watch, ten minutes away from boarding a plane to Texas. It is their first big trip together, the last before Pete sets off to Iraq, and Myka has no intention whatsoever of interrupting _that_.

“Ingrid said it was their honeymoon and that they shouldn’t have to take me with them.  I told her you were going to London, she didn’t care.  She said you could always go to London but they wouldn’t always have a honeymoon.”

It starts as anger. 

Myka is so angry that she sends Claudia into another room with her book, with Myka’s portable CD player and headphones, and she tells her to stay there until Myka comes to get her.  She tries Joshua and Ingrid’s phones again, she leaves a scathing message on Ingrid’s voicemail and she does not spare the woman any doubts about Myka’s vocabulary being both colorful and expansive.

After twenty minutes of _that_ , the tears start.

Myka is so upset when she calls that Helena threatens to call Mrs. King, to actually send her ex-girlfriend’s mother to Myka, to help her calm down, before offering another solution.

“Bring her with you,” Helena suggests.  “We have plenty of room.”

“Right,” Myka puffs out a laugh through her sob, “let me just find another grand to pay for a last minute ticket for a kid I barely have guardianship over.”

“Myka…”

“I’m sorry, Helena,” Myka sighs, “I don’t mean to be a brat.”

“I know, you just naturally excel at it.”

Myka rolls her eyes up to the ceiling from where she sits now at the dining room table, “I deserved that.”

“Sometimes I wonder if you even know who you’re dating.”

“What does that mean?”

“Myka, I will gladly pay for Claudia’s ticket.  If it means getting you here.”

“Well that’s admirable, babe,” Myka nods, though no one is around to see, “but it doesn’t change the fact that she doesn’t have a passport.”

“Myka, she has—“

“And I’m pretty sure you need longer than a week to get one considering how long mine took to get--”

“I have a passport.”

Myka turns in her chair to find Claudia standing in the hallway behind her, closed book in one hand, CD player in the other, headphones draped around her neck.  Claudia’s eyes are wide and hopeful now, when Myka questions her, asks her to clarify.

“I _have_ a passport,” Claudia repeats.  “We went to New Zealand to visit my dad’s cousins when I was six, I had to get a passport. I still have it.”

“You went to New Zealand,” Myka repeats.  Claudia nods with a growing smile on her face and Myka breathes softly, into the phone, “She went to New Zealand.”

“Yes, my beloved brat of a girlfriend, if you would have allowed me to finish speaking.”

“I’m sorry, Helena,” and Myka is breathing more steadily now, “I am sorry. I will make that up to you, too. If you can find this girl a plane ticket and we can get to you in one week, I will make so many things up to you, Helena Wells.”

“Yes, love,” Helena is smiling, Myka just knows it, “you most certainly will.”

***

Myka is certain the trip will almost not happen again when Claudia tells her that her passport is at her old house because the house is vacant and so many things had been packed up but Helena makes this simple suggestion to call Jane, as she is certain Jane would have all of Claudia’s documents. Myka calls Jane and there is no immediate answer but later that evening, Jane returns the phone call and makes sure to point out the amount of desperation with which Myka had left her a voicemail for an emergency that was not _actually_ an emergency.

Myka tells her, “It will be an emergency if I don’t get to see my girlfriend,” at which point Jane hands the phone to Jeannie and tells her, “Handle your offspring.”

“You should have called us earlier,” Jeannie scolds her, about Joshua and Ingrid, about them leaving Claudia on the front door step, and in the rain no less.  “What would she have done if you weren’t returning home right away?”

Jane, in the background, is clearly livid.

“So, Claudia is coming with me,” Myka informs them both, now on speaker phone after having re-told the entire story, though in a much calmer manner than it had been told to Helena just two days beforehand.  “My flight was sold out so Helena had to find two tickets on an available plane with another airline.  So, if you can cancel my ticket, you should probably do that.”

“It’s fine, whatever,” Jane is saying in the background.

“I don’t know how comfortable I feel about this,” Myka’s mother’s voice is quieting and she must turn to Jane, because her voice is even more quiet when she suggests, “Maybe we should just go home early.”

“Out of the question.  We’ve been waiting all year for this cruise, we are not going to lose almost $4,000 on both an unused plane ticket _and_ this cruise.  Forget it, Missy. Myka and Helena are intelligent and fully capable of taking care of Claudia.  Claudia will most likely take care of _them_.” 

“Myka,” Jeannie starts but Jane is not quite done in the background.

“I feel better about Claudia being with Myka overseas than I do about Claudia being with her own brother and that woman at home,” Jane quips.

“Myka,” Jeannie begins again, “is Helena picking you up at the airport?”

“Yes,” Myka answers.

“And you’re staying where?”

“With Helena, Mom, and her dad.”

Her mother sighs and it is that relenting sigh that she has come to know so well.  The sigh of defeat and acceptance that her mother sighs when she is about to give Myka permission to do whatever it is she is wanting to do in that moment.

“I’ll call Charles in the morning and let him know what’s going on,” her mother tells her, “Claudia’s passport is at the house in a safe in our bedroom closet, the key is in the kitchen drawer, where the utensils are.”

Myka already feels a tremendous weight lifting from her shoulders, “Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Jane.”

“You’re going to need a travel consent form from Joshua, since he’s still technically Claudia’s legal guardian,” Jane adds.

“Another hurdle,” Myka groans, throwing her head back.  “I’ve tried calling them a million times. They refuse to answer their phones.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” Jane says, “you just keep an eye on the fax machine.”

Myka is sure, for approximately one hour after that conversation ends, that London is an impossible trip.  That it will never happen.  That she was foolish to think life would allow her something as exciting and wonderful as a trip to London, to see the woman she loves, that she has not seen in over a year.  Myka is sure.

But she’s glaring at the fax machine one hour after that conversation when it rings and tones and finally _finally_ spits out a Child Travel Consent form that is filled out and signed by Joshua Donovan himself.

Later, Myka will learn exactly how persuasive Jane can be and exactly how easily a person will bend beneath the threat of a child custody battle that they are certain to lose.

***

Myka takes Claudia to the diner for dinner because she is hungry and, in all of her worry, she had not eaten.  Not nearly enough to sustain her energy through all the stress because all she had eaten was whatever she’d stolen from Claudia’s plate whenever Claudia reminded her that she needed to eat, too.  So, they go to the diner and Myka sits in that booth, the one they always do, with Claudia sitting across from her.

Leena is there and she is all shy smile and soft spoken, awaiting confirmation of Myka’s usual order, asking Claudia, “And you, cutie?”

“Chicken fingers, fries, ranch, and a Sprite, please.”

“Watered down with lemonade,” Myka corrects, arching a brow at Leena, who smirks in response.

“You got it, sweetie,” Leena winks at Claudia, “be back with your drinks,” and flashes another shy smile at Myka as she turns and heads back behind the counter.

“ _So_ ,” Myka says, dragging out that “o” as she pulls two straws into her hands, freeing them of their paper wrappers and dunking them into their corresponding water glasses.  “New Zealand?”

Claudia’s nod is exaggerated, her smile wide.

“How was that?”

Claudia’s shrug is exaggerated, “Fun.”

“Yeah?”

Another exaggerated nod.

“Not very interested in this topic are you?”

Exaggerated head shake.

“Okay.” Myka smirks, “how’s school going?”

“School? Really, Myka? You think that is a more interesting topic than my family trip to New Zealand?”

“You _like_ school, don’t you?”

Exaggerated shrug.

Myka groans, “You pick the topic then.”

“Leena.”

Myka arches a brow, “You want to talk about Leena?”

Claudia laughs, “No, silly,” and points, “Leena is coming back with my fries.”

Leena returns with their drinks and a basket of fries, a small cup of ranch, which she sets squarely in front of Claudia.  Myka snatches one up before Claudia can even get her hands on the basket.

“ _Our_ fries,” Myka corrects, shoving that warm fry into her mouth.

“There you go, cutie,” Leena winks again and Claudia’s tiny cheeks flush bright red. 

“Thank you,” she says and it is almost shy, it is almost completely out of character for Claudia, until she also says, “guess where we’re going this weekend,” and she is beaming.

“Um, let me see,” Leena feigns deep thought and concentration, scooting herself into the booth beside Claudia, “to the city?”

“Further than that,” Claudia smiles, mischievously.

“Oh, hmm, to Kansas?”

“ _Much_ further than _that_ ,” Claudia says making her arms spread far and wide apart.

“Oh, I know,” and Leena looks across the table to Myka, with what Myka is fairly certain is a flirtatious smile, “London, perhaps?”

“You knew already,” Claudia accuses.

“Maybe, just a little,” Leena smiles, turning back to Claudia, “I know Tracy Bering after all.”

“No secrets kept with that one,” Myka says under her breath and Leena shoots another shy smile in her direction.

“So, Claudia’s going with you?  That’s… an interesting arrangement.”

“I wasn’t supposed to go,” Claudia informs her, with none of that earlier enthusiasm.

“But you’re going now,” Myka tells her, “and I’m happy to have the company, Pip.”

“She’s lying to make me feel better,” Claudia says to Leena, then smiles back at Myka, “if I were going to visit _my_ girlfriend, I wouldn’t want a kid going with me either.”

“ _Claudia_ ,” Myka sighs, “you’re _barely_ a kid.”

“And if you were visiting _your_ girlfriend, who, exactly, would you be visiting?”  Leena asks with genuine curiosity.

This makes Claudia’s cheeks flush, makes her turn away from Leena and shake her head and say, quietly to both of them, “No one.”

Leena’s smile meets Myka’s growing smile before turning back to Claudia.

“Well, don’t go breaking any hearts in London,” Leena says, standing now. “I’ll be back with your orders but you had better come say bye to me before you leave, little one.”

Claudia turns back to her now, smile returned, cheeks still flushed.

“I promise, I will,” Claudia says, and this time it is shy and soft.

Leena winks at Claudia, one last time, and as she goes, she sets her hand over Myka’s shoulder, smiles that smile at Myka again, and says, in the softest voice Myka thinks she’s ever heard from her, “Tell Helena I said hi.”

That hand, on Myka’s shoulder, is gone just as quickly as it came but for some reason, for some very nonsensical reason, Myka still feels the weight of that girl’s touch there.

“She likes you,” Claudia says flatly, sipping from her soda-lemonade, eyes never meeting Myka’s.

“Why do you say that?”

Claudia looks annoyed when she looks up at Myka.  She says, “Earth to Mykes,” and it sounds _just_ like Pete.  So much so that Myka’s mouth falls wide open and she laughs, louder than she’d expected to laugh at that.  “She smiles at you like Laila smiles at me all of the time.”

“Oh, it’s Laila, is it?  Your secret girlfriend?”

At that, Claudia’s face turns almost as red as her hair.  “She’s _not_ my girlfriend, she’s just a wanna-be.”

“Well, _that’s_ not very nice,” Myka says mostly under her breath.

“Just like Leena isn’t your girlfriend but _wants_ to be.”

“Claudia,” Myka sighs, setting a hand to her forehead and rubbing a non-existent ache, “can you do me a big favor, please?”

“Sure.”

“Just… _be_ _nine_ , okay?”

Claudia’s only response is a very amused giggle.

***

“I’m sorry,” Claudia’s voice is tiny and almost nothing when she says this to Myka, where they sit side-by-side, finally on their flight to NYC. Myka turns to her, with an arched brow and offers her a gentle smile.

“Why are you sorry, Pip?”

Claudia worries her lip and lowers her eyes, looking down on the CD player that she has in her lap, wrapping her fingers around the cord of the headphones until the skin of that finger is white and bloodless and swelling beneath the wire.

“You almost didn’t get your trip,” Claudia shrugs, “to see H.G. I know you miss her. I miss her, too. But I know you miss her a lot more and you almost didn’t get to see her because of me.”

Myka reaches her hand to Claudia’s and unwraps that wire from her finger, smiles when Claudia looks back up at her.

“None of this is because of you, Claud,” Myka squeezes her hand around Claudia’s tiny fingers, “and all of that, back there?  Not even remotely your fault.  Your brother is just…” Myka rolls her eyes.  She wants to do more than that and say more than just nothing about it but regardless of how she feels about Joshua, about how she feels about Joshua’s new wife on top of that, he is still Claudia’s big brother.  He is still Claudia’s only surviving family member.  “It’s not your fault, Pip.  I’m glad you’re coming on this trip with me.  We’re going to have a lot of weirdo nerd fun, sight-seeing, visiting historical monuments, going to museums, and bugging the hell out of Helena. Okay?”

Claudia nods, “Okay.”

“I appreciate you being concerned about me, Pip, but you have to remember that _you’re_ the kid here. You just sit back, have fun, and we’ll both thank the stars you aren’t spending the next three weeks with _Ingrid_.”

***

Myka wants to kiss the ground when they reach London because Helena had been right, when she had told Myka, that her first flight ( _ever_ ) being to London would probably be overwhelming. And it had, in fact, been just that.  Myka cannot count how many times the flight attendant had approached them, asking if she was okay. How many times Claudia had smiled, calm and serene, in a way that made her look much older than nine, and said, “She’s just nervous.  It’s her first flight but also she’s going to see her girlfriend.”

How many times Myka just sort of nodded that affirmation and adjusted herself in her seat before trying, once again, to fall asleep over the hum of an engine that she is fairly certain had, at several points during their flight, actually stopped humming, stopped working altogether.  She was also very certain that they were always several seconds away from plummeting to their deaths.

It wasn’t until Claudia had put her hand over Myka’s and her headphones over Myka’s ears, that Myka finally began to relax, to ignore the sounds of the plane and give in to the sounds of music now drifting not-at-all quietly into her ears.

Myka lifted the headphones, at one point, to ask Claudia, “Is this Counting Crows?” and Claudia  beamed, nodding her head quite proudly in response.  “I don’t even know if you should be listening to this,” Myka sighs, dropping the ear piece back over her ear and resting back against the chair. She decided to ignore Claudia’s slight eye roll in favor of closing her own eyes.

And that was the last thing she remembered before waking up to the soft pinging sound overhead, a woman’s voice gently bidding them a good afternoon whilst welcoming them to London.

Myka wants to kiss the ground when they land but she decides, eventually, that kissing Helena is probably a lot more sanitary than that.

***

Sanitary, yes, but there is nothing at all sane, Myka thinks, about the way she feels when her eyes, already burning with the threat of tears, finally set sight on the woman she has not actually seen in a year and a half.

Helena is beautiful.  She is beautiful and smiling, grinning even, with wide eyes and Myka can see, even from where she stands, that Helena is resisting the urge to run to her, to run and leap into her arms.  Myka wants it, though.  Internally, she is screaming at Helena to run to her, she is readying her arms to catch that girl, she is willing herself not to express all of these things out loud. And Helena is biting down on her lip, clasping at her hands, keeping her feet firmly planted, flat on the ground. But the look she gives Myka, when she looks at Myka, has already knocked the wind out of her.

She is patient enough to allow a very excitable Claudia to propel her tiny self into Helena’s arms for the biggest hug that Myka has ever seen Claudia give to anyone, but especially to Helena.  Especially to the woman she once often referred to as someone she would never ever like, not in one million billion trillion bajillion (her exact words at age six) years. 

Myka smiles at the thought.  Smiles, even more, when Claudia pulls away from Helena and whispers, not at all covertly, “I just wanted to hug you before Myka because she’s probably not going to let you go.”  Helena laughs at that, kissing Claudia’s forehead and whispering back to her, “You are far too wise for your nine years, my love,” and this makes Myka think of the cautionary tale of her lifetime, about Myka’s impending death at the hands of one Helena Wells, that has been told to her by Pete, repeatedly, over the past several years.

It would surely be a glorious death, Myka thinks, because that laughter and that smile.  The way Helena gives Claudia one last, lingering hug before pressing her lips to tiny red cheeks.  The way she stands straight and reaches, as she stands, to run her hand through Claudia’s red hair, recently cut to just below her chin just for this trip. Because, “H.G. would like it if I cut my hair,” Claudia had told her just two days before the trip. 

Then it is the way Helena’s eyes glide to Myka, the way Helena’s smile softens, the way she slowly closes those eyes and presses her lips together tight, taking in a deep breath, before slowly opening those beautiful brown eyes wide and suddenly glistening and unsure and hesitant and somehow, even sad.

Myka drops her backpack to the ground and Helena seems to understand this cue far better than Myka had anticipated because Helena is in her arms in less than a second after that and if anyone had been foolish enough to be scandalized by the kiss they now share in the middle of a quite populated walkway at Heathrow, they were at least intelligent enough to keep their mouths shut.

Myka wants to fall to the ground right here because this kiss is hot and then it is sweet.  Then biting and desperate, and sweet all over again.  She wants to fall and she wants to take Helena with her, Helena who is practically climbing into her arms, and damn everything else, the wait in baggage claim, the drive to Helena’s, the small talk, the settling in, because Myka would take Helena right here, right now, and anyone who had anything to say about it could, quite honestly, kiss her ass. 

She wants to fall.

Her palms find Helena’s waist and wrap around that waist and pull that waist into her, flush against her own, and tiny moans are escaping Helena’s nostrils, breathing soft breath against Myka’s tattered resolve until she feels warm tears on her cheeks, against her lips.  She registers that they are her own but it draws her attention to the equally tear-drenched face before her.  And when she moves to pull away, with the forethought to open her eyes to Helena’s, to ask Helena if she’s okay, she is pulled back in by Helena’s arms wrapping securely around her neck, Helena’s fingers snaking into curls at the back of her head.

Somewhere, between these kisses, Helena whispers against warm and wet lips, “I have missed you.  _So_ much,” and Myka whispers in response, “I obviously didn’t miss you at all.”

“Brat,” Helena tells her, kissing her smile. 

“Mine,” Myka manages to reply.

When they do part, eventually, it is to the sound of someone very nearby clearing their throat, not at all in a reprimanding way.  Myka is positive the look she gives the owner of that throat-clearing is nothing close to pleasant until she realizes she recognizes the man she’d barely noticed standing just beside them. And now he, this man, and Claudia, standing just beside him, are sharing identical expectant, slightly awkward looks when Helena also turns, still in Myka’s arms, and smiles at them both.

“I’m sorry, Will,” Helena says this while leaning further into Myka’s arms, covering her smile with the hand that isn’t currently snaking its way around Myka’s waist. 

“You are not,” this Will responds but he, too, is smiling now and looks down to Claudia and then back to Helena and Myka, “I didn’t know if I should cover her eyes or…” he allows his voice to trail off.

“They used to make me turn around,” Claudia informs him, stretching her neck to reach her eyes to his, several feet above her own, “now it’s too much effort to warn me.  I have to do the turning around myself.”

“Well, I don’t see you turned around,” Helena teases her, turning a bright smile momentarily back to Myka and leaving a kiss against Myka’s jaw. “Will, _this_ ,” Helena says, turning back to him, “is Myka.”

“Oh really, darling, is it?  I couldn't quite tell.”

“Cheeky bastard.”

“It’s nice to finally meet you, Myka,” he smiles, reaching to shake her hand. “I have to admit, it’s a bit like meeting a celebrity.  I have heard so much about you over the past ten years, I feel as though I should be asking for your autograph.”

“The feeling is very mutual,” Myka laughs, returning that handshake.

“So, that must make _you_ Claudia,” Will says, turning and reaching his hand down to Claudia, who arches a suspicious brow before glancing at Myka.  Myka gives her a slight nod and Claudia turns a smile back on Will, takes his hand. “I’m Wolly.  Or Will,” he corrects, throwing Helena a sideways glance, “though H.G. hasn’t called me that in years.”

“I am, in fact, Claudia.  Or Claud,” Claudia, too, corrects.

“Or Big Red,” Helena smiles, reaching and tussling Claudia’s hair.

“Or Pipsqueak,” Myka adds before pressing her lips into Helena’s temple and pulling that woman further into her arms.  “Sometimes menace.”

“Only when I take things apart,” Claudia beams.  “She doesn’t complain when I put things back together.”

“Well, Claudia Claud, the Big Red Menacing Pipsqueak, contradictory though that name be,” Will smiles down on her, “what do you say we leave these two to their public displays of grossness and go fetch your luggage.”

“First, I must pee,” Claudia says looking around them with a bit of a dance to her stance.

“Well that, I cannot help you with,” Will says with wide eyes.

“Just point me in the right direction.”

“Okay, follow me!”  Will reaches his hand out and Claudia takes it without hesitation. 

“Claud, I can take,” they are already gone, “you?”

A soft laugh draws Myka’s eyes down to the woman still in her arms who looks at her in a way that actually appears shy, her cheeks flushing red.

“What’s so funny?”  Myka squints at her.

“She’s fine,” Helena says softly.  “Wolly has a niece Claudia’s age.  She is in good hands.”

“I’m sure she is but she’s also my responsibility,” Myka sighs, softens her voice, “you should have heard the speech Jane gave me.”

Helena, when Myka’s eyes find hers again, is biting back that definitely shy smile and tells Myka, “You’re here.  I’m holding you—“

“ _I’m_ holding _you_ ,” Myka swiftly corrects.

“You’re holding _me_ ,” Helena says softly before her lips, once again, find Myka’s and draw her into another kiss, this one less feverish but by no means less intoxicating.  And it is when they part that Helena adds, on a whisper, with her lips still pressed gently against Myka’s, “But not nearly close enough.”

Myka wastes no time retrieving her backpack from the ground behind her before scooping Helena’s hand into hers and all but dragging her across the airport to baggage claim to find Will and Claudia.

***

The drive had been torture.

Myka was reluctant to do anything but touch Helena in any small way that she possibly could without having to ask Claudia to turn around, or to cover her eyes, just to be on the safe side.  So Myka’s hand had found it’s way into Helena’s lap not very long into their drive at all.  If Myka really thinks about it, she’s sure it was sometime after Helena had started the car. Maybe before then. Maybe when Helena had latched her seatbelt.

Regardless, Myka’s hand finds Helena’s thigh and at first it is innocent, where her hand rests on top of Helena’s thigh but in three minutes, Myka’s hand moves further around her thigh, into that space between Helena’s legs, though not quite high enough to scandalize the two innocent bystanders in the back seat of the car.  So Myka’s hand is there and it is there for the duration, hovering unmoved, completely restrained (Myka will later give herself quite the pat on the back) above that spot of Helena’s.

Helena eyes her when she can.  It is a warning, the way she glances sideways at Myka and then down to where Myka’s hand rests around her thigh, and then back to the road with a shake of her head.

“Don’t worry.  I value my life,” Myka tells her, “and you are already a horrible driver on the right side of the road, I won’t be testing you while driving on the left.”

Helena rolls her eyes but the smirk that graces those too perfect lips is trying really hard not to smile.

***

Introductions and dinner had been torture.

Not even in the back of Myka's mind but in the very forefront of it, she's wondering why why _why_ Helena decided to have a welcoming dinner on their first night together again. It's nice enough for Claudia, who gets to meet Will’s niece, Sophie, and for Charles Senior, who gets to pretend as though he's elated to have both Myka and Claudia in their home for three weeks.  But for Myka, who can't stop touching Helena just to make sure that she's real, that she's really there, that Myka, herself, is actually here… it is torture.

Myka thinks it must somehow be torture for Claudia, too, because she passes out in her chair halfway through dinner. 

Helena directs Myka, with Claudia in her arms, upstairs and into the small bedroom that is to be Claudia’s for the next three weeks, which was once Helena’s bedroom, and Myka sets her on the bed, sits just beside her. Helena is removing her shoes, pulling covers from beneath her tiny frame, Myka is tucking Claudia’a legs beneath those covers, pulling them back up over the sleeping girl. They leave her with two kisses on her forehead and a pair of pajamas spread across her bed, just in case she wakes up.

And then they find themselves in the hallway, just outside of Claudia’s door, alone. Myka pulls Helena into her and kisses her and only relents just long enough for Myka to yawn, to close her eyes and rest her forehead against Helena's before kissing those too perfect lips once again.

“You must be exhausted,” Helena whispers against those lazy lips. “Your first flight? How was it?”

“Nerve wrecking,” Myka sighs.

“You survived,” Helena smiles.

“I just kept my eye on the prize,” Myka says before kissing her. “The prize that I would really love to take to bed soon.  Very _very_ soon.”

“I know,” Helena sighs, looking toward the staircase, the muted voices of Will and Charles Senior, fully engaged in conversation, drifting up those stairs from where they are sat in the dining room.  “I thought it might be a bit much, to have dinner tonight, but wanted to get it out of the way.”

“It's fine,” Myka smiles, kissing Helena again, “it's forcing me to stay awake, which is only okay because it means I get to kiss you.”  And Myka does kiss that woman in her arms again.

“I'm sure Wolly will be headed out soon,” Helena smiles and kisses Myka now, her hands on Myka’s forearms as Myka’s arms snake their way around Helena's waist.  “I can tell them you passed out, if you want to go to bed?”

It's tempting.

“I'll wait for you,” Myka nods and yawns again.  “I think I can last long enough to not be rude to your company.”

“Okay,” Helena says biting down on her lip.  “Then straight to bed we go.”

“Not quite straight,” Myka puffs out a soft laugh.

***

Myka is half asleep and slowly waking when she finds her arms wrapped around a bare abdomen and rakes her fingers across the back of that abdomen, where they had come to rest against warm skin. 

Helena moves slightly in her arms, nuzzling closer to Myka in her sleep, her arms resting, folded between them. Myka's hands travel down the length of Helena's spine, fingers against gentle ridges, until they are low enough to touch the familiar elastic of silk.

“I have missed you,” comes slow and soft and on gentle breath that still smells like toothpaste and mouthwash when Helena speaks.

Myka smiles. 

“We are in London,” Myka tells her, slipping her hand beneath cool silk and gently cupping her hands to the curve of Helena’s body below that, “you have no excuse for not wearing pajamas.”

“Don't I?”  Helena is moving against that intimate touch, mumbling this into Myka's neck just before kissing her there.  “I think I've the perfect excuse.”

“Even still,” Myka yawns.

“I'll let you sleep tonight.”  Helena shifts slightly in Myka's arms and Myka brings her hands to Helena’s hip, rests her palms against Helena's sides, and runs them up her abdomen, to just below her breasts, to more soft skin, to the exposed curve just below those breasts, and eventually, playfully, Myka cups her hands over Helena’s breasts.

“Helena…”

“I didn't want you to have any trouble.”  Even in the dark of Helena's bedroom, Myka can tell that older girl is smiling, entirely pleased with herself.  “Considering all the warning signs.”

“A dream,” Myka tells her, “not a bloody premonition.”

“Honestly, Myka, you've been here for less than twenty-four hours and you're already using the language.”

“My girlfriend is _English_.”

“Fine excuse.”

“Shut up and kiss me, please.”

Helena smiles, Myka can feel it in their kiss.

***

There is no sleeping immediately after that.

Helena is pressing tender kisses into Myka’s cheeks, her forehead, the space below her lips, between the bridge of her nose and her eye.  Her breathing is unsteady and shallow, her hips moving in time with Myka’s own gentle touches, with the palm of a hand pressed against her, with fingers lost entirely inside of her.

It is sweet and slow and if Myka had ever intended for there to be an end, Helena had certainly had other plans because she draws it out for minutes, this touching, this connection between them, even if only to keep pressing gentle kisses to Myka’s face in the meantime.

Eventually her eyes close and she shakes her head and her hands fall over the pillow, she stretches her arms out, to palm the headboard just above her.

“Tired,” is all she manages on a soft breath.  She shakes her head again.  “I’m sorry, my love.”

Myka smiles and moves her hands, her arms, to wrap entirely around the smaller woman, pulls her into her and returns each and every one of those sweet kisses as Helena relaxes in her hold.

“We have three weeks,” Myka whispers, closing her own eyes, allowing her forehead to rest against Helena’s. 

She presses one last kiss to Helena’s lips before they both succumb to their exhaustion.

***

They do have three weeks together but they are just days away from Christmas, which leaves them little time to sight-see, one great attraction per day and, if Myka is being honest, Claudia is the only reason they ever decide to leave the house anyway. Claudia is the only reason they are not permanently attached to one another for the duration of their trip because Myka and Helena agree that it probably wouldn’t be ideal to keep the kid holed up inside for three weeks.

Myka loves Claudia, with all of her heart, because she is an easy kid to manage, she listens and she’s quiet and, aside from the occasional dismantled appliance (which Helena has always encouraged anyway) she has never given Myka much trouble.  But the mere fact that she cannot just reach for Helena, wherever they are, at whatever palace they’re visiting, on whatever double decker bus they find themselves, and take Helena somewhere, anywhere, _everywhere_ , just solidifies Myka’s absolute disinterest in ever having children of her own.

“Claudia will be my only child,” she murmurs at one point into Helena’s hair, against Helena’s temple, as these thoughts consume her mind, as they are standing, arm-in-arm, in the Natural History Museum.  Helena laughs quietly and Myka smiles, pressing a kiss into her hair, watching Claudia wander further down a long hall of artifacts, armed with a notebook and a pen.  And Myka can only imagine what or why in the world that girl is taking notes but she is so focused on doing so that Myka does not dare interrupt her.

Helena turns suddenly to Myka and smiles up at her, moves her hands to Myka’s forearms and says, quite fondly, “We are something of a little family this Christmas, aren’t we?”

Myka laughs now, too, nodding and pulling that older woman back into her.

“Yes,” Myka says, pressing a kiss to her forehead, “we really are.”

***

The day before Christmas Eve, they squeeze far too many things into one very short day.  It is just after ten o’clock when they return home and Claudia and Will’s niece, Sophie, are passed out in the back seat of Helena’s car.  Myka is yawning in the passenger seat, and Helena, cutting off the car engine, lets her head fall back against the headrest for several moments in silence.

“I don’t think I have ever seen this much of London in my entire life,” Helena breathes out a sigh before allowing her head to lull to the left, turning her tired gaze in Myka’s direction, “much less in one short week.”

Myka’s hand finds it’s way into Helena’s lap again.  She says, “I bet you’re pretty tired,” and flashes a smirk at Helena, tilts her head and eyes her just over the rim of her glasses. Myka moves the tips of her fingers over Helena’s jeans, drawing tiny circles, raking invisible lines into denim.

When Helena looks at Myka, it is with a bright smile and sleepy eyes. “Not _that_ tired,” she says softly, dropping her hand over Myka’s and pulling, tugging, until Myka leans into her.  Helena meets her halfway, over the center console, until their lips find each other’s in a tender kiss.

“I can’t turn around,” Claudia’s voice says, with a youthful grogginess, still half asleep, from the back seat.

“Close your eyes,” Myka tells her, when her lips leave Helena’s, and she glances into the back seat to find Claudia only partially watching them, with just one eye open.  Sophie still fast asleep beside her.

“Get a room,” Claudia counters.

Myka grins. Helena is grinning, too, because that is exactly what they intend to do.

***

Helena is reaching, has reached, and is falling away from that peak and it is a sight accompanied by sounds that Myka has come to know and love so much, that Myka will never forget.  That she will never not hunger for.

“I love you,” Helena’s voice is thick and low and soft in Myka’s ear just before Helena kisses that ear and pulls herself up and over Myka, to straddle Myka’s waist.  Myka bites down on her lip at the sight of her, exposed breasts, long hair falling over one shoulder, with sweat glistening on _absolutely everything_.

Helena stretches, throws her head back to shake her hair into or out of place, Myka isn’t entirely sure and doesn’t particularly care.  All she knows is that it is beautiful, this thing that Helena so often does when she is above her.  It is mesmerizing and gorgeous and it is an image that Myka will also never forget.  It is an image that Myka never wants to stop seeing.

But it is gone too soon when Helena’s hands find the bottom of Myka’s shirt and push that shirt up to kiss the skin beneath it.  Helena adjusts herself so that she is now straddling Myka’s legs, so that she can bend forward and set her lips to Myka’s navel, to warm skin just above that navel, and higher still to the edge of Myka’s own bra, pushing her shirt up the entire way.

Helena tugs Myka’s shirt toward her, tells her in a soft, almost shy voice, “Sit up, baby,” and how could Myka protest that?  If she even wanted to, even if she were that asinine, how could she find the resolve?  Helena urges again, just as softly, “Baby, sit up,” and Myka sits up with no hesitation and lets Helena pull her shirt off and lets Helena press her lips into Myka’s neck, lets Helena mouth the skin where Myka’s neck meets her shoulder, lets Helena move her kisses along her shoulder, down her arm, back across her chest.

Myka doesn’t know how she does it but before she even registers the slight pull at her back, her bra is falling into her lap, Helena is tugging it free of her arms and throwing it away from the bed.

“Show off,” Myka accuses and Helena’s only response to that is a gentle smirk as she palms Myka’s shoulders and pushes her back until she falls against the bed once again.

She runs her own hand through long hair before settling over Myka’s body, laying with her belly to Myka’s, with her breasts to Myka’s, and lowering her lips back to the features of Myka’s face, to every square inch of skin that she can possibly find to kiss.  And she kisses again, all over these places, Myka’s lips, her chin, her jaw, the bridge of her nose, her eyelids.  Slowly, gently, delicately, she presses those kisses to Myka’s features before finding Myka’s mouth with her own.

“You’re really good at this,” Myka tells her.

Helena smiles, kisses her cheek, responds softly, “I’m good at other things, too.” It’s then, in that moment, that Helena’s hand, with the tips of her fingers trailing feather light touches down Myka’s side, finds its way to the elastic edge of Myka’s boxers. And because it is Helena, because Helena really is good, as Myka is finding out, at other things, too, she slips her hand into that useless hole at the front of those boxers, and before Myka can react, before she even knows _how_ to react, Helena’s hand is cupping her, between her legs, gently applying pressure.

Helena kisses her, in tandem with that gentle grasp.  It forces Myka to move in a way that is completely and entirely out of her control and that, and Myka can’t say why, strikes a strangely familiar sort of panic into her core.

Myka reaches for Helena’s wrist, slowly, just at the edge of that opening, and she squeezes gently, tugs lightly, and moves that hand away, holds that hand tight, pulls that hand into her.  And only when she brings that hand back up, to rest between them does she let go of the breath she’s been holding since that wandering hand had found its way.

That breath that she releases comes out like a sigh, like relief, exactly how Myka does not want it to sound, and it reaches Helena in a way that makes her brows furrow, that makes her lips fall into a pout before parting slightly to utter nothing at all.  To say absolutely nothing at all about what _that_ was all about, about why Myka had pulled her away. 

To distract herself, and Helena, too, Myka finds Helena’s other wrist with her free hand and she pulls Helena into her, to kiss her, to roll and to make Helena roll with her.  To push her, gently and with the utmost care, down to the bed and below her once again.

Myka leans closer for another kiss but stops, just short of capturing still parted, still wordless lips, and she studies that face below her, the softening wrinkle of those brows, the lip that still curls into a frown. Myka tells Helena, “I love you,” before biting down on her own lip.  “I love everything about you, when we’re together… like this. The way you feel, inside and out.” Myka nods, sighs.  “The way that you move, the way you look at me.  The way you’re looking at me right now… _that_ look,” Myka presses her lips to Helena’s for only a second before continuing.  “I love the way you breathe, the sounds you make.  Those beautiful sounds you make when I touch you. At the thought of me touching you…”

She moves to rest with her elbows against the mattress on either side of Helena’s shoulders, she moves her hands to palm Helena’s temples, traces her thumbs over Helena’s eyebrows, and snakes her fingers into Helena’s hair.

“I love that I can do these things to you,” Myka sighs, a warm breath against Helena’s breath before wet lips meet Helena’s lips, too. And there are those beautiful sounds, that soft moan, a small puff of hot air that escapes Helena’s nose and dances its way into Myka’s ears, into the recesses of her mind, into her very being.

When they eventually part, it is with heavy breath, with parted lips, with an intense gaze as Helena watches Myka and Helena moves her hands to Myka’s hips and Helena, with her hands on those hips, pulls Myka’s body further against her.  Helena drags those hands up Myka’s sides and down again.  Down low, so very low, until her fingers are slipping past that elastic band of Myka’s boxers and over Myka’s ass and cupping the curve of her, just above her thighs.

“I would love,” Helena says softly, pulling Myka further into her with her hands at the backs of Myka’s thighs and that feeling, in Myka’s core, it is there and it feels _so_ good but it is so far outside of her control.  So much like it had been with Abigail, it is too far out of her control.   She closes her eyes tight, “to do those things to _you_ \--”

Myka cuts her off with another deep kiss and this time, there is no parting for sweet words, there are no soft kisses of facial features, no whispered I love you. Myka kisses Helena into an oblivion.  She kisses her and kisses her until she’s sure she’s kissed those words, the thought, the idea entirely, out of Helena’s mouth and mind.  And when she can kiss her no more, she places herself in that familiar position between Helena’s thighs and grabs those thighs, and pulls them into her, closer to her, and falls over Helena again.

“I need you, Helena,” Myka says softly, her hand already trailing down that older woman’s abdomen, over her naval, to the very center of her. “I have always… I will always need you. Exactly like _this_.”  Myka presses a kiss to Helena’s cheek.  “In every way.”

Helena releases a deep sigh, her arms snaking around Myka’s neck as she gives her a slight nod and a sympathetic smile and pulls her down into a deep kiss that is punctuated by a small peck of a kiss against the corner of Myka’s mouth.

“My love,” Helena whispers, now setting a tiny kiss to Myka’s chin, “I am yours,” and Helena pulls Myka closer and rests damp lips directly over Myka’s ear to add, “however you need me.”

Myka takes Helena home again.

***

When Myka wakes on Christmas Eve, it is to an empty bed, to the muffled sounds of loud voices coming through the bedroom door, and a light tap on that door to follow.

Myka scrambles for her shirt before answering that knock and finding Claudia and Sophie outside of her door, both with wide eyes, as the voices from downstairs, one Helena’s and the other her father’s, become more loud, more clear, and more agitated by the second.

“Inside,” Myka tells them and they run to the bed and fall into it simultaneously. “Stay put.”

"It’s okay, Sophie,” Myka hears Claudia tell the other girl and she glances back through the door as she’s closing it, just in time to see Claudia wrapping a protective arm over that other girl, “Myka’s got this.”

Myka closes that door with a smirk, with a shake of her head, too, and makes her way downstairs, into the kitchen, to find Helena at the stove, cooking and shaking _her_ head and turning, occasionally, to where her father sits just behind her at the counter, a coffee mug and a laptop in front of him.  When Charles sees Myka, he begins drinking the last of that coffee, closing the lid to that laptop, pulling himself up and off of that bar stool.

“I’ve learned to expect absolutely nothing more than uncaring from you, so there is always _that_ ,” Helena is saying, immediately followed by the sound of Helena’s sharp cry.  Myka’s eyes move away from Charles, in time to find Helena just as she is drawing her hand away from that stove, just as she is pulling her hand into her own abdomen and clutching it tightly with the other. “ _Fuck_!”

Myka is quick, when she moves to Helena’s side, as Helena hastily cuts the stove-top burners with her uninjured hand and turns, on instinct it seems, toward Myka.

“ _Fuck_ , that hurts!”

Charles takes this very moment to slip _almost_ silently out of the kitchen with a shake of his head and Helena’s name, exasperated, under his breath.  That, Myka is certain, Helena does not hear at all, or she’d surely have something to say about it.

“ _Goddamnit_.” It’s a whispered cry this time and there are tears already in Helena’s eyes.

“Let me see it,” Myka says softly, reaching for Helena’s arm, pulling that injured hand, balled up tight, into hers.  Myka taps lightly, runs a feather light touch of her fingertips over Helena’s fingers, still balled into a fist, until she loosens her grip and exposes that palm for Myka to examine.  “Well,” Myka smiles, leaning down to better inspect that hand, “it’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad? Try being the one who just burned her hand.”

Myka rolls her eyes upwards but ignores that quip.  She returns her gaze to the palm of Helena’s hand, now red and warm to the touch.  “It might not even blister,”  Helena has tears in her eyes when Myka looks back up at her, so she offers her a soft smile and a kiss to her forehead, “but you should probably stop arguing with your father while cooking.  I’ve noticed a pattern.”

It works, that tease, just a little.  Helena puffs out a soft laugh and leans into Myka’s arms as Myka pulls Helena into her, wraps her arms fully around that older woman of hers, and holds onto her tight.  “My doctor _and_ my therapist now, are you?”

“I do what I can,” Myka smiles, setting another tender kiss to Helena’s forehead. “So, what was all that yelling about?”

Helena shakes her head and sighs, “Charlie,” and Myka already regrets asking. “Being deported. Coming back here. Having no place to stay, if my father has anything to do with that.”

“Oh,” Myka pulls away from Helena just slightly, to tilt her head down, to study Helena’s expression, “and this upsets you because…”

“He’s my brother,” Helena says, shaking her head again, “he only _has_ us.”

“Because he’s an _asshole_ ,” Myka quips before thinking to stop herself, not even wanting to stop herself. A long silence follows and Myka can only wonder how Helena will respond, anticipates her upset, her retorts. But all Helena does is give her a slight nod and lift herself onto the tips of her toes to set a chaste kiss to Myka’s lips before turning completely away from Myka and back to the stove.

“Breakfast is ready,” Helena offers Myka after that, never turning away from the task she now busies herself with, using only her uninjured hand. So Myka nods, too, even if Helena cannot see, and she steps to Helena to plant a quick and gentle kiss over her temple, to sigh a soft breath against her skin as her hand pushes its way through black hair and pushes black hair behind Helena’s ear.

“I’ll get the girls,” Myka tells her, stepping back and away from Helena, with Helena’s eyes on her in a mixture of sadness and upset, of both her love and her annoyance.

Helena nods, wordlessly, before dropping her gaze to the floor and Myka makes her way back upstairs.n

***

When Claudia and Sophie are settled at the dining table with their breakfast and Helena has settled, too, in front of her own plate, Myka disappears into the kitchen.  She grabs a cloth, fills that cloth with ice, wets that ice-filled cloth with water. And when she reappears in the dining room with her own plate of food in one hand, that damp cloth filled with ice in the other, she sits quietly next to Helena, who has remained just as quiet since Myka left her side. 

Myka sets her plate on the table and pulls Helena’s hand into her lap, is met only momentarily with curious and questioning eyes, before those curious eyes fall on that cloth and those questioning brows furrow further into that sadness, that upset, that Myka has found to be too prominent a look for these short few weeks that they have together.

Helena is quiet and she turns her gaze away, opens her palm up to Myka, where it rests in Myka’s lap, and Myka sets that damp cloth to the still red, still warm hand in hers.

"Merry Christmas, H.G.,” Claudia is saying now, while shoveling eggs into her mouth, a skill she, without a doubt, inherited from Pete. Sophie, beside Claudia, echoes that sentiment.

“Merry Christmas, loves,” Helena says softly, narrowly managing to sound awake and in one piece.  Still, she manages a soft smile and it is enough, of course.  For children, even those as intelligent as Claudia, that smile is enough.

To Myka, that smile is one thousand unspoken words, a collection of confessions to be made.  That smile, Myka thinks, is trouble on the horizon.

She decides she will wait for the storm to come to her.

***

It’s cold, even colder than home, and it is dark way too early on top of that. So Myka isn’t entirely surprised to find Helena, when she disappears into her bedroom, buried beneath covers, all the way up to and over her ears.  Myka had very much anticipated finding Helena that way and had very much planned to find her that way soon after pouring two mugs of hot tea to bring upstairs, into Helena’s room.

Myka is setting those hot mugs of tea on the night stand and reaching for covers, pulling covers back from over Helena, who is actually wearing pajamas, thin and useless as they are.  Helena actually shivers and protests, the first thing she has said to Myka since that morning, at the sudden cold.

“ _Ophelia_ ,” comes out in Helena’s scolding voice, but it is weak and effortless.  Still sad and upset. 

Myka climbs into that bed beside Helena and sits with her legs folded in front of her, playfully slaps Helena’s thigh in an effort to get her to sit up, too, and she eventually does.  Eventually, Helena is sitting with her legs crossed in front of Myka and they are quiet again, for a long while, before Myka says, “I’m sorry.”

Helena’s eyes find hers for the first time since her arrival and she sighs and she reaches for Helena’s hands and she pulls those hands into hers, gently caresses her fingertips over the palm of that injured hand.  No longer red, no longer warm, only slightly blistering.

“That I upset you,” Myka continues, “about your brother.”

Helena sighs and she looks away again, lowering her gaze to the sheet below them, to the empty space of white cloth that sits between Helena and Myka. Even that little bit of space is too much for Myka.

“I won’t even excuse it away,” Myka tells her softly, reaching, with both of her hands now, to grasp Helena’s thighs, to gently pull that girl, by her thighs, closer to her, until Helena finally relaxes and reaches, too, for Myka’s shoulders, around Myka’s neck, and moves herself into Myka’s lap. “I will never forgive him for that night,” Myka continues, running her hands up Helena’s thighs and around her waist, to the small of her back, as she pulls Helena’s body even closer to her own. “For all the nights he’s tortured you and assaulted you.”

Helena brings her forehead to rest against the bridge of Myka’s nose and closes her eyes, and steadies her breathing.  “Myka,” it is the only other thing that Helena has said to her since this morning and even now, even after only these short few hours, Myka misses her voice. Misses Helena in her arms, misses Helena’s lips on hers.

Myka moves her mouth to Helena’s and kisses her.  She’s both surprised and not surprised that Helena allows her. That Helena kisses her, too, just as feverishly. As if she has been wanting to, holding back from doing so, all day. 

“I’ll never forgive him for all the bullshit he’s done to hurt you but I’m sorry if I what I said about him, to you, hurt you. I’m only sorry if I hurt you, I’m not sorry for how I feel—“

“It isn’t Charlie,” Helena interrupts.

Myka falls quiet.  She is quiet but she moves her hands up Helena’s back, to hold Helena closer, and she hugs this woman in her arms, bringing their foreheads to touch again and asking, on a whisper, “Then why—“

“Will you be honest with me?”  Helena presses a kiss to Myka’s cheek, just below her eye, moving her hands into curls just at the nape of Myka’s neck.  Scratching, gently, the tips of her fingers against Myka’s scalp.

Myka nods and closes her eyes at that sensation, at Helena’s nails raking their way, tenderly, through her hair, of Helena’s lips as they, soon after, press a feathery kiss to Myka’s lips.

“Do I,” Helena swallows and sits slightly back on Myka’s lap, “make you… uncomfortable?”

“What?”

“I mean, when we’re… in bed together,” Helena’s eyes fall conveniently to the sheets below them and they are not so quick to rise, to meet Myka’s again.

“Helena? No,” Myka wants to laugh. She wants to laugh a lot. Because she had been, at some point in their past, very nervous – understatement of that century – at the thought of touching Helena, at the thought of being intimate with Helena.  Long before it was ever a possibility. Long before Helena had ever set a wanting eye on her. 

But now?

“No,” Myka puffs out a soft laugh again and follows that with, “I love you, Helena,” and a shake of her head, “I want to touch you all of the time,” and she closes her eyes, pulls that woman back into her arms, “I am one hundred percent comfortable with my need to touch you.”  And she smiles fully at that, she almost expects a smile from Helena, too.  But what she gets, instead, is the shake of a head.  What she gets, instead, is Helena moving her hands away from that perfect spot in Myka’s hair to Myka’s cheeks, and Helena’s brows, pulling together in a look or a thought that Myka cannot exactly place.

“That’s not what I mean,” Helena tells her and whispers, “you _know_ what I mean.”

***

Myka _knows_ what Helena means.

Myka thinks back to the beginning of this, before Helena, to Abigail. To nights and days and mornings and afternoons, stolen away with Abigail.  In an empty house, in an abandoned treehouse, in Myka’s own bedroom. Once in the backroom of a sanctuary that Myka had never wanted to step foot into in the first place.

With Abigail, it had been different because it had been new and unfamiliar and she knew, they both knew from the very beginning, everything that they _didn’t_ know.  They knew it wouldn’t always work, they knew it wouldn’t always feel right.  They were prepared for that, it wasn’t disappointment or failure or inadequacy. It was trial and error, plain and simple.  They tried and they tried and they tried and sometimes it worked.  A lot of times it did not.

For Abigail, it worked.  For Myka? It did not.

And Myka is thinking about all those times it never worked for her. She thinks about it often, even when she isn’t faced with Helena, who is so ready and willing and _receptive_.  Myka thinks about the times she and Abigail tried for her sake and it felt right and good and okay in some ways, for only a short time before it was unpleasant and painful and not okay.

Trial and error.  It had been trial and error, where the error of the trial never seemed to end for Myka. But it was Abigail and Abigail, smart and understanding and all-knowing as Abigail has always been known to be, would see the look on Myka’s face and just know.  Myka would try and try and try to make it work but Abigail could see, would stop, would touch her free hand to furrowed brows and closed eyes and tell Myka, “It’s okay,” and kiss those furrowed brows and call Myka, “Handsome,” then kiss her, in that sweet way that Abigail had come to do, and say, “that this isn’t working.  If it doesn’t work.  If you don’t want to--”

“I want to,” Myka had been quick to cut Abigail off at that. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Abigail made her sit up then and Abigail sat more securely in Myka’s lap, snaking her arms around Myka’s neck and pulling her in close.  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Abigail had told her and kissed her.  “Absolutely nothing.”

Myka hadn’t been completely sold on that but Abigail understood and it was all that mattered.  They understood each other and in that mutual understanding Abigail accepted that it wouldn’t work for Myka the same way it worked for Abigail. And Myka had been okay with that. She was absolutely okay with it working for Abigail, with not trying to make it work for her.

That’s just how their relationship worked and they’d been happy, in that aspect of it at least.

***

Helena is not Abigail. 

The way Helena pulls herself further into Myka’s lap is not Abigail. The way Helena moves her arms around Myka’s neck, that is not Abigail.  When Helena presses soft kisses to Myka’s surely pouting lip, it is so far from Abigail that it almost hurts.  It almost makes Myka wish for the simplicity (even despite the complexities) of her relationship with Abigail because she is not _this_.

Myka knows Helena is too beautiful for her. Myka knows Helena could fall in love with anyone and they, that anyone, would fall right back in love with her. It would be that easy. It would probably be so much nicer for Helena, this woman who is too beautiful and too intelligent and _experienced_.  So when Myka thinks about things like being with Helena, how being with Helena is not at all like being with Abigail, she is reminded of all the things she never felt with Abigail. 

Disappointment. Failure.  _Inadequacy_.

She feels inadequate, as though she is not nearly enough, to Helena. Trial and error would not be good enough for Helena and Myka had run out of patience for trying to reach that peak long before she and Helena had ever become a thing. So when Helena does try, to touch her, in _that_ way, in any way at all that falls into trial, that is threatened by error, Myka takes control. She takes Helena’s hands in her hands, she pulls Helena back into her, and she takes complete control.

***

“We went too fast,” Helena says softly, lowering her eyes, closing them, and pressing her forehead into Myka’s forehead.  “I knew it was too soon.  I knew we should have waited.”

“No,” Myka shakes her head. “We did not go too fast. Too fast would imply that it would have worked just as well, if not better, eventually. Too fast would imply that, if we had gone slower, things would be better.  We did not…”  Myka sighs, she is exasperated, and she pulls Helena’s chin up to look at her as Helena blinks away tears.  “Fast or slow, Helena,” Myka shakes her head, “I would still be this fucked up person with this… non-existent… _urge_.”

“ _Myka_ ,” it’s her scolding tone.

“Helena,” Myka is shaking her head and says again, “we did not go too fast.”

“But why would you let me?  If you don’t want to, why…”

And Myka is reminded of the very words she had once said to Abigail, in response to the same inquiry.  Myka tells Helena, “I _want_ to,” and Helena shakes her head now, like she doesn’t believe it or she doesn’t want to hear it. She is slowly pulling away from Myka, moving away from Myka’s lap, bringing her hands to cover the tears that now fall freely down her cheeks.

“Myka, clearly you don’t…”

Myka holds Helena into place, her hands on Helena’s waist, sliding down to her thighs, and she tells Helena, “I love you.  Helena.  I love you and to have you, like this, is all that I need.  It is everything to me.  I don’t need the,” Myka pauses and pulls Helena back into her, until Helena’s straddling her waist, sat with her ankles crossed just behind Myka.  “I don’t need reciprocation.  But I understand… if it’s not enough.  I understand,” Myka lowers her head now, allowing her own tears to fall into her lap, “if this won’t work for you.”

“Myka.  My love. Shut _up_.” Helena’s hands find their way to Myka’s cheeks and Helena makes Myka look at her. Myka _sees_ her, she does. The red eyes and wet cheeks, swollen and warm.  Helena smiles and shakes her head and puffs out a soft laugh before pressing her mouth to Myka’s mouth and kissing Myka so deeply, with such need, that Myka’s eyes roll up and back and close tight with that touch.  And Myka, with her hands still wrapped around Helena, falls slowly back onto that bed and pulls Helena back with her until Helena is over her, still kissing, still straddling, still moving, in that way that she does, slowly and purposely, against her.

When they part, “I promise I’ll try again,” Myka says softly before Helena kisses her mouth again and Helena pulls away, just enough to brush her lips against Myka’s and set a soft kiss to her chin, just below her bottom lip.

“I’m not asking you to,” Helena whispers against Myka’s chin, kisses her again. “I would never push that of you.”

She doesn’t know why but this makes her cry.  Tears that burn in her eyes, that have been burning in her eyes, now fall down the sides of her face, past her temples, to her ears, into her hair.  Helena, like the mother she sometimes becomes, shushes Myka softly, lovingly, and wipes at those tears with her hands on Myka’s face, with her thumbs moving gently, carefully, over wet cheeks.

“I’m not asking you to, Myka--”

“You don’t have to ask, Helena,” Myka continues to cry softly, trying to control her voice, trying to contain her sobbing, “I will,” Myka nods, “for you. I want to... eventually. Try.”

Helena smiles and her smile is bright and loving and a little bit sympathetic when she tells Myka, with more than a hint of amusement behind that smile and in the slight arch in her brow, “If you _insist_.” Myka manages a soft laugh at that, her lips settling into a smile that Helena does not hesitate to kiss. “ _There_ she is,” Helena says quietly and grins just before kissing Myka again, “my baby girl.”

***

That evening, Myka finds herself with a hot cup of tea in one hand, with Helena’s thigh below her other hand and Helena seated close beside her, leaning into her, resting her head, periodically, on her shoulder.  Myka is gazing at the pile of gifts they’ve just wrapped and sorted for Claudia, it is a small stack that sits upon a coffee table in the living room, entirely devoid of Christmas decorations, but it is more than Claudia has ever asked for because Claudia has never asked for anything.

“You give away laptops like candy,” Myka accuses, teasing.  When she looks at Helena, the look Helena is giving her is curious, inquisitive, just a little bit challenging, before she smirks and rolls her eyes and turns away, with a slight blush.  “All this time, I thought I was special.”

“You _are_ special,” Helena says quickly, turning back to meet Myka’s eyes.  “Claudia is a different sort of special.”

“Oh,” Myka smiles, “I see.  Similar to how our love is just… _different_?”

Helena’s smile grows. “Our love _is_ different.  It has always been.  Hasn’t it?”

Myka smirks and takes a sip from her mug, then nods and echoes, “It has always been.”

“How are your mothers getting on in Vancouver?”

“Just fine,” and it is Myka’s turn to roll her eyes.  “They didn’t have much to say to me but they made sure to play twenty questions with Claudia, to fish out any hints about her well-being.”  Helena is laughing at this already because she knows, and has pointed out often, the magnitude of love and protection that fills Jane and Jeannie’s relationship with Claudia, with the girl they _both_ took in and tend to casually claim as their “heart” daughter.

Helena had also been the first to point out, when Myka had once brought up how _different_ her mother was with Claudia, how foreign that woman that is her mother appeared when mothering Claudia, that maybe she had been making up for all of that lost time with her own daughters.

“Like a second chance,” Helena had told Myka then.  “A chance to make up for all of the mistakes she made with you and Tracy.”

Myka smiles thinking about that, gazing at that stack of presents, _many_ from her mother and Jane, that sits before them.  And Myka tells Helena now, “Her presents took up a third of my suitcase and they still had the nerve to ship more here directly _and_ email me a shopping list.”  Helena is still laughing softly when she rests her head against Myka’s shoulder again.  “They could have at least wrapped them first.”

“So, you don’t enjoy staying up late to wrap presents with me? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I would stay up for five days to do nothing at all with you, Helena,” Myka sighs and she turns and presses a kiss into the top of Helena’s head, squeezes her grasp gently over that spot on Helena’s thigh.  Helena’s hand swiftly finds hers, over that spot, and she interlocks their fingers, moves to sit up and press a quick kiss to Myka’s cheek.

“We’re being good,” Helena scolds, her voice low and thick, almost a whisper in Myka’s ear.

“ _You’re_ being good,” Myka corrects with a smile, “it’s all business as usual in my corner.”

“Oh,” Helena smiles, wide and playful, “keeping me _happy_ and _satisfied_ is just business as usual now?  You’ve grown tired of my old self, have you?  Maybe it’s time for you to get creative.”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” Myka rolls her eyes, “still, I can be creative…”

Helena arches that brow again and it makes Myka smile and wink and kiss those perfect lips. And they are both laughing, sighing away that laughter, when Helena turns more toward Myka, to face her square on.   She’s smiling still, for a moment, before that smile fades and her hands rise to Myka’s face and in a tone that isn’t quite so serious as her furrowed eyebrows make her appear, Helena says, “Can I ask you something, that… may be too personal?”

“Helena,” Myka smiles, throwing her head back against the couch and turning to look at Helena, still sat beside her, still leaning into her, “you _are_ my too personal.”

Helena’s right hand comes to rest over Myka’s chest, her fingers gently tapping at the collar of Myka’s shirt, her thumb nervously drumming over Myka’s heart, almost perfectly in sync with her pulse.  “When you were… with Abigail…” Myka’s smile disappears and she sits up straight but she is quiet, “you know what,” Helena sighs and smiles, pulls that nervous hand through her hair now, “never mind.  It doesn’t matter.”

“Helena? Whatever it is… you can ask me.”

Helena just shakes her head more and leans in to set a soft kiss on Myka’s cheek.

“I promise you, Myka, it doesn’t matter,” Helena sighs.  “You and I are going to back up and we’re going to slow down, okay?”

“I don’t need us to slow down, Helena,” Myka is laughing, incredulously, slightly amused.  “I just need you to realize… to know… that I’m not… _there_. Yet.  And I don’t know why and I don’t know if I’ll ever be. Regardless,” Myka sighs, moving her arm around Helena’s waist and pulling Helena further against her until Helena is up and moving into place over Myka’s lap, straddling that lap where they sit on the couch, “regardless of where I’m at, I’m here for you.  I’m here for _this_.”

Helena raises herself up and onto her knees, still straddling Myka’s lap, and leans down into a kiss that forces Myka to draw her head back, to rest it against the back of the couch. Myka’s hands drag slowly up Helena’s thighs, to just over her backside, to hold her closer.  And Helena’s kiss, this kiss, it is sweet and tender at first but as Myka’s hands move further into that place, just below Helena’s ass, just at the cusp of where her ass meets thighs, and grasps tight and tighter and the tightest Myka possibly can without hurting that woman in her arms, Helena deepens that kiss.  

Her hands find their way into Myka’s hair, down Myka’s neck, fingers raking thin lines over sensitive skin, pulsating arteries.  Helena’s thumb drags slowly down, over Myka’s throat and Myka pulls that body closer, into her, elicits a soft moan that vibrates against her own lips.  The softest moan that, if not for their mouths being together as they are, would go almost unnoticed. It would be missed by Myka entirely.

When Helena draws her mouth away, to let it hover over Myka’s where her head still falls back against the couch and Helena’s body still presses, _wanting_ , into hers, it is to say, softly, “You always make _being good_ an extremely difficult task.”

Myka smiles, her crooked smile, and it seems to make Helena melt in her arms because that older woman closes her eyes and shakes her head, smiles in return but says absolutely nothing before kissing Myka again.

Eventually, Helena tells her, with heavy lids and a whispered breath against her own lips, “Right now.  Please?” And Myka is on the verge of asking for an elaboration when Helena pushes her body further into Myka and Helena’s hand, falling over Myka’s still below her ass, is grasping that hand tight, urging that hand to move further around her thighs, until Myka’s fingers are wrapped around her inner thigh, closer to the very center of her.

“Let’s go to bed,” Myka smiles into another of Helena’s needy kisses, gently loosening and tightening that grasp she has on Helena’s thighs, but Helena shakes her head and manages another, “right now,” followed by a raspy, “here,” and an almost inaudible, “please?”  Myka’s eyes widen.  “Right here? Helena?”  Helena hushes her and Myka lowers her voice, “In the middle of the living room?”

Helena nods and smiles and kisses Myka again.

Myka arches a brow and smirks and examines, skeptically, the openness of the room around them.

It is dark.  Claudia has been in bed for hours.  Helena’s father is gone, as always.  The house is quiet, save for the two of them in their usual way… except tonight they are on the living room couch.

“Not in front of Claudia’s presents,” Myka shakes her head. “I cannot.  Isn’t that weird?  That’s weird, right?”

“Myka,” Helena has an urgency in her voice and her hands are back on Myka’s shoulders, her lips falling into Myka’s neck.  “It’s Christmas,” and Helena is smiling when Myka laughs at that.

“I bought you a tangible gift, you know.  If you want to open something in the living room, it could be _that_ ,” Myka grins, even as her fingers find their way to the elastic waistline just at the front of Helena’s pajama bottoms, those pajamas that never seem to find their way out of London.

“Tangible gifts are always appreciated, my love,” Helena says softly against Myka’s neck before rising to meet her eyes again, “though I so rather prefer the more metaphorical tangibility of opening ones _gifts_ to the _actual_ opening of.. gifts.” Helena waves her hand away, in mock disgust,  at the last mention of gifts and Myka laughs, even as her cheeks begin to flush and warm, and surely they are turning bright red, _bright_ bright red.

“You are so discrete,” Myka teases as her hand moves rather indiscreetly down the front of Helena’s pajama bottoms.  Helena has no response for that, other than to move her mouth back to Myka’s in anticipation of that touch.

And when it comes, when Myka’s hand slowly, but surely, finds its way as they sit now, one over the other, in a dimly lit living room with only a stack of presents and two mugs of cooling tea to keep them company, Helena closes her eyes and smiles and bites back that smile and rests her forehead against Myka’s forehead, then presses the tip of her nose against the bridge of Myka’s nose.

“It’ll be quick, I promise,” Helena sighs.

“It will not be quick at all,” Myka whispers in response, her hand moving ever so slowly into that warm place between Helena’s legs.  “ _I_ promise.”

Helena kisses her and smiles and moves her hips against Myka’s hand. Her smile growing, her breath catching, as she exhales a soft laugh. 

“Lucky me,” Helena breathes.

***

Helena has an arm draped around Myka’s neck, over Myka’s shoulder, the elbow of her other arm is on Myka’s other shoulder, the hand at the end of that arm is buried in curls at the top of Myka’s head.  Helena is practically cradling her head in her arms as Myka’s fingers move, still slowly, against her, as Helena’s body moves, still with some need, within reach of those fingers.

Myka cannot see Helena’s face but she can hear her breath, heavy and jagged, she can feel her grip on her shoulders, pulling at her hair.  Tiny moans grow louder as they escape Helena’s lips, her nasal cavity, and fall heavy and intoxicating against Myka’s ear. It is like music, these sounds, Myka thinks.  Like a favorite song that you put on repeat and listen to for hours at a time.  Myka could listen to Helena in this way for hours at a time.  She never wants this song to end.  These sweet sounds of Helena’s moans against her ear, her heavy breath in between, even the sound of her fingers as they move in steady rhyme against wet and warmth, still hidden away in Helena’s pajamas, in Myka’s lap, in a dimly lit living room, in an almost empty house.

Myka thinks about how sometimes this doesn’t always work.  She thinks about how sometimes this isn’t enough for Helena, about how sometimes it is almost too much.  Tonight, it is just enough.  Tonight, the bridge of this song, so loved by Myka, is the sound of her name on Helena’s breath.  

It is just enough.

 _Maybe it’s time for you to get creative,_ lingers at the back of Myka’s mind.  Because even if tonight is enough, it won’t always be. Helena won’t always be this sensitive, this wanting, this _needy_. This won’t always be enough for her and Myka doesn’t even know, cannot even comprehend, how it is enough even now. Even as Helena’s grip on her tightens and Helena’s arms move around her neck, to hug her, to hold her close.

Even now, Myka doesn’t understand how this works for Helena. How it works so well when it absolutely does not work for Myka.  How it worked for Abigail, how they had tried and tried so many times for Myka and the pain, the discomfort, had always won out.

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Myka?”

She hadn’t meant to say that out loud but now Helena, with her flushed cheeks and strands of hair stuck to her forehead with perspiration and her concerned eyes, is moving her hands to Myka’s face, wiping away tears while simultaneously catching her breath and placing gentle kisses against Myka’s cheeks, over her lips, to the bridge of her nose.

“I’m sorry,” Myka apologizes because she hadn’t been paying attention, in the end, and she doesn’t actually know if this was one of those times that worked or if it was one of those times that had not worked at all.

“Don’t apologize,” Helena whispers.  “ _I’m_ sorry.  I shouldn’t have asked… so soon.”

Myka smiles softly up at Helena and kisses that older woman again, moves her offending hand slightly away, and Helena pulls suddenly forward, into her, wrapping her arms tight around Myka’s shoulders again. And Myka knows, now, that this is one of those times that still needs _more_ time to work.

“It’s not that,” Myka whispers in return, stilling her hand beneath Helena for a moment before moving her fingers back into place.  Helena breathes in softly, closes her eyes again.

“Myka,” comes another scold.  “Do not tease me, love.”

“You’re beautiful.”  Helena smiles and kisses Myka.  “You’re too beautiful for me.”  Helena tells her to _shut_ her _mouth_.  “I am broken, Georgie.”

“Quiet,” Helena’s brows furrow and she bites down on her lip and moves her hips further against Myka’s hand, follows that motion up with a sharp intake of air. “Quiet,” she repeats.

“You should want someone you can love, too.”

“Myka, shut _up_.”

Myka sighs and Helena kisses her again.  It is soft and Myka knows it is also apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” Helena says soon after, “but we wouldn’t be here, like this, if I didn’t want to be here like this with _you_. Do you understand?”

Myka nods, silently.

“You aren’t broken,” Helena sighs.  “Sexual discomfort doesn’t make you broken, it just makes you human. Understand?”

Myka continues nodding.

“When you’re ready and only if you want to, you and I will take our time and we will try again until we find something that works, okay?”

“What if nothing works?”

“Then nothing works,” Helena sighs and leans in to kiss Myka and lets her lips linger over Myka’s lips, then tells her, “but you are not broken. You are mine.  I love you exactly the way you are.”

Helena kisses her again and rests her forehead, the tip of her nose, to the side of Myka’s face now, against her temple, pressing her lips into Myka’s cheek.

“Do you understand?”

Myka nods, “I understand.”

“Okay,” Helena nods and sighs and whispers, “we should… go to bed.”

“At least,” Myka laughs softly, kisses Helena’s lips quickly, “let’s finish what we started?”

Helena sighs, feigning annoyance, “If you insist.”

“I do.”

***

They’ll laugh about this someday, they’re almost sure of that.

Myka is finishing what she started and Helena is finishing what Myka started and she is coming down from that finishing, quieting after not having been very quiet at all, when the front door opens. The front door opens and, at first, they don’t hear but then they _definitely_ hear as someone walks into the foyer and toward the living room and pauses in the archway.

“You girls are up late.”

Helena and Myka turn, both at once, to Helena’s father who lingers in the archway between the foyer and the living room, several feet behind the couch. Not nearly enough feet for either Helena or Myka to not be mortified by the fact that Myka’s hand is still in place and Helena’s cheeks are flushed, her breathing still pulling itself together.

Helena hides her face into Myka’s shoulder and Myka tightens her hold on Helena with her free arm wrapped around Helena’s back.  But Helena’s father sways, just a little too far to one side, from where Myka can see him, before righting himself.

“He’s drunk,” she whispers into Helena’s ear.

“If you wouldn’t mind?”  Helena is yelling but it comes out muffled against Myka’s shoulder.

“Well,” her father sighs, “Merry Christmas to you, too, Georgie.”

“Goodnight!”

Myka wants to laugh at the urgency in Helena’s voice but she is frozen, trying to both steady and _hide_ the fact that her hand is still lost inside of Helena’s pajamas.

“Myka.” Charles acknowledges her with only a slight head nod before turning back into the foyer and toward the stairs.

“Oh my God,” Helena gasps.

“I don’t think he noticed,” Myka sighs, reclaiming her own hand and wrapping that around Helena’s waist, too.  “Miss Right Here Right Now.”

“Oh my God.” 

“Are you ready for bed _now_?”

“Oh my _God_!”

“ _Okay_ then.  Let’s go to bed.”

Some day, Helena, too, will laugh about this moment as much as Myka laughs about it when they finally crawl into bed.

***

Helena’s gift to Myka had not been quite as tangible or immediate as Claudia’s laptop or the collective scrapbook (everyone in their family had made their own page, Pete included) that Myka had given her.

“It’s a surprise, actually,” Helena had told her, when what she had received was an envelope with a fabricated ticket stub inside that read “New Years Eve Admit 2”.

“Sounds _romantical_ ,” Claudia said playfully, wagging her tiny eyebrows.

“Okay, Little Pete of Pete & Pete,” Myka accused, receiving one very confused look from that Little Pete in return.

“Will doesn’t have plans for New Years,” Helena had elaborated, eventually, “and he offered to look after Claudia, since he’ll already have Sophie, as her little brother is due to arrive soon anyway.”

“Whose what is having a who, huh?”  Myka arched a brow at Helena.

Claudia almost choked on her hot chocolate, laughing.

“Just… don’t make plans for New Years Eve!”

“Oh, right, Helena,” Myka grinned, “I actually already _made_ plans with this extremely hot girl I know up the block named Georgie.”

“Don’t be cheeky,” Helena said, glaring back at her.

***

Helena is a vision.

Helena is a vision in a deep navy blue dress that is strapless and tight at the top, giving her cleavage where, if Myka is being honest, cleavage rarely exists.  It is tight at the top, around her abdomen, down to her waist, and then there is a bit of flare to that dress, the way it flows and falls open around Helena’s hips and out and down only far enough to cover half of those thighs before revealing long legs. Beautiful and bare and long, and just a little bit pale, legs punctuated with black heels.

Myka _loves_ those legs. And she realizes, in this moment, as she’s watching Helena finish her make up and drag a hand through long hair, just how long she has loved those legs.  Because when Helena moves past her, paying her very little attention, Myka reaches her hand out and she palms Helena’s inner thigh (something she has wanted to do for a long time) and runs her thumb over soft and sensitive skin and almost, _almost_ , brings Helena down to her knees.

“Not now, Ophelia,” Helena scolds, slowly pushing Myka’s hand away from her thigh but not before leaning over her to press a kiss to her mouth. “We’ll be late.”

Myka rolls her eyes and tells her, “You were singing a very different song last week, Miss Right Here Right Now.”

“And if you play your cards right,” Helena smirks, moving away from Myka and toward her bathroom, “you may hear me singing that song again.”

Helena winks, disappears into her bathroom leaving Myka alone, sat on the bed, shaking her head and saying, on a soft breath, “ _Sucia_.”

*

The tube is a blur to Myka on any given day but it is especially cryptic the evening of New Years Eve because it is packed, there are people everywhere, and if Helena let’s her go, Myka is certain she will be lost forever.

To emphasize her point, she pulls Helena in close to her, where they sit on the train, and leans further into her, wraps her arm around Helena’s waist, whispers into her ear, “Don’t lose me.”

“I would never,” Helena smiles, slipping her hand into Myka’s other hand and holding on tight.

*

“Helena, where do you have me?”

“Everywhere, darling,” Helena grins, turning back to Myka as she is all but dragging her up yet another unfamiliar street.  One far more empty than others Myka had been dragged through this evening.

“You know what I mean,” Myka rolls her eyes.

“Just around this corner, love,” Helena’s smile is bright and she tugs Myka around that corner, into what Myka is certain is an alley, where a crowd gathers at a door alongside a theater.

“Helena? What are we—“

“You’re so impatient,” Helena says coming to a stop amidst that crowd and pulling Myka closer, setting a quick kiss to her lips.  “She won’t be long.”

“Who won’t be—“

But Myka’s voice is cut off by excited chatter, the crowd they are in has shifted forward as the door they are standing just outside of opens and Myka isn’t entirely sure she’s seeing what, or _who_ , she’s actually seeing when she sees her, but she definitely sees something, _someone_ familiar.

“That’s…”

It’s all that comes out.  Myka lifts a finger and points and says, “That’s…” again with not much to follow until “that’s”, with her short height and her long blonde hair and that bright smile, has made her way through the crowd, to the edge of that crowd, to where Myka and Helena stand just at the edge, and greets her with a smile and an English accent no better than what Myka herself could produce.

“Hello,” the blonde woman says.

“Hi,” Myka manages.

“Ms. Anderson,” Helena grins.

“You have a familiar face,” the woman smiles, turning her attention to Helena now, “Helena, is it?”

“That’s right,” Helena nods.  “And this is Myka.”

“Hi,” Myka repeats, also grinning.

“Hello,” the blonde woman laughs.  “Have you something for me to autograph?”

“I… I uh…” Myka looks wide-eyed to Helena who, without hesitation, pulls something from her purse and hands it over to the much shorter woman before them.

“You can make it out to Myka, if you wouldn’t mind,” Helena is telling her, “That’s M-Y-K-A.”

“Ah,” Ms. Anderson says, “X-Files fan.”  She winks at Helena, glances curiously at Myka and asks, “Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m… yeah… I’m, thank you.  I’m… I mean _you’re_ …?”  Myka looks to Helena then, eyes still wide, mouth still speechless.

“American?”

“Yes,” Myka closes her mouth tight.

“You’ll have to forgive my girlfriend,” Helena speaks finally, as the woman (Myka isn’t entirely sure she is who she thinks she is, even now) hands the DVD she’s just signed back over to Helena with a knowing smile.  “She didn’t know I’d be bringing her here.”

“Oh, well I hope the surprise was worth the trip?”  Ms. Anderson asks, turning back to Myka who says nothing, then again to Helena to ask, “Did you enjoy the play, Helena?”

“Oh, yes.  It was lovely.. brilliant, really,” Helena nods, “and you, of course, were divine. Clearly you are no stranger to the stage, despite your time on The X-Files?”

“Well,” Ms. Anderson smiles and nods, “the stage has always felt more like home,” and she gestures to someone just behind them before turning a humbling smile on both Myka and Helena, “Lovely seeing you again, Helena. You girls have a fun evening and happy new year.”

“You as well.”

The woman is already seated in a waiting car by the time Myka gathers up enough courage to say thank you and goodbye.  And when she has gone, when that car has carried that woman down the road and away from this dispersing crowd, Myka turns to Helena and stares at her smug smile.

“How did you…”

“You really made the most of that, didn’t you?”  Helena is teasing.

“I’m sorry, I was not expecting to meet _Gillian Anderson_ after being dragged into a back alley!”

“London is full of surprises,” Helena beams, pulling Myka into her and linking their arms together.  “Most of them in back allies,” Helena teases, leading her out of that alley way and further down the road.

“Were we meant to be here earlier?  For the actual play?”

“Oh gods, no,” Helena laughs, “it’s _awful_.”

*

“Ophelia, you’ll break your neck if you keep staring up at it like that,” Helena is smirking when Myka returns her gaze to that woman beside her and she knows why, when Helena laughs softly, because Myka’s eyes are still just as wide as they had been, her smile still just as crooked as it had been, when they met that peculiar Gillian Anderson look-alike that Helena keeps insisting is _actually_ Gillian Anderson.

Now Myka’s eyes are wide and her smile is crooked and she is staring up at the massive ferris wheel that is the London Eye.  She had seen plenty of it from their numerous other adventures around the city but now they were actually there and up close and…

“Wait, are we getting on that thing?”

“Yes?”

“Um.”

“You will be _fine_.”

Myka remains quiet and Helena moves to stand in front of her, lifts herself onto the tips of her toes, presses a kiss to Myka’s lips. 

“The engineering is _sound_ ,” Helena smiles. “Trust me.”

“Your love of contraptions will, one day, be the end of me.”

“Or the start,” Helena winks, slipping her hand into Myka’s and pulling her along. “Come on, love. If we’re late, we have to wait another thirty minutes to catch our pod.”

“Our pod?”

*

 _Their_ pod.

Sometimes Myka forgets that Helena has a _presence_. Back home, the presence has a different tone to it because Helena had been an English implant in a small, mostly conservative, very traditional American town.  She was an enigma to many of its residents, people knew her because of her beauty, because of her accent, because she lived on the nice side of town and dated one of the most popular girls on campus and had money.

In London, the tone of that presence is all about _who_ and where she comes from, the name she has inherited, the man who is her father.  CEO of a publishing company, Myka had always thought that was the end all and be all of Charles Wells but London has shone a brighter light on the history of the Wells family, on the ties they have to the community, on the absolute wealth of that family name.

So Myka doesn’t know why she so often forgets or why she is surprised when, after watching so many other pods fill with large groups of people, _their_ pod arrives and it is for them alone.

*

“This _is_ romantical.”

Helena rolls her eyes but she is smiling softly, shyly, when Myka looks to her and mimics that Little Pete inspired wag of her eyebrows. 

Myka had had a good look at those other pods, that had been filling up with people.  They’d had nothing more than a bench, centered inside of them.  This one, _their_ pod, also has a small round table with a crisp white table cloth, bracketed between two chairs and set up just beside the outer window.  There are two chrome, dome-shaped plate covers on either side of that table, a tiny vase with a single flower in it and a fake tea light in-between those platters.

Myka lets her gaze move side-long to Helena, who is just beside her running a nervous hand through her hair.  So Myka reaches for her other hand and pulls Helena into her, holds her very very close.

“It’s a little cheesy,” Helena says softly.

“I really like cheese,” Myka smiles, leaning down into a kiss.

*

“If I would have known you’d be this nervous about heights…”

“I’m fine,” but Myka is forcing a smile, making a massacre of her dinner, shanking her chicken with her fork and finally breathing out a sigh of relief as that pod moves past the height of that wheel and begins its descent yet again, “see, we’re going down again.  It’s okay.”

It is very much not okay.

“Myka,” Helena puffs out a soft laugh, “we don’t have to stay. These things are hardly comfortable to begin with.  I just thought it would be nice, with the lights, but you seem to be refusing to even look out of the window.”

“I’ve looked.  It’s gorgeous, Helena. It is truly breathtaking I just…” Myka sighs, “you know, I’m _flawed_.”

Helena smiles and it is sympathetic.  She stands and reaches for Myka, takes Myka’s hands into hers and pulls Myka until she stands, too. 

“Come here,” Helena steps back, to the center of that pod and away from the window, Myka is happy to go with her, happy to wrap her arms around that woman when Helena pulls her into a hug, happy to rest her chin over Helena’s shoulder, to close her eyes when Helena, too, wraps her arms around her. “We aren’t perfect,” Helena whispers softly into Myka’s ear, “and we wouldn’t be us if we were.”

Myka kisses her cheek and tightens her hold on Helena.  It is mostly out of love but a fraction of it is her fear of being locked inside of a death trap.

“You are perfect,” Myka tells her, “for me.  You are _absolutely_ flawless.”

“I could say the same thing about you,” Helena whispers, pulling herself into another kiss.

They are quiet and holding one another, kissing and nuzzling, until that pod touches ground and Helena tugs Myka away from that devil egg, as she will never not refer to it, tipping the attendant generously as they go.

*

“I have a confession.”

“Confess to me, woman.”

“I didn’t actually… plan anything for the rest of the evening.”

Myka wants to pretend to be shocked by spitting out her wine but this is far too precious, both the wine and Helena’s _allowing_ her to drink it, so she swallows that sip back instead. Also, she’s certain the owners of this particular establishment would not appreciate that.  They still seem to be recovering from the horror of Myka drowning her wine with lemonade and orange juice.

“Oh, I see how this works,” Myka is smiling and Helena is already preparing herself to be teased, judging by the way she rolls her eyes and looks away from Myka, “leave the schedule open after dinner, in case we should somehow find ourselves alone? Is that right, Miss Right Here Right Now?”

“You’ve found me out, love,” Helena shakes her head, running her hand through her hair again and taking a sip from her own wine glass.  “I guess I just assumed we would find our own way.”

“We could always just… _go home_.” Myka grins and Helena isn’t smiling but Myka is sure she wants to when their eyes meet and Myka arches a curious brow and tilts her head and Helena turns reddening cheeks slightly away from her.

“I’m trying to be _good_.”

“It’s _cold_ ,” is Myka’s argument.

“It’s New Years Eve,” Helena rebuts, turning back and moving closer to Myka where they are sat side-by-side upon stools in a dimly lit wine bar.

“Hot tea,” Myka smiles, tilting her head further, smiling wider, moving closer to Helena.  “You and me, a space heater, and a duvet?”

“Tempting,” Helena says softly, biting down on her bottom lip before meeting Myka at that halfway point between their seats and pressing a kiss to her wine-stained lips.  “I have a suggestion,” Helena whispers when they part and she reaches for her purse, pulls out her phone and holds it up.  “Remember Liam?”

Myka sits back in her seat, smile softening, nodding her head, “Your social friend.”

“Yes,” Helena sighs with a shake of her head, “he’s at party, relatively close to home.  We could

ride the tube back and walk home afterward.”

“A party?”

“Just to be _out_ for the new year.”

Myka looks down at her watch, they still have three and a half hours to kill before midnight, then back up at Helena whose expression perfectly gives away her anticipation.  Helena knows, Myka is certain she knows, that Myka herself is not a _party_ person, she’s not the _partying_ type.  She, in fact, avoids them with great skill because why would she welcome more trouble into her life? It is her logic. She’s already had a childhood filled with wild unpredictability.  Why open that door?

Tonight, Helena answers that question of “why” with one single look, this look that she is giving Myka now, and one small touch, when Helena touches her hand to Myka’s cheek and her thumb to Myka’s bottom lip, and one soft breath, when Helena tells her, “Quick stop and then,” Helena sighs that soft breath and it isn’t exasperated or annoyed or defeated, it is _dreamy_ and whimsical and full of thought and longing and _want,_ “you take me home.”

Myka concedes.  They kiss. They down their wine and they go to this party.

*

“I want to take you home,” Myka is whispering into Helena’s ear and they are standing on the sidewalk just outside of a lovely Victorian home that Myka thinks looks very similar to Helena’s though not nearly as stately, not nearly as warm and quiet and comfortable as Helena’s place would be at this very moment.

Helena is turning to Myka and slipping her arms into the opening of the blazer that Myka wears, and she’s wrapping her arms around the soft cotton button-up that Myka wears, pulling herself into Myka, reaching her eyes to look directly into Myka’s eyes.

“I want to show you off,” Helena smiles.  “My love.”

“Sweet talker,” Myka accuses.

“Come with me?”

Myka, again, concedes, as Helena tugs at fabric at the back of her shirt and pulls Myka toward her, steps back toward that house, pulls Myka with her.

*

Liam is probably a perfectly nice guy, Myka is sure and she tells herself this, even as she is glaring at him, at his hand around Helena’s hip, as he talks to her about nothing Myka is paying attention to and leans close to her and laughs with her and pulls her closer, just to hear more of whatever it is Helena is trying to tell him.

“This is my girlfriend, Myka,” is what Helena _is_ saying and Myka smiles, reaches to shake his hand.  And when her eyes meet Helena’s, Helena is scolding her with furrowed brows and a pointed look because she knows that smile that Myka is smiling is fake as _fuck_. It only makes Myka broaden that fake smile in Helena’s direction for a second before allowing that smile to fall away, to be replaced by something less theatrical.

Still, she is polite and she says, “Nice to meet you, Liam,” and Liam responds by leaning back, flashing a smile that only exacerbates his handsomeness (Myka scoffs internally) and asking, “American?”

“That’s me,” Myka shrugs, throwing her arms, sheepishly, into the air. “You’re… Texan?”

“Louisiana, actually,” Liam nods.  “The _real_ south.”

“All of it is way too south for me,” Myka says with another shrug and Liam laughs, turns to Helena, tells Helena, “She’s cute,” and then whispers, “I approve.”

Myka makes a face that she is more than certain shows her discontent because Helena, with a hand on Liam’s arm, turns Liam toward her and away from Myka, to say more things that Myka does not hear, does not want to hear.

“I’m going to go find some alcohol,” Myka announces and Helena glances over Liam’s shoulder, says quietly, “All right, darling,” and furrows her own brows in Myka’s direction as she turns to go.

*

Myka finds a display of wine and glasses in the kitchen.  It is conveniently located next to the non-alcoholic beverages.

This party isn’t so big, it isn’t so wild.  It is actually quite sophisticated.  A little too much of that, if Myka had to say. One of their professor’s homes, Helena had told her on the ride over.

“A lot of my professors live in my neighborhood,” Helena had also told her. “A lot of them know my father.”

“Who doesn’t know your father? The Queen?” Myka had laughed in response.

Helena was quiet and when Myka turned to her, Helena was biting back a small smile and shaking her head.

“Don’t talk to me.”

Helena laughed and Myka, in that moment, realized how very rarely she heard that laugh these days.

Even now, pouring wine and juice and lemonade into her glass, she is thinking about how very rare it has become for her to hear that laugh. Even as that laugh echoes its way into her ears from across a crowded house.  Myka rolls her eyes before she ever looks back and practically throws her head back when she sees Liam, closer to Helena again, arm on her waist again, leaning _into_ her again. And Helena is laughing so loud, so happy, so amused that she is wiping tears from her eyes.

Myka groans loudly.  Helena is too far away for her to hear.

“It’s gross, isn’t it?”

Myka turns suspiciously to the owner of that accented voice, a tall girl with tan skin, with long dark hair, with a smirk on her face.  A “huh?” is all Myka manages in response.

“The way guys just impose themselves on women.  The way women just eat it up?”  but that girl beside her sighs and when she does, it sounds almost content and thoughtful.

“Oh,” Myka smiles, “yeah.  I mean, it’s fine.  Whatever,” she sighs, turning back to Helena and Liam, “people can do whatever they want.”

“You’re American.”  The girls voice perks up and when Myka turns back to her, that girl has a wide smile on her face.  She is gorgeous, this woman, probably Helena’s age and Myka has no idea why she is talking to her.

“Yep,” Myka nods.  “That’s me. The _American_.”

“Are you in the program?  I’m new, so I’m afraid I don’t know too many people.”

“Sorry, no,” Myka smiles, turning completely to that woman now, taking a sip from her glass, “just visiting.”  And Myka turns back toward Helena and Liam, “Visiting _that one_ , actually.”

“I have always had the misfortunate of being abandoned by my friends in the wake of cute boys, too,” that girl laughs softly.

“She’s my girlfriend,” Myka tells her, crossing her arms in front of her, wine glass still in hand.

“Oh.”

When the girl says nothing more, Myka turns back to her and arches a brow at the expression on her face.  Still thoughtful but no longer content.  “Did I hit a nerve?”

“Oh no, no, I was just… thinking,” the girl smiles again, “sorry, I… “ she sighs and rolls her eyes, “it’s _unfortunate_.”

“My having a girlfriend is unfortunate?”  Myka questions.

“Yes,” that girl, or woman, Myka can’t quite peg how old she truly is, is saying, still staring at the floor then bringing her eyes, wide now, back to Myka’s, “I mean, not for you, obviously. That’s great.  It’s just such a… _rare_ occasion that I work up enough nerve to talk to someone I find… attractive.  That’s… all.”

Myka wants to laugh.  Instead she smiles.  Her smile grows and it is wide, just a little bit smug, and she can feel her cheeks flushing, even as her mind is screaming at her to _stop_ because this is probably not okay.  With Helena, that is.  Helena who is currently doing much the same thing across the room with some handsome guy in her program. 

And Myka knows that Helena doesn’t mean anything by it, Myka knows that she’s over thinking their interactions, that there is absolutely nothing _to_ those interactions. Still… she wants nothing more than to take her girlfriend home for the night and her girlfriend, apparently, wants nothing more than to waste time at this party without her.

“You’re sweet,” Myka manages, “truly.  I… appreciate the compliment.”

“But your girlfriend is only feet away,” the woman before her says.

“She is only feet away and also,” Myka nods, “I really… _really_ love her.”

“Well,” the woman is biting down on her lip and rolling her eyes, “you’ll never know if you never ask, right?”

“Right,” Myka smiles and reaches a hand out, “I’m Myka, by the way.”

The woman’s cheeks redden and she shakes Myka’s hand, says, “It’s nice to meet you, Myka, I’m—“

“Maggie?”

Both Myka and that woman turn to where Helena stands, suddenly at Myka’s side. And Myka’s hand is still holding that woman’s, that woman is still holding Myka’s hand when she says, “Helena…”

“ _The_ Maggie?”  Myka questions arching a brow in Helena’s direction.

Helena is quiet, offering only a slight nod in response.

“Your journal did _not_ do her justice,” Myka teases softly.

*

Helena is mostly quiet on the walk home, until…

“Helena…”

“She slipped you her phone number?”

Myka sighs. 

“I haven’t seen Maggie in _years_ and the first time I see her again, she’s slipping my girlfriend her _phone number_ in a handshake.”

“I can’t tell if you’re more upset about _me_ getting her phone number or about _her_ giving it to me,” Myka scoffs.

“ _Myka_.” Helena’s voice is scolding.

“ _Helena_.” Myka mocks that scolding tone.

“I’m just…” Helena shakes her head and throws her hands to the air.

“You know, for the record,” Myka holds up a finger, “I don’t think she realized you were who you are until you came over and by then, the paper was already in my hand.”

“Well, she certainly didn’t try to take it back did she?  Did you not tell her that I was your girlfriend?”

“Of course I told her!”

“Then there’s no excuse, whether she knew I was me or not.”

“What would she care if you weren’t you?  Obviously she cares that you _are_ you.”

“More obviously, she cares that _you_ are _you_.”

“She doesn’t even _know_ me, Hel—“

“Well, she certainly _wants_ to!”

Myka sighs.

“Are we honestly going to fight about this right now?”

“I’m not fighting about anything.  I am _simply_ having a conversation.”

“In which you are upset and raising your voice and accusing me of, I don’t know, being _attractive_ to other people? Sounds like a fight to me.”

Helena is steps ahead of Myka when she stops walking, when Myka stops walking just behind her. Helena is quiet and she lowers her head, Myka is watching her as she does this, as she pulls her arms around herself and turns, sideways, and glances back at Myka.  Not fully.  Her eyes do not land entirely on Myka but at Myka’s feet, on the sidewalk, before she turns her gaze away and turns herself entirely away from Myka again.

“You _are_ attractive,” Helena says softly, “to other people.”

Helena is running both of her hands through her hair before pulling her arms back around her, over her own arms, over the cardigan she wears that does absolutely nothing to shield her arms from the cold.

“Helena,” Myka says softly and Helena lowers her head again.

Myka pulls her blazer off and steps slowly, cautiously, into that space behind Helena and drapes her blazer over Helena’s arms, runs her hands up and down those arms to warm her. Then Myka is leaning into Helena, from where she still stands behind her, she is leaning forward, pressing her lips to Helena’s ear, kissing too cold skin.

Helena turns in Myka’s arms and looks up at her with the most pitiful expression on her face and with the most ridiculous pout, she says, “You loved me first.”

It has been a while, Myka thinks, since the last time Helena made her heart skip several beats.

“I did,” Myka nods.

“How old were you?”  Helena asks softly, leaning into Myka, closing her eyes.  “How old was I?”

“If you ask my mom, I was two,” Myka laughs softly, “and you were six, almost seven.” Helena laughs softly, too, wrapping her arms around Myka’s waist.  “Do you remember me?  From then?”

Helena nods and looks up at Myka with a smirk on those lips.  “I remember you calling me Helna because you couldn’t quite master that middle syllable.  It was either Hyena or Henena.”

“Nonsense,” Myka says with a shake of her head.  “I was born a linguist.”

“I remember you always wanting to sit by me or hold my hand or give me a hug,” Helena is grinning now, “you were as exhausting then as you are now.”

“Shut up,” Myka turns away from Helena now, pretends to walk away, but Helena pulls Myka back into her, wraps her arms around her, leans into her hold again.

“How much longer before midnight?”

Myka checks her watch, “An entire hour and I’m already ready for bed.”

“You’re _always_ ready for bed.”

“True,” Myka whispers, pressing her cheek to Helena’s temple as she holds that woman tighter, “How did you ever get so lucky?”

*

“Where’s Will?”

They are home and Myka is pulling Helena into the living room where Helena’s father is seated on the couch, in that very spot they had been seated on New Years Eve. 

Myka can’t help it when she laughs and Helena, knowing exactly why she is laughing, raises a very chastising brow in her direction but she, too, has a smirk on her face.

“Emergency Caesarean,” Charles says turning to them, “apparently his sister was having some sort of complications with labor?”

“Well, where are the girls?”

“Sophie went with Will.  Claudia is in bed.”

“And you’re home because…”

“I can’t be in my own home anymore?”

“It’s New Years Eve!”

“Yes, it is,” Charles is smirking, and it is somewhat unnerving, “so why are you two home so early?”  He looks at his watch.  “It’s not even midnight.”

“Helena’s old girlfriend hit on me,” Myka says, smugly.  Helena shoots a glare at her and another at her own father when he actually chuckles at that. 

“Maggie,” her father nods and Myka grins, turning to Helena who rolls her eyes and moves away from Myka, out of that living room, and toward the stairs.

“I’m going to go check on Claudia,” Helena says, waving a hand over her shoulder, and adds, “feel free to join me when you are done making jokes,” for Myka’s benefit before disappearing up those stairs.

Myka is close to on that woman’s tail when Helena’s father, Charles Senior, says, “You should probably let her cool down.”  So Myka, who has had a couple glasses of wine, albeit watered down, decides to join Helena’s father in the living room.  He makes room on the couch, when she steps to it, and she takes a seat on the opposite end from where he sits, thumbing through a news paper.

“You know Maggie?”  Myka asks and Charles nods, slowly.

“I do,” and he looks up to Myka, offers her a soft smile, “she popped up right around the time Helena could no longer stand to be my little princess. And she never went away.”

“You mean right around the time you started sleeping with her babysitter, right?”

Charles sighs and tilts his head toward Myka, arches a brow at her, too. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, “but sometimes you are too much like your father.”

Myka smiles, with a shake of her head, “I guess I can’t be too mad at that accusation,” Myka shrugs, “he _did_ donate a couple of chromosomes to the cause.”

Charles chuckles again and it’s almost as weird as when Helena _really_ laughs because it is that rarely heard and it is that rarely warranted. 

“Not that it is any of your business but I have, over time, come to regret that relationship.  For Helena’s sake.  I had no idea how close Helena was to Vanessa then.”  Charles sighs, thoughtfully, before turning his attention back to the paper in his hands.

“You have no idea how close Helena is to Vanessa _now_ ,” Myka says with a soft chuckle and the confused look that Charles gives her, in a glance, fully reveals the truth in Myka’s statement. “So, Maggie…”

“Ask what you want to ask,” Charles says, never looking away from his newspaper.

“Did you not like her?”

“I liked her,” Charles shrugs, “I was more concerned about what Georgie became with her.”

“And, by that, do you mean bisexual?”

“No,” Charles sits up now and sets that newspaper aside and turns to Myka fully, shaking his head, “I don’t care… about Helena’s…” Charles sighs and gulps, and says, really quietly and awkwardly, “ _sexuality_.” It makes Myka smile and chuckle and Charles shakes his head again, “Despite what Helena believes, I do love her and I do support her.  But Maggie was the first girl she’d ever liked, she was her first _girlfriend_ , and Helena, at ten or eleven, even at eighteen, _knew_ , or thought she did, that she was in love with her.”

“It’s hard,” Myka nods, “being a kid with feelings like that. Not knowing how to interpret those feelings when everything you see, everything around you, tells you that the answer is _true love_. I’m eighteen and still learning that lesson.”

“Understandable,” Charles says quietly.  “And looking back, I realize I could have done more to help her understand that Maggie was not the love of her life, that she was the beginning and not the end. But she was a kid becoming a teenager and I was a monster, out to make her life a living hell. The older she got, the more monstrous I became.”

“Most parents are,” Myka smiles and then her smile fades, “although, in the history of Helena’s relationships, Maggie should have been the least of your worries.”

“Right, so maybe I pulled away,” Charles says, returning to his paper. “Maybe I pulled away too far because I tried with Charlie, to guide him, and look how that turned out. Helena had a good head on her shoulders, she always has, so I pulled away and I let her live in her fantasy and oh, the places her and Maggie would go.  The places they thought they were _going_ to go.”

Charles is laughing softly again and Myka arches a brow.

“They would go out on dates, they were getting _married_ , they looked at houses they wanted to live in,” Myka is suddenly laughing now, too, “I think Georgie picked every flower in the neighborhood for that girl. Took her to the palace and told her it would be hers one day.”

“She never picks flowers for me,” Myka sighs, still laughing. “Or promises me a future of royalty.”

“Yes, well,” and Charles sighs now, too, giving a very pointed look in Myka’s direction when he then says, “what used to be flowers has turned into cell phones and glasses and laptops and cars.  Boxes of advanced copies of highly anticipated novels for a certain someone’s bookstore?”

“I guess… I’m a little spoiled,” Myka smirks.

Charles shrugs, “It’s not enough to make up for our silence.  For Georgie, it never will be.”

“Your silence?”

“About your father.”

“Oh.”

The air grows suddenly thick, Myka growing uneasy along with it, because she had not thought about those things having to do with her dad, with her childhood, in quite some time. She had certainly not thought about them in the context of anyone else knowing about them.  She knew Helena had known and occasionally other people knew, too, but Charles?

The man who knew absolutely nothing about his own daughter is telling her he knows, that he knew all along, about what was happening to her?

“I’m sorry, Myka,” Charles is nodding now, “for what your dad put you guys through.  Your mother, your sister, too.  And for trying to pull Georgie away from you when things fell apart between Warren and I. I didn’t really know…”

“I don’t… really understand.  If you knew… what you didn’t know.”

“How much Georgie meant to you, how much she cared about you, how much she helped you.  I know you don’t know and I know she won’t tell you, how much more she wanted to do for you… how many times I had to stop her so that she wouldn’t get hurt again.”

“What do you mean by getting hurt… again?  By being around me?  By my dad?”

“It’s nothing you need to worry about.  Just… old skeletons in burned down closets…”  Charles is distracted by his phone buzzing on the table and when he reaches for it, reads the screen, he shakes his head and smirks, letting go of another sigh, “It seems I’ve taken up too much of your time,” and he looks at Myka, shows her the phone, the accusing text message from Helena, “my daughter is requesting your presence.” 

“Eleven thirty already?”  Myka glances at her watch and lifts herself from that couch, turns to head to the stairs before stopping and turning back to Charles, “Thank you, Uncle Charles,” Myka nods, “for watching Claudia.  I hope… she wasn’t too mischievous.  She has a tendency to…”

“Take things apart?”

“ _Yeah_.”

“So I found out,” Charles nods, “it’s fine.  Actually, she reminds me so much of Georgie, at that age. It was nice.  _Humbling_ , even.  We just put it right back together again.”

“Wait… you did?  With Claudia?”

Charles nods again.

“Oh, _okay_. Huh. Well, thanks.”

Myka turns to leave again, then stops in her tracks, turns back to Charles.

“What, exactly, did she take apart?”

“Her laptop.”

“Oh. Shi--”

*

Before Myka finds her way upstairs, Charles assures her that Claudia’s laptop is still in perfectly good working condition.  “It, in fact,” Charles had told her, “probably works a lot faster now.”

“No surprise there,” Myka had laughed, is still laughing when she peeks into Helena’s room only to find that room empty.  She back tracks to Claudia’s room and peeks in there. Helena is on the bed, laying alongside Claudia who is turned toward her, speaking softly as Helena runs her fingers gently over Claudia’s forehead, into her hair.

Myka steps into that room, catches both their attentions.

“Hi Myka,” Claudia says softly, sleepily.  “Happy new year.”

Myka smiles, “Happy new year, Pip,” and to Helena, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”  The look that Helena gives her tries to be upset, it tries very hard to be put off and annoyed but Helena smirks and she gestures, with a tilt of her head, for Myka to join them.  So Myka kicks off her shoes and climbs onto Claudia’s bed, stretches out on the other side of her, across from Helena, and mirrors Helena’s position.  Propped up on her elbow, just above Claudia’s pillows, head falling to rest against the headboard.

“Claudia was just showing me some photos that my father pulled out for her,” Helena says softly, holding up those photos for Myka to see.  And Myka can see, when she takes those photos from Helena, that they are old photos.  She recognizes Charles Senior right away, in the first of these photos, and her dad beside him.  They are young, in college still.

“Wow,” Myka smirks,  and she moves through those photos.  There is one with her mother and father and Charles, just after college, she thinks, is when they met. Another of just her parents, her mother is so young in these photos that she looks like Tracy does now, at seventeen.

“Your mother has always been gorgeous,” Helena smiles.

“She could have passed some of that gorgeous down to me,” Myka teases.

“Myka,” Helena laughs softly and when Myka looks up to meet Helena’s eyes, the older girl is shaking her head, the same way her father does, the same expression her father makes, and says, “she did.”

Myka rolls her eyes and continues moving through those photos with a soft, “As long as you think so, I am happy.”

“I do,” Helena sighs.  “Very much.”

“Is this your mother?” 

This photo is of Helena’s father and a woman that Myka only recognizes because she looks so much like Helena.  Long legs, long and straight black hair, a bright smile, so very much like Helena’s.

“I guess so,” Helena shrugs.

“You don’t know?” Myka smirks.  “You look exactly like her.”

“I try not to look too hard,” Helena sighs and leans in to kiss a now sleeping Claudia’s forehead.  “Apparently my father was very engaging this evening.  _Apparently_ our young Claudia took her brand new laptop apart and he…”

“Helped her put it back together, yeah,” Myka nods, “so I learned.”

“So you learned when you were downstairs having a conversation with my father,” Helena accuses, not quite making it sound playful, “who seems to have developed a sudden knack for _caring_.”

“If you don’t want me to talk to your dad--”

“I’m not asking that of you,” Helena interrupts.

“Okay, then, _Helena_ ,” Myka says slowly, “I’m not sure what the problem is…”

“There is no problem, I’m just being…” Helena sighs, “I’m being awful.” That makes Myka puff out a soft laugh. “I’m sorry.  I just… suddenly he wants to make an effort to have a good relationship and it is with everyone in my life except me.”

“You don’t exactly give him the opportunity,” Myka shrugs.

“Right, so it’s my fault.”

Helena is pouting and Myka is groaning softly, throwing her head back against the headboard and letting it lull to the side, to give Helena the most incredulous, the most annoyed look she can possibly muster. 

“I’m not saying it’s your fault, Helena, I completely understand why you are so hesitant to open up to your father.  Trust me, I understand.  But you’re at a place where you _can_ open up to him because he’s finally making an effort.  I’ve _seen_ him trying to make an effort.  He sucks at it, he sucks really bad at it, but he’s _trying_.”

“Your father tries,” Helena says softly, “will you ever forgive _him_?”

“My dad strangled me.”

It’s obvious that Helena is not expecting this response.  She takes in a sharp breath and holds it and exhales slowly.

“I know.  I’m sorry. You don’t have to remind me,” Helena is shaking her head.  “I saw you. In the hospital. You don’t have to--”

“The only reason he tries now is because Mom doesn’t want to renew the restraining order and he thinks that means she forgives him.  And just because Tracy has given him the time of day, he thinks I’ll forgive him, too.”  Myka shakes her head.  “Your dad has a lot to atone for, Helena, he does.  For not being a bigger part of your life. I know that.”

Helena is quiet.

“But he has always loved you and he has always supported you,” Myka takes in a deep breath and turns back to the photos in her hands, “he has never been the greatest dad to you, Helena, but he has, at the very least, always acknowledged that he has a daughter.”

They are both quiet now, Helena watching Myka, and Myka still staring at those photos in her hands.  The one she looks at now, she has been staring at for several minutes, since she had finished speaking, before she holds it out to Helena, who takes that picture from Myka and smiles.  She bites down on her lip and, after a while, turns back to Myka and hands that photo back to Myka, saying, “See, I told you,” and whispers, “exhausting.”

Myka rolls her eyes, taking that photo back from Helena, to admire it again.

She doesn’t know where they are or when it is, but her parents are there, her dad is actually holding her mom in such a way that Myka almost believes he might have loved her before.  And her mother, with her long blonde hair pulled back into a bun, with her tank top and her very short shorts, is holding Tracy who is probably months shy of one year old.  Charles Senior is there, with an arm draped over her dad’s shoulder just opposite of where her mother stands. Beside him is Charlie and the face he is making, squinting into the sun with furrowed brows, and with his arms crossed defiantly in front of him, is already menacing, it is so very much _him_.

Myka recognizes herself easily, even if she hadn’t had a head full of short, dark, twisting curls, she would recognize the outfit she wears because it had been a favorite of her mothers.  White with pink ruffles at the sleeves and pink shorts with ruffles at the bottoms, some faux French scenery in pink and green and yellow lines with a floating collection of glittery balloons on the shirt. 

Why her mother loved that awful outfit, why Myka had so many photos of herself at that age in that thing, Myka will never know.  And when she had asked her mother about it, the only thing she’d been told was, “When you have kids, you can dress them any old way you’d like.”

To which she’d told her mother, “Lucky for them they won’t exist.” The ensuing argument over leaving the burden of grandchildren entirely upon _Tracy_ was a different story altogether.

The last remaining person in the photo is leaning into Myka’s mother, just opposite of where her dad stands.  A six-year-old Helena Wells, with strangely light brown and somewhat wavy hair, is leaning into Jeannie Bering and her eyes are closed, she is smiling very brightly. She is standing directly behind that two-year-old Myka and both of her hands are holding Myka’s hands, falling just around Myka’s neck, just above that colorful French scenery, those glittery balloons.

“I’ve never seen this before,” Myka sighs, not wanting to look away from that photo but eventually deciding that the current Helena, the one reaching across Claudia to grasp Myka’s wrist, is slightly more compelling. “My mom is always making jokes but I was beginning to think she’s just been making things up. Had you seen this before?”

“I have, a long time ago,” Helena pauses only briefly, “but I hadn’t really… made the connection then.  I haven’t seen it since… before we moved to the states.”

“All this time that we’ve known each other,” Myka smirks and then turns a mischievous grin toward Helena, “all those extra years I could have spent driving you crazy.”

“I’m sure you’ll make up for them now,” Helena teases softly, allowing her hand to fall away from Myka’s wrist and adjusting her position, to rest her head beside Claudia’s on her pillow.  “You were so adorable.”

“You know, we really need to discuss your referring to me as adorable in the past tense,” Myka narrows her eyes on Helena as she closes hers.

“You aren’t adorable anymore, love,” Helena tells her, yawning. “You’re dashing now. Gorgeous.  Handsome.  _Mine_.”

“Oh, _dashing_ , I like dashing.”

Helena laughs, a little too loud, then covers her mouth, opening an eye to check that Claudia is still asleep beside her. 

“She could sleep through a train derailing.”

Helena puffs out another soft laugh at that, too.

“Myka.”

“Hmm?” Myka is tucking those pictures away, onto the night stand beside Claudia’s bed.

“Thank you,” Helena’s smile falls away, when she opens her eyes back to Myka, “for coming to London. For coming to _me_.”

Myka smiles and leans over Claudia, carefully so as to not smother her, and into Helena as she rises up to meet her halfway, to kiss lips that are still cold, still absolutely freezing.

“I would always,” Myka tells her, kisses her again.

“I know you would,” Helena whispers in return, before their lips part entirely.

They are quiet, smiling at one another, laughing softly at nothing at all, when they hear the booming in the distance, the cheers, the faint sounds of music and noise makers and fireworks.

“Happy New Year, Georgie.”  Myka moves into another kiss, deeper this time, as it forces Helena to sit up entirely, to reach a hand to Myka’s cheek and pull her in closer.  And they are smiling into that kiss, when they part and Helena tells Myka, too, “Happy New Year, my love.”

*

“You’re freezing,” Myka whispers.

“You’re supposed to be warming me,” Helena whispers back.

It is dark.  It is a New Year. They are _finally_ in bed.

Helena yawns and moves closer to Myka, moves bare arms and chest and belly into Myka’s bare arms and chest and belly.  Helena sighs and Myka wraps her arms further around her, hugs her tighter.

“You know, we only have four days--”

“Shh,” Helena hushes before Myka can even finish and presses her mouth against Myka’s mouth in a quick kiss.  “No countdowns.”

“Now you know how it feels.”

“I _always_ knew.” Myka nuzzles closer to Helena, kissing her chin as Helena says, “I just don’t like to be _reminded_.  When you’re the one doing the leaving.  When _I’m_ the one being left.” Myka rolls her eyes as she sits up slightly to kiss Helena’s bare shoulder.

“I love you, no matter how dramatic you are,” Myka smiles, resting back against her pillow.

“Be _quiet_.  I’m trying to sleep.”

Myka laughs.

***

Myka shouldn’t eaves drop, from where she stands at the top of the steps, but she supposes it isn’t technically eaves dropping if Helena knows she is there. Though she’s sure that if Helena had known who would be at the door, when she went to answer it, she would have preferred Myka _not_ be there at all.

“Maggie, what are you doing here?”

“I can’t believe you’re here.  You moved back?”

“ _Obviously_.  Myka isn’t available, if that’s why you’re here.”

“I’m not here to see your _girlfriend_ , Helena.  I’m here to see _you_.  How long have you been back?”

“A year… and a half.”

“And you didn’t think to call me?”

“Call you?  I haven’t talked to you in almost five years, Maggie.  You didn’t think to call _me_?”

“I didn’t think you were ever coming back.  You had a girlfriend.  You said you loved her.  You told me you’d be engaged after you finished high school, that you were _never_ coming back.”

“Yes, well, things didn’t work out quite as I had imagined.”

“You _wanted_ me to think you weren’t coming back.”

Helena sighs.

“You _ran away_ from me.”

“You _cheated_ on me.”

“You were cheating _with_ me! Does your girlfriend know _that_?”

“Myka… is not Giselle.”

“She _could_ be.  She should at least know that much.”

“I would never cheat on Myka.”

“ _Right_.”

“Go _home_ , Maggie.”

“You said you’d always come back to me, Helena.  Even after _Giselle_.”

“One summer. Five years ago. That was the end.”

“I don’t believe you.  Helena…”

Long pause.

“I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t need to talk to you.”

“Helena.”

“Maggie, I don’t...”

Myka, both curious and concerned, moves onto the steps, seats herself quietly at the top of those stairs.  She can just barely see Maggie, standing outside of the door.  She can see most of Helena, except her head. She can see that Helena’s arms are crossed, that Helena is turned slightly away from Maggie. That Maggie has one foot in the doorway, that Maggie’s hand is resting on the doorknob.

The other woman takes a step forward.  Myka can see this, too.

“Helena.”

“ _No_.”

Myka is not stupid.  That last no was a struggle for Helena to say.

That woman takes another step forward and she is through the threshold. She is a step away from Helena.

“Go _home_.”

It’s a whisper from Helena, Myka barely catches it.

“Your boyfriend, Liam?  He told me that he thought you two were, you know.  Before New Years Eve, he thought you two had something.”

“ _Maggie_.”

That is a scold.

“Why would he think that, Helena?”

“Because he’s a guy?”

“Because you don’t know how to be alone.  Because, eventually, Myka is going to go back to the states and eventually you won’t want to be alone anymore.”

“ _Don’t_ say her name. Do not _talk_ about her.  Don’t presume to know anything about me.”

“I’m sorry but I do know you, Helena.  I have known you since we were kids.”

“I _love_ Myka.”

“You loved me.”

“ _Ages_ ago.”

“I wouldn’t be here, Helena, if I didn’t think you still had feelings for me. If I didn’t still have feelings for you.  I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t looked at me the way you did the other night.”

Maggie takes that last step.  Helena is quiet, unmoving.

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to hurt you, Helena.  Sweetheart, I’m not… I didn’t come here to make you cry.  To upset you. I just… you and I, we’ll always be us.  So long as we’re near each other, we’ll _always_ be us.”

“I have no intention, Maggie, of remaining anywhere near you. _Believe_ me.”

“I’m sorry, Helena, but unless you drop out of the program? You don’t exactly have a choice.”

Myka hears that deep sigh from Helena.

“Tell me you don’t love me, Helena.  Tell me that I’m crazy and that you don’t miss me.  I will leave you alone.”

There’s another long pause before Helena takes a step back.

“I don’t love you.”

“I love Myka.”

More silence.

“And you’re crazy.”

Finally, Helena whispers:

“Please, Maggie, leave me alone.”

Myka breathes again.  She doesn’t know how long she’d been holding her breath but she takes in one deep recovery breath before sighing her relief.  She breathes even easier when Maggie turns, wordlessly, and leaves the house.

Helena slams the door closed behind her but doesn’t move for several seconds. Myka can see her wiping at her eyes, can hear her sniffling, and taking in several deep breaths of her own. Seconds later, she is at the bottom of the steps, looking up at Myka with red eyes, with damp cheeks, biting down on her bottom lip.

“I didn’t know… if you wanted me to interrupt.”

Helena lowers her head and looks slightly away.

“It’s probably better that you didn’t,” Helena says softly.  “That needed to happen.”

Myka nods, “Okay.”

Helena takes the steps now, up to where Myka sits, and Myka catches her hand before she continues walking.  Myka catches her hand in hers and tugs at that hand until Helena turns back to her and sits beside her on those steps.

Myka pulls Helena closer, into her arms, until Helena rests her head against Myka’s shoulder and moves her forehead against Myka’s neck, and relaxes completely in Myka’s arms.

“She’s not wrong,” Helena says softly.

Myka arches a brow, even if Helena cannot see, and asks, “About which part?”

“Me. Being alone.”

Helena sits up, fresh tears in her eyes, falling down her face.

“I love you, Myka,” she cries.  “But I hate that we are so far apart.”

Myka nods, “I know.”

Helena presses her lips to Myka’s in a gentle, lingering kiss.

“And Liam?”  Myka asks, when their lips part.

Helena shakes her head before bringing her hands to her face, to cover her face, to hide her tears.

“Another confession?”

Helena nods.

Myka tightens her hold on Helena but doesn’t push it.  Doesn’t speak to that confessor because to do so… would complicate an already complicated situation.

“He kissed me.”

***

Helena’s birthday.  She turned twenty-three. She’d hung out with Liam a bit before then.  They’d gone out with friends, they’d gone out alone.  They always had fun but it was always _just_ fun.  It wasn’t sweet or awkward or sexual or romantic, in any way.  It was just _fun_.

They had similar interests, they had a lot in common.  Liam was intelligent and engaging.  The conversation came easily.  Helena had a hard time making new friends in London after her return, she mostly stuck to her old friends.  It was just a testament to Helena’s loyalty. To the idea that Helena never really stopped loving the people she felt closest to.  So to make a new friend, and such a great friend at that, was worth celebrating.  And often.

It was shortly after Helena’s twenty-third birthday and Liam asked to take her out.  Helena didn’t think it was anything _special_.  There was nothing inherently special about that night out.  She dressed up because they went somewhere nice but they’d gone to that somewhere before. They’d been out alone before.

Helena says, looking back on it, she probably should have _known_.

Liam walked her home from that very house where they’d spent New Years Eve. The professor is a family friend of his, it isn’t entirely out of the ordinary for him to spend a couple nights there at a time.  It isn’t out of the ordinary for him to meet Helena at her house, stop by for a chat, spend an afternoon.

Liam walked her home, he walked her to the door and Helena had been suspicious from that moment.

Everything was suddenly awkward.  Everything became suddenly _apparent_.

“He kissed me,” Helena says, “and I didn’t… _do_ anything… about it.”

Myka is quiet.  She lets Helena talk.

“I didn’t tell him no.  I didn’t push him away.  I didn’t…” Helena shrugs and slowly pulls herself out of Myka’s hold, where they are still side-by-side on the steps.  “It’s not like I’ve never told him that I have a girlfriend.  I have told him.  He _knows.”_

“Why… would he tell Maggie… that he thought you two were…”

“You can’t listen to Maggie, Myka,” Helena’s tears fall quickly now and she shakes her head.  “She’s… intelligent and… manipulative.  She knows how to get what she wants.  She won’t stop until she does.”

Myka laughs softly, incredulously, at that, and says, “That doesn’t make me feel any amount of comfort, Helena.  That just makes me feel like,” Myka shrugs, shaking her head, “like I don’t want to leave you here.  With _her_.  _Alone_.”

Helena’s silence, in this moment, is far more concerning, to Myka, than anything else she has heard today.

“Did you cheat on Giselle?  With her?”

Helena turns away, wipes at her tears, turns back to Myka. 

“We had gotten into a fight, right before that summer,” deep in thought, Helena touches her tongue to her top lip and sighs, “we didn’t exactly break up… but I was angry … I was just… and Maggie was here, waiting.  I hadn’t seen her in years and she was just… _here_.” Helena bites down on her lip.  “I’m sorry.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say.  To any of this.  She wishes there was some clear cut way that she felt.  She wishes she could be mad, _angry_. It feels like she should be, at the thought of that _guy_ kissing her girlfriend.  It feels like anger should be the appropriate response but… she’s not angry. Upset and a little bit hurt and a lot of bit annoyed with Liam… with Maggie… even, somehow, with Giselle.

But anger… anger has a hard time manifesting itself in this moment, with Helena looking at her with those guilty eyes, crying and expectant and so very sad.

“Myka—“

On cue, the front door comes flying open, Claudia and Sophie bounding through it with Will just barely on their heels.

“Hi Myka! Hi H.G.!” both girls are greeting between their own laughter and conversation. 

“Hey,” Myka smiles.

“Hi, my loves.”  Helena says forcing her own smile, wiping at her tears as the girls take off into the living room. Will, after closing the door behind them and stripping himself free of his coat, hanging that coat up nearby, turns to Myka and Helena, still sat on the stairs, and pauses.

“What happened?”

Myka turns her gaze to Helena who gazes back at her for one silent moment before turning to Will.

“Maggie came by.”

“ _Maggie_?  I thought she moved back to Spain or Hades or _whatever_ pit of demon spawn she crawled out of to begin with?” 

Helena’s gaze finds Myka’s again.

“Georgie. I’m beginning to think that your journal was not quite as comprehensive as it could have been.”

Helena lowers her eyes, stands and bends down to press a kiss into Myka’s hair.

“I’m going to see what the girls are getting up to.”

***

“She runs away.”

“I know,” Will laughs.  “Trust me, I _know_.”

Myka runs her hands through her hair as Will comes to stand on the steps just below her, facing her, leaning into the rail. 

“She hasn’t exactly been taught any differently,” Will adds. “Her mother… her father, too.”

“Should I be worried?  About Maggie?”

Will sighs and shrugs, lifting a hand in something like defeat, “I want to tell you no, Myka… but Maggie is... _Maggie_.” Myka groans.  “All I can say about it… is that I hope, in the past five years, Helena has truly gotten over her.”

“Not comforting _at all_.”

***

Helena has run away.

Not _actually_ but _emotionally_ , as she tends to do. 

Helena has run away and she has conveniently decided to do so when she and Myka only have two nights left together.  So, after one day, a whole eight daylight hours, of Helena being quiet and standoffish and avoiding being alone with Myka, avoiding anything Myka would have to say that might sound remotely _serious_ , Myka puts an end to her running.

“What is wrong with you?”

The fact that there _is_ something wrong with Helena, makes this an impossible question for her to respond to because if she says “nothing”, she is lying.  Any other response would be too telling. Any other response would shine too much light on her already overexposed and crumbling resolve.

Myka actually has Helena cornered in the kitchen, where she’s just finished making dinner and sent Claudia on her way, into the dining room with her plate. Helena is physically standing in the corner of that kitchen and Myka is in front of her, hands gripping at a ceramic tile countertop at either side of Helena’s waist.

“Myka please, I—“ Myka is shaking her head because whatever Helena is about to say, it is not the right answer.  It is not the thing that needs to be said.  Not right here.  Not right now.

“Is Maggie the thing we’re avoiding talking about?  Or is it the fact that Liam kissed you four months ago and you never bothered to tell me?  Either way, I’m going to be perfectly honest with you right now, Helena.” Myka stands straight, removing her hands away from countertops, moving her hands to grip, gently, at Helena’s arms.  “I _care_ … that these things happened or are happening but I don’t care enough that I’m willing to sacrifice my last two nights with you to… _whatever_ it is… you think I’m going to do or say to you.”

Helena is quiet.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“You hate me.”

“That is the exact opposite of what I’m saying.  I don’t _hate_ you, Helena. I could _never_ \--”

“You’re mad at me.”

“I’m not _fucking_ mad at you,” Myka says this, knowing it isn’t proving her point.  Not entirely. “I’m _hurt_. I’m scared.  I feel… inadequate.  Mostly, I feel like… when I leave here, in two days, I’m not just leaving London.  I’m leaving you… and this… _us._ To uncertainty.” Myka moves her hands up now, to palm Helena’s cheeks.  “Because if it isn’t some cute boy that is your age, that you allowed to kiss you, that you still talk to and laugh with and let _touch_ you the way you let him touch you the other night? Then it’s _Magdalena._   The girl… a _woman_ … that you have always told me is the love of your life.  _That_?  You have always told me.”

Tears are cascading down Helena’s cheeks.  Myka lets her hands fall from those cheeks to her sides and she takes a step back.

“I don’t know why you’re crying.”

Helena licks her lips, wipes at her face with the backs of her hands, says very softly, “You’re breaking up with me.”

“I’m not breaking up with you, Helena,” Myka says softly.  “I’m asking you if I should be worried about this uncertainty that I feel surrounding us and the fact that we’re about to spend the next two years apart.  Because you seem absolutely unwilling to talk about it.  It needs to be talked about.  Should I be worried?  That you have unresolved feelings for Maggie?  That Maggie is here?  Should I be worried about _Liam_? That he kissed you? That you’re _close_?”

Helena takes in a deep breath and exhales slowly but says nothing more.

Myka nods, slowly, her understanding, steps back even further and leans into the countertop that is the breakfast bar behind her.

“Your silence is more telling than anything you could possibly say to me right now.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, Myka,” Helena says quietly, whispering.

“Are you saying you _will_?” Myka whispers in return.

Helena’s eyes fall away from hers, to the countertop beside her, down to the floor, and she adjusts her stance, crosses her arms in front of her. Myka sighs, _knowing_ , before Helena can even open her mouth to speak again.

“I’m saying… two years is a long time to be alone,” though she is hardly saying anything at all, Myka thinks, because Helena’s voice is so soft, so small, so already difficult to hear.

“And just like that, your love for me is nothing in that woman’s shadow—“

“Make no mistake, Myka Bering,” Helena sounds upset now, when she interrupts Myka, when she takes a step toward Myka and lets her arms fall but points a finger upward as she continues, “that I love you, with all of my heart. That I want nothing more than to be with you right now, for as long as we can stand to be together.”

“Then say _that_ , Helena. When I ask you if you want this, if you can _do_ this? Say _that!_ Don’t say nothing at all! As if _we’re_ nothing at all.”

“My silence shouldn’t read to you like a break up song, Myka Bering. If I say nothing to you at all, the first thing that pops into your mind shouldn’t be that I don’t love you.”

“No, Helena, but when I ask you if, after I’m gone, you can still maintain this relationship, if you can still be with me and be happy and not let random guys _feel you up_ ,” Helena’s brows furrow, she’s insulted, Myka doesn’t give her a chance to say anything about it, “and not let your psychotic ex-girlfriends manipulate you into thinking they actually care about you?  When I ask you these things, you should be able to say, ‘ _No_ , Myka, I am not going to cheat on you with my gorgeous ex-girlfriend that I’ve always been in love with but never bothered telling you I _slept_ with,’ or ‘ _No_ , Myka, I am not going to let that guy touch me or kiss me and then also not tell you about it until that psychotic ex-girlfriend brings it up in front of you!’”  Myka waits only a second before demanding some sort of confirmation but Helena says nothing. Not, at least, fast enough. “Right?  If that’s how you feel, that’s what you say?  If you have any inclination or interest at all in staying together for two years when we’re an ocean apart, that’s what you would say.”

“It doesn’t very well matter what I would say, does it?  If you had ever given me the chance to actually _think_ about anything before sputtering off into your little rant… before putting all of these thoughts and words and intentions into my mouth.  You aren’t exactly giving me a chance, are you, Myka?  You’ve basically already concluded that it is my intention to leave you or to cheat on you, right?  To be with Maggie?  To be with Liam?  Which one, of the two of them, do you think I’d bother leaving you for?  _You_ , Myka Bering.”

“I didn’t put words into your mouth, Helena.  You said, and I quote, ‘I don’t want to hurt you, Myka,’ and, ‘two years is a long time.’”

“You and your goddamn memory, Myka Bering.  Sure, you can remember exactly every single word I’ve said but could you be bothered with at least trying to comprehend the context in which I am saying these things?”

“The context was clear as day,” Myka says, crossing her arms in front of her. “It’s clear to me, Helena, that you’d intend to be with _anyone_ than spend two years alone.  With no one to touch you or hold you or keep you _pleased_ and _satisfied_.”

Helena lowers her head but keeps her eyes steadily, angrily, on Myka, when her hands fall to her sides and ball into fists and she steadies her stance.

“Being alone and without _you_ for two years?  Hurting you when I can’t possibly be there to _comfort_ you?  These are not confessions!” Helena raises her voice, “They are _fears_!”

Now Myka falls quiet. 

And it is not for lack of anything to say but she, too, is angry and frustrated and trying, very hard, to collect her thoughts.  To organize those thoughts into something that will make sense of this situation because she can’t remember ever fighting with Helena like this.  Not since high school.  Not since she was young and stupid and angry all of the time.

But this isn’t like that, Myka reminds herself.  This isn’t just Myka being angry about Helena putting herself in harms way, risking her own well-being to keep Myka company and safe and together and alive.  This is something entirely different because Myka’s feelings are valid. She is hurt and she is upset and maybe she is a little more angry about this thing, about all of these things, than she had been willing to admit.

So who is Helena to stand here and say that she is afraid? That she fears the future, that she fears being alone?  Helena will never be alone.  She will never not have someone, anyone.  Because everyone, absolutely everyone would fall over themselves to be near her, to be _with_ her. 

And what, then, does that leave Myka with? 

Two years.  Hurt. Loneliness.

Myka had loved Helena almost her entire life.  Myka has loved Helena, could not imagine ever not loving Helena. And to have her and then lose her? To be just another person that Helena had once loved and no longer loves, that Helena can no longer see herself having a future with? That Helena, eventually, just moves on and away from?

Myka cannot even imagine, cannot even comprehend…

“I love you, Myka,” Helena’s voice is soft and breaking behind tears, cutting through Myka’s thoughts, reaching through Myka’s chest, ripping out Myka’s heart.  That voice, Helena’s anger, her sadness.  “More than anything and more than _anyone_ , I love you.  But I need to be away from you.  Before this gets any worse.”

Helena hesitates, for only a second, looking into Myka’s eyes and shaking her head, lowering her eyes to the ground.  Then she turns and she goes, quickly out of the kitchen, without ever looking back.

Myka doesn’t blink or move or possibly even breathe at all until she hears the bedroom door slam closed.

Helena always runs away.

***

“I’m sorry, Claudia,” Myka is speaking softly, sitting beside a wide-eyed little Donovan.  She has only been picking at the food on her plate, Myka can tell, but now she takes a small bite, chews quietly, swallows before speaking.

“Is H.G. okay?”

Myka smirks, shrugs.  “I don’t know.”

A pause.  Claudia reaches a hand to Myka’s arm.  “Are _you_ okay?”

Myka nods, wiping away her tears.  “I’m okay.”

“Don’t be too mad at H.G.,” Claudia says softly, nodding her head. “It’s hard.”

“What’s hard?”  Myka asks, just as softly.

“When two people like you, when you kind of like them, too,” Claudia says shaking her head, her expression dead serious.  Myka can’t help the small smile that pulls into her lips. “And you don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“And what do you know about all of that?”  Myka questions the tiny old soul beside her.

“If I tell you something, can you promise to keep it a secret?”

Myka smiles even more now, “So long as it isn’t harmful to your health or your well-being, Pip,” she is thinking of Jane as she recites this, one of her infamous lines, “I can keep your secret a secret.”

“Laila thinks I’m her girlfriend,” the utter look of annoyance on Claudia’s face is a thing to behold.  Myka tries very hard to tame her smile.

“And what do you think, Pip?”  Myka doesn’t actually try very hard at taming that smile, it is wide in the face of this adorably tiny human.  “About what Laila thinks?”

“I think…” Claudia sighs, shrugs, “well, I think it’s not really such a bad thing because I like Laila all right and she’s pretty and she’s nice but she’s a nuisance and she never leaves me alone and she always wants to sit by me at lunch or hold my hand.”

“I can see why that would be annoying.”

“Exactly,” Claudia says with a nod, “but then… I met Sophie.”

“ _Will’s_ Sophie?”

“What other Sophie would I be talking about, Myka?  Can you please try and keep up, I’m not exactly talking in Unicode here.”

“Oh,” Myka puffs out a soft laugh, “my apologies.  So then… you met Sophie.”

“Then I met Sophie and she’s nice and she’s pretty, too.  She hugs me and she kisses my cheek all the time and that’s all right, too, I guess.  But it makes me feel bad about Laila.”

“Because Laila… is your girlfriend?”

“Right-ish,” Claudia nods.  “If she doesn’t know then I’ll feel bad because I know and she doesn’t.  But if I _tell_ her, just to make myself feel better, then _she’ll_ feel bad, too.  Right?”

“Maybe. I mean, she’s nine… how bad is she going to feel?”

“Have you met Laila before?  She’s _emotional_.”

“Point taken.”

“I also don’t want to hurt Sophie’s feelings.  By not being her friend.  Because she’s a good friend, even if she likes me when I can’t really like her back.  She’s still a good friend and without her, I wouldn’t have any friends here at all. It would just be me and you two balls of joy.”

“Claudia--” Myka doesn’t know whether to laugh or be insulted and Claudia gives her no time at all to wade through either of those emotions.

“So, it’s hard… when two people like you.  Even if I never see Sophie again, I’ll still think she’s nice and a good friend.  I’ll still appreciate our time together.  I don’t mind that she hugged me and kissed my cheek, I’ll still want to be her friend.  But Laila will always be _Laila_ and, if my heart were a hard drive, partitioned in two, Laila would be the bigger of the two. You know, the one hosting the operating system and all of the anti-virus software.”

“That is, oddly, romantic.”  Myka thinks it almost makes too much sense and that, in and of itself, makes no sense at all.

“What did you do, when two people liked you?”

“That has never happened,” Myka laughs softly, incredulously. At how ridiculous that sounds.

Claudia arches her tiny brow in confusion.  “H.G. didn’t like you when Laila’s sister was your girlfriend?”

Myka closes her eyes and shakes her head, “That’s different, Claudia. On a level that I cannot even begin to describe to you.”

“But you loved Abigail.  Didn’t you?”

Myka is staring blankly across the dining room, into the living room, when she answers, “I do… _did_.”

“And you loved H.G., too, didn’t you?”

Myka nods, wordlessly.

“So how is that any different?”

“I suppose it’s not.”

“Then what did you do? When H.G. liked you and you didn’t want to hurt Abigail’s feelings?  When you didn’t want to stop being friends with H.G.”

Myka is thinking of Abigail. Of all the things about Myka’s friendship with Helena that she never told Abigail because she didn’t think she could ever tell Abigail.  About how close they were, about how emotionally invested they were, and _are,_ into one another. 

If Abigail had known…

And not until the very end did Myka say anything.  Not until that last night, on Abigail’s front steps, did Myka ever say anything to Abigail about how close she and Helena actually were. And even now, Myka wants to take it back and never tell her. Myka wishes she had found some other way to break that girl’s heart without completely breaking her heart.

But what would that make her?  A liar?  A cheater? A coward?  Completely selfish?

Human?

What would that make Helena?

Myka had decided, long ago, that Abigail would never know about how close she and Helena had been throughout their entire relationship.  Myka decided, long ago, that Abigail was better off that way.  She decided that for Abigail. Abigail would never know.

“Abigail didn’t know,” Myka whispers finally.  “Not really.  I never told her.”

Claudia arches her brow, twists her lips to the side and says a simple, soft, and somewhat accusing, “Oh.”

***

Myka tells Claudia, after she’s finished eating, after she’s cleaned her plate, and showered, and dressed in her pajamas, “Don’t stay up too late, Pip.” And she leaves Claudia with her portable CD player, her Counting Crows CD, her headphones on, the volume turned all the way up.

*

She taps on the door to Helena’s bedroom, to _their_ bedroom, Helena had once called it.  And that had reminded Myka a lot of the summer Helena spent with her in the city.  In _their_ apartment, living their lives together. It had all been so natural. Everything about Helena, everything Myka did _with_ Helena, felt so very natural.  Like it was meant to be.  Like all of it, every single thing about their lives that had torn them down and brought them together and lifted them back up again, was meant to be.

This latest fight, too.  Entirely meant to be.

When there is no answer, Myka turns the knob, pushes that door open, surprised to find that it isn’t locked, that Helena had not locked it and was not intending to keep her out, and steps into that room.

It is empty but judging by the mess of covers, the clothes on the floor, the soft light which spills out around the partially opened bathroom door, Helena, in all of her beautiful anger, is still around.

*

Loud music plays from a small speaker in Helena’s bathroom, perched on Helena’s vanity, pointed directly at the shower where Myka can just make out Helena’s frame through steam and beveled glass. 

Myka tightens her grip on the towel she has wrapped around herself as she stands awkwardly in the doorway of that bathroom, as she walks, unsure of her steps, unsure of anything she’s doing, across cool tile, toward that vanity just across from that shower, to stand just as awkwardly in front of it.

She reaches for that too-loud little speaker. Turns it off.

And this is where her plan mostly ends.

*

“Myka!”

Helena is visibly startled, when she opens that glass shower door.   When her eyes find Myka, standing just outside of that door, they are instantly wide and she jumps and almost slips in that shower, but Myka reaches and catches her arm and Helena steadies herself, recovers quickly, heaves out a deep sigh.  Follows that up with a deep scolding.

“What are you _doing_? You scared me half to death! Are you _trying_ to kill me?”

Myka is lost.  _Completely_ lost. 

Myka is lost in beautiful brown eyes and jet black hair made more black by its wetness.  Myka is lost in a thought of pressing her lips to too-pale skin beneath warm running water. In cheeks, flushed pink, in breath that falls heavy and hot and desperate to catch, as that bare body rights itself and the contact, Helena’s arm in Myka’s hand, is gone.

“ _Myka_?”  Helena calls again, voice rising over the sound of the shower though less agitated, a hint of concern in her voice. But Helena, too, seems to catch that her voice sounds concerned.  She straightens her face, tames her voice, and says, “Myka Bering, I am not even remotely ready to talk to—“

“Two years is a long time,” Myka tells her, cutting her off, watching with too much hope in her soul as Helena’s face falls from that anger, that anguish and upset, and shifts into something like sadness, not quite like regret but something very close to it.  Myka nods and she takes in a deep breath and exhales that breath slowly, through barely-parted lips.  She clarifies, “Two years apart is a very long time, Helena.  And your fears are my fears, too.”

*

Helena stares at Myka quietly, wordlessly, breathlessly for the longest time, for an eternity in silence, before Helena steps back and gestures for Myka to step into that shower.  And Myka does as she is told, even as she is told to do that thing with absolutely no words at all.  With only a look.

Myka loosens her grip on that towel, lets that towel fall to the floor and waits, anxiously, nervously, for Helena’s eyes to follow.

But Helena’s eyes never leave Myka’s.

*

Myka doesn’t know why make-up sex is a _thing_ until she’s gripping Helena’s hand which is wrapped around a metal bar in a too-slippery shower, trying desperately to keep that girl standing. And even now, it is still only about Helena.  Helena pressed, somehow, between Myka and a shower wall, Helena’s legs weak and simultaneously gripping firmly around Myka’s touch.  Helena’s eyes shut tight.  Helena’s head falling back and into Myka’s shoulder.  Helena’s mouth searching, wanting, for Myka’s.  Helena’s breathing completely, entirely, out of her control.

Myka has never, more than now, wanted to feel the way she makes Helena feel. She has never, more than in this moment, wanted Helena’s touch the way Helena needs hers.

*

Helena’s hands, when she turns to her, soon find their way to Myka’s bare waist. Myka’s hands rise to palm Helena’s cheeks, just over her jaw, fingers lost in Helena’s hair.  Myka leans into that hold she has on that older woman, the tips of their noses touch, and Myka sighs a soft breath against wet lips as water cascades down and over Helena’s face, over Myka’s now, too.

“I love you.”

Helena closes her eyes and Myka moves her lips to Helena’s lips, to brush lightly against those wet lips of Helena’s.  And she closes her eyes, too.  Inhales.  Exhales. Inhales again. Sighs.

“I love you,” Myka repeats softly, against those lips, “Helena.” And Helena sighs, moving her forehead to rest against the bridge of Myka’s nose.  It makes kissing Helena’s nose easy, simple. Perfect. “I love you and you are not just someone that I love because I am attracted to you.  I love you… because you are my best friend, because I have known you my whole life, because we have grown up together and are still growing up together and I never want to stop growing up with you.”

Helena’s eyes open to Myka. Red and wet and not exactly from the shower. Her tears return, quietly falling down her cheeks.

“Sometimes… I forget that.  Sometimes, all I can think about is how much I love being with you… like this. And I lose sight of what really matters, of what’s really important to me.”

“And what,” Helena finally speaks, “is more important than _this_?”

“Our sanity, our happiness as a result of that sanity,” Myka nods. “Not just now but later, too.  Because we are both still in school and we are both in these demanding programs, stressing ourselves out over when we’re going to have time for one another knowing damn well that we will not have time.  Knowing damn well that we aren’t giving up school, we aren’t giving up our futures or the chance to, maybe, build a future _together_ , just to make that time.”

Helena sighs at that and Myka stands straight, breaking the touch of Helena’s forehead to the bridge of her nose, replacing that lost touch with a soft kiss to Helena’s eyebrow.

“We should not have to worry about maintaining a relationship across an ocean for two years.  It is too much for me to ask of you.  It is too much for me to ask of myself.  Regardless of either of our intentions, regardless of what happens in either of our lives, _socially_.  You are what’s important to me.  You getting through your program alive is what is most important to me.”

“So we are, then,” Helena bites down on her lip, her brows pulling together in that display of sadness that Myka cannot stand for so many reasons, “breaking up?”

“Listen to me,” Myka says, palming Helena’s cheeks again, “this is not breaking up. This is me suggesting that we focus on what actually matters to both of us.  Your education, your mental health, your happiness? These things matter to me. You are my best friend, Helena, and I am not willing to sacrifice our friendship over a fight like the one we had tonight.  I am not willing to sacrifice our friendship over _Maggie_ or _Liam_.  Over anyone else who might come along in either of our lives while we are thousands of miles apart.  Over jealousy and miscommunication, over severe misunderstandings… I am not losing you because of _somebody else_.”

Myka pauses and Helena brings her hands to cover Myka’s hands, still on her cheeks.

“Nothing has to change about us, Helena.  Nothing at all.  We just… take a step back until we… can be together again?”

Helena pulls back from Myka, just enough to turn around and shut the shower water off.  Just enough to turn back to Myka and pull Myka’s hands into hers again, and squeeze those hands tight in hers.

“You sound like you’re doing this solely for me, not for you. Like you’re giving me up because you think I couldn’t possibly stay loyal to you.  As though I cannot help myself, as though I will surely go wild one day and just throw myself at the entire city—“

“Georgie. My love, you are already wild,” Myka teases with a small smile and a shake of her head.  “I trust that you _can_ wait, Helena,” Myka sighs, shaking her head, “the point I’m making, is that I don’t want you to. Because even if you do… you know, _find_ someone?  Someone else?  I don’t want to keep you from that.  And if anything happens, to where we figure out that the long distance doesn’t work? I don’t want to be thousands of miles apart when we come to that realization…”

Helena squints at Myka and it is with a great deal of suspicion..

“So…” Helena says softly, “we’re just going to… preemptively separate? To save ourselves the heartache later?  That’s your plan?”

“Yes,” Myka nods.  “That’s my… plan.” Though she doesn’t sound so sure of herself with Helena’s curious and questioning gaze upon her.

“And then what?  You’re going to go home… seduce Mrs. Cho?”

A small smirk pulls into Helena’s lips and Myka rolls her eyes.

“Try my best,” Myka says, giving a single nod.

“And what am I supposed to do?” Helena asks, tilting her head. “There aren’t too many girls around here who will stand naked and freezing with me in the shower.”

Myka is more than certain that Maggie would.  That Maggie would be exactly that girl.  But to save them from diving into another heated argument, Myka just shrugs.  She pulls Helena into her, wraps her arms around that freezing body, and offers in a whisper, “Ask Wolly?”

“ _Brat_.”

“ _Wildling_.”

*

The second Helena shivers, Myka pulls her out of that shower and into a towel, into her arms.  She pulls Helena into their warm bedroom.  She is letting Helena go and reaching for a drawer where her underwear are when Helena pulls Myka back into her and wordlessly pulls Myka back to the bed, and sits atop it, pulls Myka onto that bed with her.

Helena crawls into her lap, curls herself around Myka.  Arms around her shoulders, hands into damp curls. Smile suddenly wide and unrelenting.

“What’s so funny?”  Myka asks, not sure she wants to know the answer.

“You,” Helena says softly, “being _you_.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

“We just go into a huge fight about,” Helena shakes her head in thought, “I don’t even know what... and you,” Helena is laughing softly again, “you tell me to _stay in school_ and that you want me to _see other people_.”

“How is that funny?”  Myka asks, playing affronted.

“It’s funny because it’s you.  It is very much _you_ and it is very much one of the reasons why you both frustrate me and why I love you _so much._ ”

“Are there other reasons,” Myka asks, “why you love me so much?”

Helena tilts her head to the side, bites down on her bottom lip.

“There are plenty more reasons why I love you.  Plenty more reasons why you frustrate me, too.”

“For the record,” Myka arches a brow, pulls Helena further into her lap, “I don’t _want_ you to see other people. I just… two years… it’s a long time… to ask you to… you know.”

“Darling,” Helena whispers, pulling her mouth closer to Myka’s ear, “one has ways of taking care of oneself _on ones own_ in a certain _other_ one’s absence.”

“Well.” Myka breathes out softly.

***

Myka has made her decision by the next morning.

Because all night, Helena’s hands had traveled the length of her body, from her thighs, up her side, across her arms, beneath and between her breasts. Helena had raked those gentle fingers, the tips of those fingernails, across shoulders, along the column of Myka’s neck, below her chin, into curls that fall at the base of Myka’s neck.

And it is when Helena’s hands travel lower, it is when Helena’s kisses travel lower, too, that Myka begins to think on that decision, begins to think about the possibilities of _how_ and _if_ and _maybe_ , too.

It already feels different.  With Helena. When Helena kisses her belly, when Helena takes up this unfamiliar space between Myka’s thighs and kisses the skin at her hip, kisses up her thighs to her knees, and then back down again along her inner thigh.

This way already feels so much different than _before_. Than Abigail. Than even her own sad and disappointing attempts.

So Myka makes her decision and she tells Helena her decision, just as Helena is taking a sip of her very hot tea.

“Georgie,” Myka pauses only to bite down on her lip, to look back up, from where she is lying, sprawled out on her back over their bed, to Helena, who is looking at her over the top of the mug sips from, “It’s our last night together.”

“I said no countdowns,” Helena says softly, into that mug.

“I’m not counting down,” Myka shakes her head, “not anymore.” She stretches her neck further to see more of Helena from where she rests, blindly reaches to touch long legs that stretch out beside her, and rus her fingers along Helena’s thigh. “I’m asking you… if we can try,” another pause and Myka looks away, “to help me, you know… _peak_?”

Helena chokes on her tea and Myka turns over, onto her belly, more than prepared to give that girl CPR if absolutely necessary.  Even if not so absolutely necessary.

“I’m okay,” Helena coughs, holding a hand in the air, setting her mug on the nightstand beside her.  “I’m fine.”

Myka arches a brow at her girlfriend who smiles and rolls her eyes.

“You don’t have to be so cryptic, love,” but even Helena is blushing now, falling back into the pillows on her bed and patting the bed beside her. “We are adults. We have sex.”

Myka _knows_ her expression changes in that moment, at that statement.  Helena just laughs.

“Says the girl who just choked on her tea,” Myka eventually teases, moving, as she’d been silently commanded to do, into that space beside Helena and resting against her pillows.

“You caught me off guard.”

“I can only imagine how I would have caught you had I _not_ been cryptic.”

At that, Helena rolls her eyes and leans into Myka, until her cheek comes to rest against curls at the top of Myka’s head.  Helena reaches for Myka’s hand, takes that hand in hers, interlocks their fingers.

“Myka,” Helena sighs, “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not ready to do.”

“I wouldn’t have asked,” Myka says, turning her head now, to look up at Helena.  “If I didn’t want to at least try.  Something new? I wouldn’t have asked, Helena.”

Helena lowers herself on that bed and adjusts her positioning until she is on her belly, resting over Myka. She is propped up on one elbow, looking down over Myka and pushing stray curls out of Myka’s face, tucking those curls behind her ears. 

After minutes of quiet, of Helena looking down on Myka in a way that lets Myka know she is very much _hesitant_ about this, Helena finally nods. 

Helena nods and she’s tucking hair behind Myka’s ear still and sighing, sweet breath that smells of toothpaste and Earl Grey and comes out warm against Myka’s cheek.

Helena tells her, “I love you,” and Myka responds with, “I know you do,” because she knows that Helena has more to say, just by the look on Helena’s face, something like worry and concern, still that hesitation.  The more that Helena has to say is, “We’ll go slow,” and after Myka nods her confirmation, “we’ll be gentle.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Myka sighs and she trusts Helena, completely, entirely, but she’s suddenly nervous.   She is very _very_ nervous and she thought she’d been nervous just thinking about asking Helena that question but now, _from this moment_ , she is worse than before.

“Right here, right now?”

Myka smirks and puffs out a soft laugh, masking another sigh as she shakes her head.

“Tonight,” Myka whispers.

Helena smiles, and whispers, too, “Okay.  Tonight.”

***

Tonight has come and almost gone and Helena, beautiful, gentle, sweet, loving, Helena Wells, has taken her to the edge.  Helena Wells has taken her to the edge, taken Myka’s hand in hers, taken more of Myka than anyone ever has, and pulled her right over the edge.

Helena has pulled her over the edge, not once but twice, and with her mouth in places that Myka never knew, that Myka has never known a mouth could actually go.

It is one thing, Myka thinks, that Abigail doesn’t know. Or, if she had, she’d never shown Myka. 

Myka is _struggling_ to regain control as Helena rises from that precarious place between her legs and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, with little fanfare about it, with the shadow of accomplishment pulling into those lips.  And those lips, too-perfect in more ways than Myka had ever truly known, find new purchase against Myka’s inner thigh, against her left knee and her right knee, and then the other inner thigh.

Myka is making feeble attempts to ease her muscles, to catch her breath through waves of feelings she has never in her life felt before, when Helena’s eyes find her and Helena smiles a smile that Myka has never seen. It’s seductive, it is sly, mischievous, almost wicked. 

It does absolutely nothing to help Myka regain her control.

Helena, and that smile, move and reach and climb, to stretch out on top of Myka, to press her body against Myka’s body and reach her hands into Myka’s hair and her lips to just under Myka’s chin.  She’s brushing sweat-dampened curls out of Myka’s face, moving her kisses up Myka’s cheeks, to Myka’s ears.

“Are you okay?”

Myka furrows her brows, laughs softly.  It makes Helena, still on top of her, move with that laughter, and Myka moves her hands to Helena’s thighs, and grips and pulls Helena’s legs until they are open and straddling her and Helena pushes herself up, to sit up as Myka nods from below her beautiful form.

This. _This_ is familiar.  Helena stretches her back and does that _thing_ with her hair that Myka cannot look away from, cannot stop watching, as Helena’s hair falls over her shoulders, over her breasts, and she reaches up, with both hands, to toss her hair behind her back.

“Helena,” Myka smiles and stretches, too, and reaches for Helena, to pull Helena back into her, over her, against her.  “Georgie girl.”

“Hi baby,” Helena says, looking at her in a way that only Helena ever has, that only Helena truly can. Myka hugs her tighter, closer, and kisses this woman in her arms all over her face until she feels warm and hot tears, burning in her own eyes, warming her cheeks, cooling as they fall against the pillow beneath her head.

“I love you,” Myka says and her voice is breaking.  “I don’t knowwhat you just did to me… but I love you for i--.”

“I don’t want to break up,” comes out rushed and whispered and _desperate_ against Myka’s lips and it is followed by tears that are not her own but they are tears that fall over her cheeks and travel the same path as hers. And when Helena sighs from where she lies above, on top of, Myka, her body trembles. She is _shivering_ and lowering her head to Myka’s shoulder and breathing softly against that shoulder.  “I don’t want this…” Helena lets her voice trail away.

Myka’s hands move to Helena’s wrists and grab those wrists which rest somewhere over her shoulder.  Myka moves to sit up and this forces Helena to sit up, too.  Helena is sitting up slowly above Myka, with her knees folded over the bed at either side of Myka’s hips.  Myka moves her hands, still grasping at Helena’s wrists, into Helena’s lap, then releases those wrists to wrap her arms around Helena’s hips, to pull Helena further into her.

Myka does not say a word to the woman in her lap but Helena, with tears falling and shaking her head and wiping at her eyes and cheeks, finds plenty to say:

“If this is what you want, Myka.  Absolutely, without a doubt, if you want to be rid of me, then let this be the plan but… I…” Helena pauses to take in a deep breath, to bring her hands to Myka’s shoulders and lean into Myka’s hold, in Myka’s arms, and press her forehead to Myka’s forehead, too, “Two years or two months or five years or ten, Myka… I want to be with you.  I want to be with you and I don’t want to stop being with you because it’s _practical_. Because it’s _safe_?”

“And I don’t want to come back to you in two years, or you to me, only to find out that you and I have all of these… _confessions_. About kissing boys. About meeting up with old girlfriends while we were at odds.  Or finding new girlfriends.  Making old mistakes.”

“So, what, we just… break up?  Why? What’s the point? Because we’re scared? Because we don’t trust each other or even ourselves against temptation?”

“I heard you, Helena, when you were talking to Maggie,” Myka adjusts her hold on Helena when Helena pulls slightly away from her at that mention of that woman. “I heard your voice.   The hurt you must feel because of her.  How much you still care...” Helena turns to look away but Myka leans into her view, reaching a hand to just under Helena’s chin and gently urging her gaze to return. “It’s not about whether I trust you or you trust me.  It’s about the fact that we are only human and I can’t ask you not to care about other people. I can’t ask you not to be with anyone at all for two years, Helena. It’s asinine.”

Helena actually laughs at that. It is just a soft puff of laughter but the smile that is left behind in the wake of that laugh makes Myka smile, too.

“You are so _noble_. To put my libido ahead of your own feelings.  Not even I could ever possibly live up to such promiscuity. Not even _I_ , Myka.”

“Shut up, Helena,” Myka says playfully, mostly.  Rolling her eyes.

“I don’t think we should break up,” Helena is sighing, returning to the start of this conversation.  “It feels too methodical. It feels pointless… because I love you and you love me and we both know that the second we are able to, the second we find ourselves together again, we will be together. So, why are we trying to play it safe? To save ourselves heartache that may never come?”

“It will come,” Myka sighs, bringing her hand to her forehead to rub a non-existent ache.  “It is already knocking on our door, and I have seen it, Helena Wells.  That heartache is pretty fucking cute.”

Helena rolls her eyes, “Again, it’s me, isn’t it? It’s me breaking your heart and not you breaking mine?”

“It isn’t just you,” Myka shakes her head, “it’s me, too.  They way things were with you… when I was with Abigail? I don’t want to go back to that, Helena.  I don’t want to go back to feeling guilty about being physically close to someone, whether it’s because my heart isn’t in it or because my heart is too far gone. I don’t want that. I especially don’t want to do that to you,” Myka scoffs now, “if I even could.”

Helena is quiet.

“We shouldn’t expect to, Helena.  With school and life and friends and so many unpredictable things, we shouldn’t put that on ourselves.  We shouldn’t thrust loneliness and longing and distance upon ourselves during the most stressful time of our lives.”

Now it is Helena’s turn to scoff.

“What?” Myka says this, already offended.

“I am so very sure, Myka Bering, that you will be _stressed out_ by anything school related.”

“Not just school.  Need I remind you that I live with Kelly now?  _And_ Tracy?”

“Oh, for the love of Christ,” Helena is laughing.

“Georgie,” Myka smiles but pulls that woman back into their conversation, “I don’t know what else to do or to say. I don’t know any other solution to this… problem.  Because you are right. Two years is a long time.  It is absolutely forever and that’s… that is far too much time to be alone… to not expect some rules to be broken.”

Myka isn’t going to lie to herself.  It feels good.  _This_ feels good.  That Helena is fighting for their relationship when even Myka is trying to run away from any future of pain.  It feels good, this confirmation that Helena loves her, that Helena wants to continue loving her, even as their relationship moves into this place where it hardly feels like a relationship at all because they are so far apart.

“Change the rules.”

Helena’s words and Helena’s lips on Myka’s pull Myka out of her thoughts and back to the woman still straddling her lap, now putting her hands on Myka’s face and moving her lips over Myka’s lips, Myka’s cheeks and chin, to just beneath her jaw.

“What?”

“Pay. Attention,” Helena says, kissing Myka again.

“You cannot _kiss me_ like that and also expect coherence from me,” Myka growls playfully at her, “your lips are either kissing me or they are speaking to me, they are not doing both of these things at once or in rapid succession, Hel—“

“Myka,” Helena interrupts her, “ _shush_.”

Myka glares at her girlfriend before she’s eyeing her, and that smug smile on her lips, with great suspicion and a bit of worry.

“What’s stopping us from changing those rules?”

“ _What_ rules?”

“The rules you _just_ …” Helena feigns exasperation, “maybe you _do_ need a break from me.  From my kisses.  If they make you this incoherent.”

“I’m _telling_ you…”

“We can’t break the rules, my love, if we set the rules ourselves,” Helena kisses Myka again, and her smile now is excited. Still smug and now excited, too. “This is _our_ relationship, Myka.  This is _our_ love and our love has always been just a little bit…”

“Different.” Myka concludes.

Helena is beaming, and whispers then, “You even complete my sentences.” It is a tease, Myka knows, but she kisses her anyway.

“About these rules…”

“I have a suggestion,” Helena is still whispering, pulling Myka into several smaller kiss, drawing her thumb across Myka’s bottom lip in-between those kisses. “If you’re interested?”

“Helena,” Myka smiles and kisses and nods against her lips, “absolutely everything about you… _interests_ me.”

***

Myka hates that they always wait until the last minute to do these things, to push the envelope of their relationship and dive, head first, into something _new_.  But there is nothing in the world quite like the threat of not seeing your significant other for a year or more to force you into shaking those nerves away, stripping yourself bare in front of that other person.

Physically. Emotionally.  _Sexually_ bare.

So when they are done talking, when they are done saying words and solving this thing that is their relationship in all of its newness, its simultaneous agelessness, they fall into their bed again.  To indulge in one another, one or two or three last times.

Myka takes her place on that cloud, much _much_ higher than nine.  She thinks about all of the most pleasant experiences she has had the pleasure of experiencing in her life. About how Helena has completely altered her view on what pleasure truly is.

Myka has never felt more physically drained in her entire life. Not even after being with Giselle on a basketball court for seven hours of drills has Myka felt this exhausted.

“You’ll sleep better on the plane,” Helena whispers, sleepily into her ear, trailing lazy fingers down Myka’s bare abdomen and losing those finger to curls just below her navel.

“I won’t sleep at all,” Myka sleepily whispers back.

Thankfully for Claudia and the flight attendants, and the other passengers, too, Myka passes out the second they are in the air.

***

“Open relationship?”

“Please, don’t make this into a bigger deal than what it is, Mom. It’s not a big deal.”

“What does that even mean?  Isn’t that like polygamy?  Myka,” her mother lowers her voice and Myka is certain she’s joking when she then whispers, “we aren’t _Mormon_.” But then Myka isn’t so certain she’s joking anymore.

Myka rolls her eyes.

“You know how kids are these days, Jean,” Jane cuts in from where she stands, taking up her usual space in front of the stove in Myka’s inherited apartment, “they put their entire lives on the internet for everyone to see. Might as well share it with multiple partners, too.”

“Doesn’t _seem_ very healthy,” Myka’s mother mutters from where she sits across the table from her, most of her attention is on the gifted cookbook that Myka brought her from London. “ _Someone_ is bound to get jealous.” Myka’s mother takes that moment to look up at her over the rim of her glasses and that look is very telling, already accusing.

“Why is it going to be me?”  Myka protests, cutting a bite away from the waffle that Jane reaches over and sets in front of her.  “That’s rude, Mom.  I’m your _daughter_.”

“Only by blood.”

Myka has no clue how to respond to that, so ignores it entirely.

“Look, we’ve already established that this is unchartered territory for us… that things might get a little rocky.  But we decided it was worth a shot.  It’s worth it, for us to stay together… to support one another any way we can for the duration of this distance.”

“The Great Distancing of 2003,” Jane mocks, waving her hands, one yielding a spatula, in the air in front of her.

“The Great _Jealousing_ of 2003,” Myka’s mother corrects, much to Jane’s amusement.

“It’s actually great timing, Jeannie, tell her about the Martino boy,” Jane is already winking that playful wink in Myka’s direction, turning back to the food she tends to on the stove.

“Oh!” Jeannie claps her hands together, pulling her attention away from that cookbook and allowing a smile to grow wide across her lips, “It is perfect timing, isn’t it?  You remember Sam, yes?  Your little boyfriend from elementary school?”

Myka is already crossing her arms in front of her, waiting to see where _this_ is going because her mother knows she knows _exactly_ who Sam is.

“Not my boyfriend, Mom,” Myka mutters.

“Yes, well, _anyway_. We happened to run into his mother at the store not long after we came home and she seems rather desperate to get you two together,” Jeannie is winking.  “Now that you’re in an ‘open relationship’,” Jeannie is using finger quotes when she says that, “maybe you two can go on a little date, see what sort of magic happens?  Rekindle the heterosexual spark in this apartment?”

Myka’s mouth fell wide open somewhere around “you two”, she became suspicious of her mother’s motivation at the utterance of “a little date”, and “heterosexual spark”? Well, that just sends both Jane and Jeannie into a laughing fit.

Myka is not amused. Not really.

Maybe just a little.

Just to be on the safe side, Myka tells her mother, “Mother, don’t you dare. If you even have a single impure thought about setting me up with him?  I will know and lack of grandchildren will be the absolute least of your concerns.”

“Oh, calm down,” Jeannie is waving Myka off.  “I don’t want you dating that boy any more than you want to be dating that boy.”

“Well, that’s great news for both of us—“

“You know we only have your happiness in mind, Myka,” Jane adds.

“Yes, your happiness, honey,” Jeannie is nodding her agreement and flipping pages in that book she doesn’t soon look away from.  “And for you and Helena to _get over yourselves_ and _get married_ , so that I might convince _her_ to convince _you_ to knock her up.” Jeannie looks up at her daughter now, smug smile on her face. “I want grandchildren, you see.”

Myka is throwing her head back, groaning aloud.

“Leave her alone, Jean.”

“It’s too easy,” Jeannie smiles.

“Helena and I are the last two people on this planet who should be having children, don’t you think?  Considering? What do we know about being children?”

It isn’t until after she’s said this, after the words have completely left her mouth, that Myka feels the mood in the room change.  Her mother’s eyes, when she looks to her mother, move swiftly away from hers and down to that cookbook. And she does nothing more than clear her throat in response to what Myka’s just said.

“Mom, I didn’t mean it like…”

“You’re right, baby,” Jeannie says with a shake of her head and a wave of her arm. “I’m just teasing you anyway.”

Now Myka feels bad.  Even when she knows she shouldn’t.  When she knows her mother feels like she has to atone for these things, for Myka’s past.  For the years of awful.

“I would just like to put this out there now, to be perfectly clear,” Jane says coming to the rescue, turning back to Myka to wave a spatula at her accusingly, “One grandchild per one weekend day.  That is our threshold for childcare.”

“Well, you’re going to have to talk to Pete, Tracy, and Jeannie Jr. about that. I want no part,” Myka says sitting straight again, “as a matter of fact, I’m also going to be perfectly clear.  _No_ child per seven days of the week. That is _my_ threshold for childcare.”

“Atta’ girl,” Jane steps to Myka and they knowingly exchange a high-five.

Myka’s mother is shaking her head from across the table, looking up at the both of them for only a moment before sighing and saying, and she is definitely joking this time, “I don’t think Sam is going to like that idea _at all_.”

***

“Dad has a present for you.”

It is March and Myka has just turned nineteen.

All Myka has to do is look in her sister’s direction before Tracy, uncharacteristically soft spoken and appearing apprehensive, continues.

“I told him it wasn’t going to work, whatever he was doing to try and see you. I told him you’re not an idiot but…” Tracy shrugs, “I also told him I’d at least tell you.”

“Well, thank you, Sister,” Myka looks away from her now and back to her laptop, returning to her typing, “for confirming that our father still knows absolutely nothing about me.”

Tracy nods and turns to leave the office, stopping for only a moment to turn back to Myka.

“He _has_ changed.”

Myka takes in a deep breath and steels her expression but does not look away from her laptop or stop typing when she says, “Good for him.”

“I know it doesn’t change what he did to you, how he treated you,” Myka can see Tracy lowering her head out of the corner of her high. Whatever Tracy has been doing, spending some of her weekends talking to their Dad, visiting him in the city, where he now lives with another woman, it is having an obvious effect on her.

“You’re right, Trace, it doesn’t change anything,” Myka says shaking her head, “not one damn thing.  I want nothing to do with him.  So this conversation, that we are currently having, is pointless.”

“However,” Tracy looks back up at Myka and adds more depth to her tone, raises her voice just a little bit in her slight annoyance, “I think he deserves--”

“He deserves nothing,” Myka cuts her off, “No, I take that back. He deserves to rot in hell or a prison or the fucking Sahara for all I care.  He deserves nothing that I have—“

“Myka, will you just fucking let me _talk_.” Tracy interrupts, stepping further into Myka’s office and Myka turns, back to her laptop, back to her typing. Narrowing her eyes on her screen, shaking her head. 

“Not if all you have to say is the same old tired bullshit that Mom is always trying to feed me.”

“Mom is just worried about you, about the anger.  About you putting your fist through your bedroom door. She’s just worried, we all are. That includes Helena.”

A lot had happened since London, Myka concedes. None of it, she’s sure, had been her fault.

“I get that you don’t understand, Tracy, because you have always been his angel, you have always been his little girl but my relationship with Dad,” Myka corrects, “my non-existent relationship with the man who donated his genes to the cause?  Is going to stay exactly as it currently is.  There isn’t enough convincing that you or Mom or Jane or _especially_ Helena could possibly do to get me to change my mind.”

“I’m not saying you need to have a relationship with him, Myka,” Tracy is backing out of the doorway again, “I’m saying he deserves to hear what you have to say.  He _deserves_ to know how awful he was to you.  _You_ deserve the chance to tell him that.  You _deserve_ the chance to go up to him and get in his face and tell him, _show_ him, that you have always deserved better.  That he has always been wrong about you.  That, despite him and the way he treated you and the many ways that he hurt you, despite all of that… you are _you_ , Myka.”

“And what am I?”  Myka asks, softening her voice, “Exactly?”

“Beautiful? Intelligent?  Loving and protective and successful?” Tracy crosses her arms in front of her and lowers her head again.  “Despite him, you have grown into an amazing person, Myka.  You are the one person in this family that I most look up to and he deserves to know, you deserve to tell him, everything you have accomplished and fought for and successfully won, despite his best efforts to break you down.”

Myka is quiet in the wake of these words.  Her fingers resting motionless on the keys of the laptop that sits in front of her.  A window on the face of that laptop is open to her e-mail, she is three paragraphs into a written monologue of updates on her life, on the lives of those around her and the recipient of that e-mail is her best friend, Pete Lattimer. Thousands of miles away, occupying a country at war.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Tracy says quietly, turning to leave once again.

“I don’t mean to be so angry,” Myka furrows her brows, turning to her sister. “It just… happens.  When I think about him.  When I try _not_ to think about him.”

Tracy nods, “Yeah, I know.”  Suddenly Tracy is upon her, wrapping her arms around her, pulling her into a hug that is strong and warm and lasts for just about ever.  Tracy says to Myka, “I hope you know that I will always be on your side.  I don’t want you to think that, because I visit Dad, that I am not.  I am _always_ on your side.”

“Trace,” Myka can feel the burn of tears in her eyes as she returns that hug, so she quickly and gently begins to push Tracy away from her citing, “hormones, everywhere,” and wiping away the threat of falling tears. “Go and take them with you.”

Tracy turns to go but not before setting a sloppy wet kiss on Myka’s cheek.

“Gross.”

“By the way,” she says, peeking back into Myka’s office, “Leena’s staying over this weekend.  I hope you don’t mind, they’re in-between selling the old house and closing on the new one and she’d rather not stay at her cousin’s. I offered…”

“Leena is always welcome here,” Myka says, waving her sister off. “I don’t know why you don’t have her here more often.”

“Yeah,” Tracy laughs, rolling her eyes, “she doesn’t seem to get why either.”

Tracy disappears, still laughing, somewhere into the bookstore and upstairs as Myka turns back to her laptop, fingers typing the beginnings of a new paragraph of that e-mail to Pete:

_I know you’re going to think that I have lost my mind but I am seriously considering driving to the city this weekend to see my dad…_

***

_Georgie: Myka. We talked about this._

_Georgie: For the sake of avoiding exactly this._

_Georgie: You cannot just avoid me forever._

_Georgie: Answer your phone._

_Ophie: can’t talk right now, going to dad’s._

_Georgie: … ??_

_Ophie: i’ll explain later._

_Georgie: Call me… if you need me._

_Ophie: i’ll be fine._

_Ophie: tell liam i say hi..  
Georgie: Myka, you are acting like such a petulant child!_

_Ophie has signed off._

***

Myka is standing outside of a two story town home in the city, in the same neighborhood that Vanessa had once lived in, a neighborhood that is much too nice for the likes of her father but somehow her father has found his way here.

“Good evening, Ms. St.Clair.”

“Myka,” Rebecca is smiling up at her and Myka is not smiling at all, as her eyes meet the eyes of this woman who had once been her math teacher. Myka’s eyes meet Rebecca’s smiling eyes before falling down to the wheel chair she sits in, that she has been sitting in for almost three years.  “Come in, Honey, your father is still upstairs getting ready.”

Myka only offers a polite nod before moving through the door, past Rebecca, and into the foyer of a home that is much _much_ too nice for the likes of her father.

*

“Would you like something to drink?  We have juice, apple or orange, some water?”

“What?” Myka puffs out a soft laugh, where she sits on the living room couch, Rebecca is taking up space in the archway that leads to the kitchen.  “No wine? No scotch?  No whiskey?”  She asks.  She doesn’t mean to be rude but she is nervous, her nerves are shot to hell, and she is upset, regretting ever coming here but too far in to turn this thing around.

“There is no alcohol in this house,” Rebecca says softly, allowing a small, understanding smile to pull into her lips. And her voice, too, is understanding. Too understanding. It doesn’t make Myka feel any better at all.  It only serves to make her more upset.

“How can you be happy like this?”  Myka asks her and Rebecca moves her chair closer, into the living room, beside the couch where Myka sits.

“I know this is hard for you,” Rebecca says softy, “Myka, I know that you don’t want to believe your father has changed but—“

“You, of all the people in this world, should know better,” Myka whispers, gazing down at her fingers, nervously pulling and tugging and worrying over her other fingers.  Myka turns that gaze to Rebecca now, and says, “You narrowly escaped with your life, living with one abusive alcoholic.  I know, Ms. St. Clair. My best friend’s father _died_ trying to save your drunk of a husband from a fire that he intentionally set.” Myka shakes her head and she already has tears in her eyes. She has been here for less than five minutes and she is already crying.  This is already too much.  “How are you going to escape another alcoholic?”

Rebecca is quiet and turning her gaze away from Myka, casting it to the floor.

“He’s already put you in a wheelchair for the rest of your life,” Myka whispers. “That’s already more than I can say for Claudia’s family—“

“Your father lives… _every day_ , with the guilt of what happened to the Donovans. Every single day, Myka, that is both his guiding light on a path of sobriety and the demon that pushes him toward intoxication.  That numbing feeling? To forget his emotions? He _craves_ that.  He wants nothing more than to not feel that guilt for even two minutes of his day.” Rebecca is moving closer to Myka, her voice is somewhat stern but still laced with understanding. “I promise you, Myka, he is a fighter.  He fought against that craving.  He is sober. He was sober then, too.”

“You don’t have to tell me he’s a fighter,” Myka says, a soft laugh escaping her.  She shows Rebecca a large, discolored spot on the back of her left arm.  “Five years old.  Running through the house with Tracy.  I bumped into my mother’s ironing board and the iron fell and got Tracy on the way down.  It barely got her but she was three and _Tracy_ and _dramatic_.” Myka shakes her head.  “Dad grabbed my arm, picked up that iron and pressed the tip of it… right there.”  Myka points to that spot.

Rebecca’s brows furrow.

Myka turns and pulls the neck of her shirt down, bares her shoulder to another discolored spot that has never left her skin.  “Six years old, I can’t even remember what I did but Dad yanked me up from the floor with such force that my arm dislocated from my shoulder. The bruise is from him, drunk off of his ass, trying to pop it back into place before finally letting my mom take me to the hospital.”

Rebecca is quiet, still.

“Seven years old,” Myka says, moving her hands into her hair just at the back of her head and pulling back layers of curls until her finger touches her scalp and finds a row of scar tissue.  It feels like a deep groove in her scalp, in some laces, dipping into her skull.  “You might actually remember this because it was the first time Dad was _almost_ arrested.  Or you might not… because my mother refused to press charges against him for what he did to her.  Denied knowing anything about what he did to me.  But I’ll tell you what he did,” Myka drops her hands, allowing her hair to fall back into place.  “He cracked a bottle of Scotch over my head.  I passed out, I lost a lot of blood.  They had to pull glass out of my skull.”

Rebecca brings a hand to her mouth, to cover her shock.  Myka wants to roll her eyes.

“My best friend, Pete?  You know Pete because his dad saved your life before he lost his,” Myka nods, “he pushed my dad down the stairs to protect me and Dad went into cardiac arrest. They blamed his heart attack then, too.”  Myka laughs again, shaking her head, rolling her eyes up in disbelief because she still cannot believe it, even after twelve years.  “How does a heart attack explain cracking a bottle of Scotch over a seven year old’s head?  How does it excuse that in any way?  Did his heart also make him an alcoholic?  Thirty stitches in my skull and they had to shave part of my hair off to do that. Do you have any idea, any clue at all, how traumatic any of these things are alone, not at all less altogether, must be for a seven year old?”

Rebecca is quiet, she is shaking her head, she is saying softly, beneath her breath, “Myka, I’m sorry, I…”

“I went through those things alone.  I deal with all of these things alone.  My own girlfriend, a woman I love, doesn’t even know the extent, the lengths to which my dad had gone through to destroy my childhood. And he just expects me to willingly and joyfully come here, to his home, to this place that he doesn’t deserve to live in, to this life that he doesn’t even deserve to exist in, and what? Stay for dinner? Reminisce?  Like we didn’t have fifteen years of dinners over which he could apologize to me?  Like we didn’t have fifteen years together for him to turn his fucking shit around?”

Myka is standing, shaking her head, gathering her bag by her side.

“I’m just going to go,” Myka says softly.  “I’m sorry because I’m angry and it isn’t your fault but I’m taking it all out on you and you don’t deserve this.  My dad deserves this but I don’t… I can’t see him. I don’t want—“

  
“Anything to do with me.”

Myka and Rebecca, together, turn to the stairs, to where Myka’s father is descending those steps and stepping into the living room, slowly and nodding and with his eyes cast down to the ground.

“I understand, Myka,” he is saying, “this… you standing here, is already more than I could have ever asked for and… I know it’s hard for you.”

“You don’t know a damn thing about what this is for me.  You have no fucking clue.  You never have, you’ve never cared to. You _don’t know_.”

“I just want you to know… how sorry I am… how much I regret everything—“

“No.” Myka is shaking her head and she is stepping around the couch, toward the foyer, stepping back into the living room and pointing, angrily, accusingly at her father.  “You don’t get to talk.  You don’t get to ask me here to plead your case to me, to throw all of these _apologies_ at me that mean shit.  They mean absolute _shit_ because my childhood is gone, Dad.  I am nineteen years old and I can count my happy, childhood memories, those that I can _actually_ remember after you broke a fucking bottle of Scotch over my head, on these two hands.”

Myka holds up her hands and stretches them out for her father to see, as if doing this will actually conjure up those ten happy memories that Myka can vaguely recall. That Myka is almost certain mostly involve Helena or Pete or her own mother actually acknowledging her pain.

“I only came here because Tracy… because Tracy is right.  You deserve to hear how angry I am, how angry you have made me.  You deserve to know that I hate you for taking away my childhood.  But you also deserve to know who I am, despite you. Despite being the daughter of an abusive alcoholic.

“I am _happy_ , Dad. When I’m not thinking about all of the things you took away from me, that you _tried_ to take away from me? I am happy.  I have the bookstore, and it is good to me. It is better to me than it ever was to you.  And I’m in the apartment, that doesn’t feel like an asylum anymore.  I have a mother who is happy and healthy and in an equally happy and healthy relationship with someone she loves, that helps her love me more. I have Tracy, my beautiful sister. And Pete and Kelly, and Helena…” Myka pauses to wipe at tears that are all over her cheeks, falling down her face, burning in her eyes. “I have Helena, even if she is a thousand miles away, I have her and she is the one thing… out of all of the things that you have tried taking away from me, she is the one… that I will not let you, and all of the awful things you’ve done, take away from me.”

Myka doesn’t realize how hard it is to breathe until she is done talking and she is struggling, straining, to take in oxygen, through tears and sobbing and on-the-verge-of-hyperventilation.  Rebecca is by her side and reaching a hand to her, pulling her back to the couch, telling her to sit, and Rebecca is, thankfully, holding out a hand toward Myka’s father when he takes two steps toward them.

“Give her space,” Rebecca tells him, not looking at him, and moving her hands to Myka, to Myka’s shoulders and Myka’s back, to rub soothing circles and whisper into her ear that it’s okay, to tell her she understands, to praise her strength.

It feels like hours but it is minutes later that Myka calms down and catches her breath and Rebeca’s arms, wrapped securely around her, are pulling away and Rebecca’s hands are wiping tears from Myka’s cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” Myka apologizes, only to Rebecca, as she sits up and looks that woman in the eyes and sees what she’d not bothered wanting to see before now. That familiar pain, and hurt. Like what her mother used to bear. That look she saw too often in her mother’s eyes.  “I have to go.”

“Wait, Myka,” her dad is calling but she is up and she is moving to the door, “Myka, please.  I know,” Myka stops, “that you don’t owe me anything,” and Myka turns to face that man, “but if you never again accept anything from me, understandably, at least, at the very least, take this,” he holds out two folded sheets of paper, “please?”

“I don’t want read what you have to say… anymore than I want to hear it.”

“It’s not a letter from me,” he sighs, “it’s… from the county.”

“Warren,” Rebecca is shaking her head, “this is no time for that.”

“There won’t be another time, Becca,” Myka’s father manages to sound sincere and caring, it is a tone that Myka is unfamiliar with.  Just has she’d once been unfamiliar with that tone in her mother’s voice.  “She won’t want to come back.  I won’t ask her to.”

He, at least, has the decency to hand those letters to Rebecca, to allow Rebecca to hand those letters, hesitantly, to Myka.

Myka is exasperated, she is frustrated and angry and sad and exhausted and absolutely _done_ but curiosity gets her, it pulls her to care what is written on these pages. So she unfolds them, first one that has her name on it, and she scans over it, several times, before she has to go back and assuage her disbelief by reading that letter the entire way through.

“DNA test results?”

“I’m sorry, Myka, I just… had to know for sure.”

“Know what for sure?  That I was, in fact, _your_ mistake?” Myka holds up that letter of affirmation.  “Congratulations, Mr. Bering.  It is, in fact, a girl.  She’s nineteen fucking years old and you’re just now acknowledging, through DNA testing, that she is your daughter?  Is this why you wanted me to come here?  Was this my so-called birthday present?”

“Read the other one,” he says.

“No, I am fucking _done_ with you!”

“Myka, please,” her father urges, “read it.”

“Warren, stop.”

“Please, Myka…”

Myka glares at him as she opens the second letter, with Tracy’s name on it, then reads that one and she makes sure to read it thoroughly the first time around and when she is done, when she has then read it twice and three times, all thoroughly and in it’s entirety, she looks back up.  She looks at her dad, to the man who has, apparently, never truly thought he was her dad, and she shakes her head and holds that letter up.

“Has Tracy seen this?”

“No,” he answers.

“Good,” she folds those letters up and shoves them into her back pocket, “don’t you say one fucking word about it to her,” and she turns to head to the door, stops, and turns back with one solitary threatening, accusing finger pointed directly at her father, “Not one fucking word.”

***

Myka leaves through the front door but before she leaves entirely, she is lifting a box out of the back seat of Helena’s car and she is walking back up to that house, to her father, with that box in her hands. It is the box from her father’s office, filled with empty bottles of Scotch of Whiskey of every type of alcohol Myka has heard of and then some. 

She walks up to her father and she shoves that box into his arms, it is the closest she has been to him in years and she feels it, in her nerves, when his arms brush against hers as he takes a hold of that box.  It sends a chill up and down her entire body, it makes the hairs of her skin stand on end.  But she sticks it out and sticks through it long enough to tell him, “ _Here_.”

“What’s this?” he asks, as if he is genuinely confused.  As if he truly doesn’t know.

“It is a box.  I found it in your office,” Myka nods, “and I filled it with all of our happy memories.”

Myka is one hundred percent satisfied when her dad has nothing to say to that, when he can do nothing more than cast his eyes over that box and then guiltily down to Rebecca, by his side.  And Myka reaches into that box and pulls out the one bottle of Scotch that is on top, that is still full, and tucks it under her arm.

“I forgot,” Myka tells him, allowing herself to smile, “no alcohol in the house.”  She nods a goodbye to Rebecca and turns on her heels, declaring, as she walks away from that town home and back to the car, “I’ll just keep this one,” she calls back, holding that bottle up and turning once again when she gets to the car, back to her father and Rebecca, still standing outside the front door. She says, with a grin on her face, opening that car door and before getting into it, “Maybe I’ll make my own brand new happy memories.”

She leaves that place.  Far quicker than when she came.

***

Myka is seated at her desk, in front of her laptop.  She is, at one moment, staring at her e-mail inbox which houses a new unread e-mail from Pete, another from Helena, and the next moment, allowing her eyes to drift to those two folded pieces of paper on her desk, one with her name on it, the other with Tracy’s. 

Both of those letters are the result of DNA tests, their own DNA (and Myka will have to ask Tracy, some day, how their father might have gotten ahold of her DNA to begin with) against that of their fathers.  More accurately, the DNA has been compared to that of Myka’s father… and not at all, if these test results are to be believed, to that of Tracy’s father.

Whoever that may be.

Myka’s eyes drift now to that bottle of Scotch that also sits atop her desk and she is reaching into a drawer, far back into that drawer, where her father had thought to hide a glass behind office supplies and outdated billing paperwork. Myka pulls that glass from the drawer and sets it on her desk, stares at it for a while before deciding it is clean enough for the little amount she cares in this moment. 

She pours that Scotch into that glass.  Not too much but certainly not a little.  She brings that glass to her lips, hesitates, brings it to her nose and sniffs.

It is _awful_.  If anyone could see her face now, they would know. But she rubs her nose, rubs away the burn, and brings that glass back to her lips, brings the fingers of her other hand to pinch her nose, and swallows back that shot, swallows the burn, swallows her absolute disgust, in one single gulp.

She groans against the aftertaste and tucks that glass back into the drawer, places that bottle and those letters in the drawer too, before throwing that drawer closed, closing her laptop, rising from her seat, and tucking that laptop under her arm.

Myka is absolutely done with this day.

***

Tracy and Leena are on the couch in the living room, seated in darkness, watch a scary movie, devouring popcorn, laughing and throwing that popcorn at the ridiculousness that plays out on the television.

Myka catches their conversation just as Leena is saying, “I’ll tell you why the Black people always die first in horror films,” and Tracy is already laughing when she asks Leena, “Why?” and Leena, laughing, too, even as her eyes meet Myka’s, as Myka lingers just inside of the living room, waiting for their conversation to break, says, “Because had we _known_ there was a serial killer on the loose in this town, we would not still be living there in the first place.”

Myka cannot help laughing at that, too.  She cannot help smiling at Leena, when Leena smiles, shyly, at her, and offers her a small wave from where she is curled up on the couch beside Tracy.

“I guess that also explains why there are no other Black people in the movie,” Tracy sighs. 

“ _Exactly_ ,” Leena grins, turning back to Tracy who is sat just at her other side, “they all packed up and left town the second they heard the news.  Left all y’all silly white folks behind to get cut up.”

Tracy’s laughter cuts deep into Myka’s heart.  It is their mother’s laugh, there is absolutely nothing there that is their father… that is _Myka’s_ father.  There is so much, now, that when Myka really thinks about it… _isn’t_ their father.  So much about Tracy that is entirely their mother and partially someone else entirely. A stranger?  Someone who isn’t a stranger?

Myka has no way of knowing.  But she cannot stop her mind from wondering.  From playing through the faces of all the older men she knows, all the men her mother has known or that she has known her mother to know. Still, she can’t think of any her mother is that close to.  That she might have had an affair with? 

Suddenly, Myka is envious.  She is so very envious of her little sister, of her little sister’s lack of relation to their father, to Myka’s father. 

What Myka would give… to have those results be switched around. What Myka would give… to know that her _real_ father was someone else, _somewhere_ else. To know that her father hadn’t spent the first fifteen years of her life _hating_ for absolutely no reason.  Denying her as his, all the while doting on the daughter who was not.

What Myka wouldn’t give to not have that man’s blood course through her veins.

But Myka knows that she could never be so lucky.

“Classic, Leena,” Tracy’s voice is pulling her from her thoughts, as she tame her laughter, as Leena nudges her to get her attention and gestures in the direction of where Myka stands, still watching them quietly. “Don’t be a creeper, Ophie.”

“I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Tracy sits up, her expression a bit more serious now, and asks, “How was Dad’s?”

Myka is already turning and shaking her head and waving that question away.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, “just wanted to let you know that I’m home.  I’m going to shower and get ready for bed.”

“Okay, whatever,” Tracy sing-songs, falling back into the couch, back into her previous laughter, beside Leena.  Myka doesn’t miss it, when Tracy tells that girl beside her, “You should go cheer her up,” and laughs when that girl beside her responds by telling Tracy, “Don’t think for one second that I would not.”

***

Myka is warm, even after her shower.  Her body is warm and her face is flushed and she’s pulling out a plain white tank top and underwear from her drawers to wear to bed because it is already warm and she is already too hot for this weather.

When she is dressed, or as dressed as she intends to be tonight, she sits on her bed with her laptop and opens it up, logs into her instant messenger. Almost immediately, there is a message from Helena.

_Georgie: I’ll stop seeing Liam._

_Georgie: It isn’t worth you ignoring me._

Myka throws her head back and sighs and rubs at an actual ache in her forehead before turning her attention back to that screen, bringing her fingers to the keys of that keyboard.

_Ophie: i am not ignoring you, helena. i am giving you (and me) space._

_Ophie: that we desperately need._

_Georgie: Because an entire ocean of space isn’t enough?_

_Georgie: You agreed to an open relationship.  You knew how this was going to work._

_Georgie: We will always be together, Myka.  But to be alone?_

_Ophie: i know what i agreed to._

_Ophie: i agreed to giving my girlfriend time to work through her feelings for her ex._

_Ophie: i agreed to knowing my girlfriend would be intimate with others because asking her not to be, for two years, seemed cruel and selfish._

_Ophie: i also agreed to recognize that this was new and different and that my tolerance, my patience, for what we might go through, would be tested. i am pretty sure my girlfriend agreed to that, too?_

_Georgie: We agreed to keeping the lines of communication open._

_Georgie: We agreed to coming to one another and talking when there was a problem._

_Georgie: We agreed to not let things like this get in the way of our relationship with one another because we knew they would be temporary.  We knew it was just for companionship and nothing more._

_Ophie: you want the line of communication open? funny coming from you. when i had to find out through tracy that you were seeing someone but okay, babe. here we go:_

_Ophie: i don’t understand why it only took you two months to require someone else in your life. i don’t know why the person you chose to require was the guy who kissed you knowing you had a girlfriend. that girlfriend being me._

_Ophie: i also don’t know why you chose the guy who thought it appropriate to feel you up at a new years party that i was attending._

_Georgie: Would you rather me go out with a stranger? Someone I didn’t know?  Someone you’d never met?_

_Ophie: i’d rather you go out with no one, if I’m being perfectly honest.  at least not in the first six months. you really couldn’t even be assed to wait six months, helena?_

_Ophie: maybe then i could tolerate that it’s him just a little bit more. but seriously, helena, i would have tolerated any other person on this planet a lot better than i tolerate the fact that it’s him, two months after i’ve gone. if you even waited_ that _long._

_Georgie: I’m sorry, Myka, I didn’t realize there was a trial period, in which I actually wasn’t allowed to see anyone. It never came up. It hasn’t come up until now. But I can’t take this. It isn’t worth you being mad at me.  So please, tell me what you want, if you still want to do this.  If you want me to stop seeing Liam._

_Georgie: Please, tell me._

_Ophie: i don’t want either of those things, helena. what i want is my girlfriend to be here when i need her to be here. what i want is to be able to turn to my girlfriend, after having it out with my dad, and have her hold me and let me hold her and allow me to cry and…_

_Ophie: i just want you here. i don’t want to have to jump through hoops to have you. i don’t want to have to tolerate you dating other people, or worry that you’ll find the right person and then… realizing that the end of these two years is never actually going to come._

_Georgie: Myka._

_Georgie: You are my right person._

There is a light tap at Myka’s bedroom door.

“I’m fine, Tracy, go to bed!”

When the door creeks open, a soft voice says, “Not Tracy,” and Myka looks to her doorway, just in time to see Leena looking through it. “Sorry, actually, Tracy is passed out.  I just… wanted to see if you were all right.”

“Oh,” Myka sighs and closes her eyes, “sorry, Leena, I was just…” Myka gestures to her laptop and shakes her head, “fighting with my… kinda-sorta, maybe not anymore or for long, girlfriend.”

Just then, Myka’s screen flashes with a new notification, to which Myka quickly responds.

_Georgie: I love you, Myka.  Please call me, so we can talk about this over the phone._

_Ophie: can’t right now, helena. have company._

_Ophie: don’t break up with liam._

_Ophie: but i don’t want to hear about him. that’s all i ask._

_Ophie: i don’t want to know anything about your relationship._

_Ophie: i have to go._

_Ophie has signed off._

Myka shuts her laptop as Leena steps cautiously, carefully into her room and sits across from her on her bed, completely unsure of herself. Myka, too, is completely unsure of absolutely anything anymore.

“Is it bad?”  Leena asks, softly.

Myka shrugs, “Nothing we won’t figure out.”

“And your dad?”

When Myka has no response to that, Leena scoots closer to her on that bed and brings her hand to rest over Myka’s.  Squeezes gently.

“Did you want to—“

“I really don’t want to talk about,” Myka says softly, gaze finding Leena’s just before Leena nods and that small smile falls from her lips and she stands, quickly, to leave, already excusing herself, saying, “I understand,” taking a step and, “but if you need to…”

Myka catches Leena’s hand, the one that is still somehow over hers, Myka turns her palm up and grips lightly to Leena’s hand and tugs that girl back toward her and slowly back down onto the bed.

“I don’t think you understand,” Myka says softly, quietly, lowering her voice, lowering her eyes, too, to Leena’s hand in her hand.  When she looks back up at Leena, at this gorgeous girl with her gentle eyes, those tempting and almost smiling lips, Myka is trying to remember when this girl, that she has known for most of her life, became a woman. 

“Myka?” Leena questions and it is with concern and anticipation.

“I don’t want to _talk_ ,” Myka says softly, pulling Leena into her, heart racing when she realizes that Leena, too, is moving closer _._ “Talking,” Myka shakes her head, “is the absolute last thing I want to do right now.”

A comforting smile pulls into Leena’s lips and it seconds after that when Myka finds those lips pressing against hers, when Myka is lost in the way her own lips move against Leena’s.  Unsure and cautious at first but soon so very sure and curious.

It is something new, entirely.  From everything Myka is used to.  Because there had been Abigail and there had been Helena.  And for the last five years, that is all there had ever been. But this, with Leena, is different.  It feels different, almost forbidden.  But Myka has to tell herself that this is okay, that if Helena can do this, she can, too. That if Helena can agree to this and so easily, so quickly, fall into this routine, then so can Myka.

 _Easily…quickly…_ is exactly how Myka falls into this routine.

Of Leena in her bed, in her arms, in her life.  Of Leena, wrapped repeatedly, entirely around long, slender fingers.  Of Leena, losing her entire self against the wet hot kiss of lips, of a tongue that grows more experienced as the months tick by.

And, also, to the regular and innumerable conversations with Helena, her girlfriend, the woman she loves, where they no longer say a single word to each other about the _other_ people, who are so intimately intwined in their lives.


	20. 18/19 & 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapters starts when Myka leaves London, ends just after she finds out about Liam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The original Chapter 20 is 70,000 words and incomplete. So, rather than make you wait another month for me to finish it, I'm just going to spread it out into several different chapters. I'll try to post the bulk of it over the next couple of few weeks.

Myka doesn’t know that she isn’t truly happy until she wants to break up with Helena.

That Myka actually wants to break up with Helena is a sign to Myka that things in her life, in the world, in the whole entire universe, are out of alignment. But with Myka being thousands of miles away from Helena, and Helena being a million miles away from Myka, it is difficult, at the very least it is _difficult_ , to want to walk that battleground.

Once, just one time, Myka had only narrowly touched on the idea of an actual separation to Helena over the phone, and the emotional roller coaster of questions and tears and anger and e-mails to follow… just to get Helena back into her happy place? Her happy _enough_ place?

All of it makes Myka nauseous.

***

Myka leaves London and Helena in early January.

“I… _hate_ this.”

Myka looks up suddenly, from where she is zipping her suitcase closed, standing, and righting her luggage up and onto its wheels. She looks up and her eyes meet the sad brown eyes of a very pouty Helena Wells, sat upon her bed dressed in only a tank top and those oh-so-precious knickers of hers.

Myka’s smile grows, only a little, into a mischievous sort of thing and she nods, says softly to that older girl, curled up and half-naked on her bed, “I know. Georgie,” she sighs and shakes her head, turning away now, pretending to further inspect her luggage, wiping tears before they ever have a chance to fall, “I know.”

When she turns around again, Helena is on her feet and stepping sloawly to her, already reaching and snaking her arms around Myka’s neck, burying her face into Myka’s shoulder.

Myka’s arms are immediately on her, moving around her waist, hands finding purchase against hips and at the small of Helena’s back. Myka spreads one hand flat against Helena’s back, allowing her fingers to fan out, to hold Helena more securely against her as she begins to sob. Her other hand slides easily, comfortably and naturally, beneath the familiar pull of elastic, the cool touch of silk.

That hand falls just below the curve of Helena’s ass and she squeezes gently, pulling more of Helena’s body closer to her own. Drawing out more of Helena’s tiny whimpers.

Myka lowers her head into the crook of Helena’s neck, presses her lips against Helena’s shoulder and kisses exposed skin there. Then Myka buries her face into Helena’s hair, kisses that older girl’s neck. She moves her lips up, to kiss her cheeks, to also kiss falling tears and eyelids, shut tight and refusing to open.

“If we find the time,” Myka whispers into her ear, “to get together.”

Helena is already nodding, sniffling. She wipes away her tears with the back of her hand which is still over Myka’s shoulder. She’s still holding on tight. Still pulling herself closer against Myka’s touch.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Helena manages despite those tears, despite that breaking voice.

Myka tells her softly, gently, “You need to put pants on, if you expect me to leave.”

“I prefer to keep you here,” Helena’s reply is just as soft. She lifts her head only to move her lips to Myka’s cheek, to set a tender kiss there, and then to Myka’s lips to kiss her there, too.

Myka feels some new compulsion to step forward. It is that step which also moves Helena to step backward and toward the bed. To step further back and to fall into that bed and move eagerly further onto it, for just once more before they go.

Myka won’t soon forget this morning.

Myka won’t forget the ease with which Helena falls back onto that bed. Long, exposed legs bending and folding up and welcoming, along Myka’s sides, over Myka’s shoulders. She won’t forget long fingers pushing into her hair or that look on Helena’s face, with hooded eyes and brows stitching together in something mimicking deep concentration. Her wide open mouth and the soft sounds made more vocal with every delicate press of Myka’s tongue between her legs, with every push of her long fingers into the woman below her.

With every new kiss from Myka’s lips, every gentle squeeze of Myka’s hands over those sensitive spots on Helena’s thighs, Myka’s memory of this moment will only grow more vivid. More colorful and real and so very easy to remember.

When Helena’s back arches and Helena pulls Myka _into_ her, presses herself further against Myka in some new need, some unfamiliar desperation, Myka commits all of these things to her memory. The warmth, that feeling, the very _taste_ of her.

Myka will never forget them.

***

Helena cries as she climbs, her entire body trembling.

Helena whimpers as she falls.

Myka will never forget the reaching.

She will never forget the feel of Helena’s hands back in her hair as Helena pulls herself up and snakes fingers into curls and kisses Myka’s mouth, still hot and glistening and wet, before pulling away with furrowed brows and worried eyes. Helena is training those worried eyes on Myka. Helena’s fingers are searching for and finding purchase on a scar that Myka now realizes Helena knows nothing about.

A scar that Myka has tried desperately to forget even exists.

But there are so few things that Myka forgets.

“What is…” Helena is breathless with warm cheeks, her face flushed entirely red. She tries again, a solitary finger pushing its way through curls, catching the slight dip at the top of Myka’s skull, “What is this?”

Myka takes Helena’s hands and pulls them away from her hair. Myka moves her hands to just below Helena’s jawline and pulls that girl into another kiss. Deeper this time, with more desperation, and when they part she hushes her. She tells her, “It’s nothing,” and shakes her head, kisses Helena again, “compared to you, compared to _now_? It is absolutely nothing.”

There is a light knock at the door and it sounds almost as apologetic as Will’s voice at the other side of it. He’s telling them Claudia has her things ready. That they should get going. That they don’t want to get caught in the late afternoon traffic.

“We’ll be down shortly,” Helena’s eyes on Myka are still questioning that scar in her hair, still waiting for her answer.

Myka smiles and she pulls Helena into another kiss. This one meant to reassure her.

“It’s nothing, Georgie,” she holds Helena’s chin up, between her thumb and forefinger, “and you should get dressed, so that we can go,” she kisses Helena again, softly this time, as Helena wipes her own moisture from Myka’s lips, “so that I can walk away from this.”

Helena nods and finally, at a pace narrowly rivaling that of a snail, she removes herself from Myka’s hold. She stands and she goes but is watching Myka over her shoulder as she disappears into her closet.

Myka, now free of that face, from the near-irresistible pull of those lips, slips quietly into the bathroom.

***

Back in the bedroom, Helena is in jeans and a tank top. She grabs a sweater from atop her drawer and pulls it on over her head as they leave the bedroom together. Helena reaches behind her, in wait for Myka’s hand to take hers, and together they greet Will, Sophie, and Claudia at the bottom of the steps.

“Ready to go home, Pip?” Myka asks of that young girl. She is shaking her head and yawning, even now, in the middle of the afternoon. But it dark and it is cold and it has been a very busy, not-nearly-long-enough sort of weekend.

“No,” Claudia pouts, reaching for Sophie’s hand and holding it tight.

Myka sighs, turning to an also pouting Helena and leans in to press a kiss to those still-perfect lips, to that mouth now masked with the taste of mint.

The taste makes Myka smile and she smiles into that kiss and sighs against those lips.

“Neither am I,” and she says this never looking away from Helena.

***

In early February, Myka wants Helena in so many ways that she has never before thought she could ever possibly want that woman.

 _Any_ woman.

***

There has always been love.

Myka has always loved Helena with this intensity that she cannot accurately define but _now_? Now there are nights when Myka truly understands why Helena uses sex, of all things, to cope. How sex and the thought of it, the _feel_ of it, are so much better for Helena than all of the alternatives. So much better than everything that Helena has ever run away from.

It is inescapable now because Myka’s mind, her ability to remember, clings tight to the feel of Helena’s touch in and against places that Myka had never in her young life imagined Helena would ever be. Her memory clings to the feel of that touch, Helena’s delicate fingers, her soft hands, a quick and gentle and knowing tongue, those absolutely perfect lips all over her.

Completely inescapable.

And now, when she talks to Helena, whether it is dark in Myka’s world or dark in Helena’s world, Helena uses that voice. It is some new voice that Myka has never heard Helena use before this year, that Myka imagines Helena has used a lot with Giselle, or had used one summer not very long ago with Maggie. And had even used one night with Vanessa Calder.

Helena uses _that voice_ and she calls Myka “baby” in a way that makes all of her heat up and all of the hairs on her arms stand on end and that once familiar twist in her stomach now moves much lower than where it used to reside. And Helena moves into these conversations that, at first, make Myka stumble on her words, but after the third or fourth of these conversations, Myka learns.

She learns to keep up and not just to keep up but she learns all of the right things to say. Myka learns how to talk to Helena in a way that causes that woman’s breath to hitch, that draws their conversation out, that makes Helena sing that song in that voice that Myka loves so much. It is a collection of soft whimpers and moans and tiny, jagged little breaths, that song. It is what Myka loves so very much to listen to.

Helena, at Myka’s words on the tip of her tongue, is an instrument. The sound that resonates from her very core is more beautiful than anything Myka has ever heard in her life. And Myka loves that song, loves that she knows all of the right strings to pull, all of the correct keys, in their proper order, to yield those beautiful sounds.

Even when she is nowhere near close enough to Helena to touch her with anything more than her words, she learns to talk Helena through it.

Thousands of miles apart, an ocean between them, a phone tucked between her ear and her shoulder, the sound of that song resonating through that phone, the muffled sounds of her name, strained and needy on Helena’s lips. Myka _still_ loves that song more than any other song in the world.

Myka loves, most of all, that she knows exactly how to play it.

***

By mid-February, they have established a routine of visual communication.

_Ophie: can’t find my webcam. think tracy snatched it.._

_Georgie: That’s all right, my love. I have something for you._

It both is and was Valentine’s Day. The sun is not quite setting where Myka is, it has not quite risen where Helena is and, as it is conveniently a Friday night for Myka, a Saturday morning for Helena, they’ve made plans to meet at this time, online.

Myka is lying on her bed, she is on her belly and facing her laptop when a one-way video chat window opens and she is greeted with a lazy smile on a very sleepy Helena Wells. Helena is sat in her bathroom, at her vanity presumably, as Myka can see the beveled glass and the gold trim of that shower just behind where she sits.

Myka can only type what she wants to say and so she does.

_Ophie: hello, beautiful._

Helena smiles as she reads these words and says into the camera, “Hi, my love.”

She tilts her head to the side and runs a hand through her hair, scratches at the top of her head before throwing that hair back and sitting straight again. She stretches, just the tiniest bit, letting go of a soft sigh and smiling that sleepy smile into the camera again.

“I miss you.”

_Ophie: like the deserts miss the rain?_

Helena laughs softly, shakes her head, rolls her eyes.

“A lot more than just that,” and that girl is biting down on her lip, wetting it with the tip of her tongue. She presses her lips together tightly and adjusts the way she is sat on the bench. “Do you miss me?”

Myka truly wishes Helena could see how exaggerated her eye roll is in this very moment. Instead, she types exactly that to her (“I wish you could see how exaggerated my eye roll is in this very moment.”) She smiles when Helena laughs softly while reading what she’s typed and even more so when Helena reaches to her keyboard and begins typing a response.

_Georgie: Be nice or no gift._

_Ophie: i love you and of course i miss you. now where is this gift?_

“You are _so_ impatient.”

Myka may be impatient but Helena, and she tells her this, is _trying_ her patience. And so she had better _get to it_ , whatever _it_ is exactly, before all of her patience gets whisked away, packed neatly into a suitcase and bound for a flight to London.

If not for school, Myka thinks. And lack of funds, too. She would be back in London already.

Helena tells Myka, “Be right back, darling,” and disappears somewhere off screen and to the right, in the direction of her bedroom. When she returns, she is dressed in a robe and when Helena lets one shoulder of that robe fall – and it’s _almost_ convincing, that she does this accidentally and not purposely – Myka realizes she is dressed in _only_ a robe.

_Ophie: i miss that robe._

Helena leans into the screen, to read what Myka types, and that robe falls open. What is beneath that robe, which is nothing at all, confirms all of Myka’s suspicions.

“ _Just_ the robe?” Helena asks softly, with something like a shy smile.

_Ophie: what’s beneath the robe, too. i miss that most of all…_

Helena reaches to type.

_Georgie: What is beneath this robe also misses you._

Then she yawns.

_Ophie: you should go back to bed._

“I’m heading out early today,” Helena tilts her head to the side, stretches her neck, then to the other side to stretch that way, too. “Early morning meeting with the cohort. But I thought you might… _enjoy_ keeping me company,” Helena sighs and leans further into the camera, elbow on the vanity, chin propped in the palm of her hand, “while I shower.”

Myka arches her brow at those words, at that suggestion, at the cute smile that slowly pulls its way into Helena’s lips.

“That is, if you would like to.”

She has the nerve to shrug.

Myka hesitates a long while, almost too long, before she begins to type anything. She knows it is almost too long because Helena sits straight again and tugs at the sides of her robe, pulls that robe closed, as if she is suddenly aware of what she’s suggested. As if she is suddenly concerned, worried, or self-conscious about how Myka is perceiving her in this very long moment of silence.

If only that woman could see the way Myka smiles. She is tempted to raid Tracy’s room for her webcam. Tracy, who is gone, who is out, who is probably somewhere and everywhere she isn’t supposed to be on a Friday night, would never know.

But Myka quickly decides that navigating Tracy’s room, the mess that is her piles of clothes and cheer gear and teen magazines, is not quite worth it.

Besides. Myka isn’t the one currently at a disadvantage.

_Ophie: go forth, woman. shed thy loins of such oppressive cloths and cleanse._

Helena’s face may fall into a look that lingers somewhere between annoyance and amusement. She may arch one perfect eyebrow. She may even give the slightest shake of her head upon reading all of these words that Myka has just typed.

But Helena also lets her hands fall from that robe, lets that robe fall free and open and revealing once again. She lets her guard, those walls, that feeling of wanting to run that she is no doubt feeling, fall completely down and away from her. And when that smile does eventually move back into those lips, she asks Myka, “How did I fall in love with such a dweeb?”

_Ophie: i’m charming._

Helena’s smile grows as she types, in response:

_Georgie: That you are._

***

It is somehow not sexual.

Helena disrobing. Helena, naked and care-free and dropping a towel on the floor just outside of the shower door. Helena propping that shower door wide open.

Helena looking back over her shoulder, smiling at Myka. Turning back to that shower to manipulate its levers, to adjust the temperature of the water which begins to fall from overhead.

Helena stepping into that shower, stepping beneath the steady stream of hot water and rising steam. Helena lifting her chin, tilting her head back, letting that water fall against her face, letting that water fall all over and around her, to the tile of the shower floor below.

Myka is in awe. She is enamored. She is in absolute love.

With Helena soaked. With Helena’s hair, blacker than black, longer than long, in its heavy wetness. Helena, reaching for a brand new bar of soap. Helena, running that bar of soap up her arms, across her chest, over her shoulders. Helena, moving that soap over and beneath her breasts, in circles on her belly, up and down her sides.

Helena rinsing, soap falling swiftly away from her body. Helena pushing soap away from her skin, running her hands over her arms, her shoulders, through long black hair, which she now cleans.

This is not entirely a sexual thing.

It makes Myka think only of the first time they had ever showered together. How very not sexual it had been. How she had very much fallen more in love with Helena beneath a steady stream of falling water.

Two years ago, almost. At a hotel in downtown Wichita.

***

“You’re nervous,” Helena had told her then. Myka was hoping it hadn’t been too obvious but she supposes the way she pulled her towel tight around her, only the bottom half of her, might have given Helena some indication. “Please don’t be nervous with me.”

Helena was standing, naked and care-free and tucking her index fingers into the too-small space between Myka’s towel and Myka’s hips. She stepped closer to Myka, until their breasts touched and Helena dropped her head to look down at where her fingers met the skin along Myka’s hip bones.

“Please?” came low and whispered and near breathless through Helena’s lips which moved, slowly and with great trepidation, up and against Myka’s lips. Into a kiss that was mostly pleading and desperation and two hands full of a white terry cloth towel that was now falling completely away from Myka and to the floor, just over both of their feet.

But it hadn’t been sexual and that was important to Myka both then and now because even if they had had sex, even if Myka had taken away all of Helena’s pain from that day and relieved Helena of the burden of that weight, she wasn’t coping. _That_ wasn’t coping.

Them, standing together beneath too-warm running water, Helena facing her, leaning into her arms, resting her head against her shoulder? It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t just Helena coping. It wasn’t just Helena needing Myka for the release and only that and nothing more. And Helena lifting her head up, tilting her head back, giving Myka that expectant look, an innocent gaze, just before closing her eyes, allowing her lips to part, and welcoming Myka’s kiss? It may have been needy and wanting, a silent plea for that closeness, for Myka’s touch. But it wasn’t sexual.

It _wasn’t_ coping.

Myka asked Helena, “What does it feel like?” when their lips parted. Helena opened her eyes to Myka but remained quiet. Myka pushed forward, “A million years? Nothing at all?” And that made Helena smile a smile that had been waiting, patiently, just below the surface of that quiet expression. Helena smiled big and wide and let go of a soft laugh, moving her arms up and around Myka’s neck, pulling Myka closer until their foreheads came to touch and the tips of their noses pressed gently together.

“It feels,” Helena had breathed out and then slowly in, moving only slightly away to better look into Myka’s eyes before sighing. “ _I_ feel,” Helena corrects, moving her hands to the back of Myka’s head and pushing her fingers into wet hair, into fallen curls, “like never letting go.”

Coping, Myka prays, could never feel this way.

***

_Georgie: Where did you go?_

The chiming sound of her laptop notifying her of a new message pulls her slowly away from those thoughts of the past. Of a past she has spent with Helena that is quickly becoming lengthy and rich and eternal.

_Ophie: nowhere. i’m here._

Helena is back in her robe. She is sat at the vanity with a worried expression slowly moving out of the features of her face. Her brows relax, their natural arch returning. Her lips no longer pressed tightly together but curling up just slightly at the corners. Her eyes are a bit less wide and a bit less awake than they had just been.

“I thought I’d lost you,” she says softly, reaching for a towel and moving it over her hair to dry. “Or scared you off.”

_Ophie: helena._

“Yes, my love?”

Myka types everything that she wants to say in this moment, right now, to this woman, thousands of miles away and yet, somehow, still within reach.

She types all of these things that she’s feeling and then reaches for her cordless phone, holds down the number one until it tones just before automatically dialing Helena’s cell phone.

Helena turns to her bedroom and says, “Who would be calling me this early?” She turns back to Myka, “Do not go anywhere.”

Myka has no such plans in her foreseeable future.

Seconds later, Helena’s voice is soft in Myka’s ear, “Hi, baby.”

Myka’s voice is in hers, “Good morning, beautiful human.” Myka hits send on her laptop and tells Helena, “Read your messages.”

Helena, Myka thinks, would be offended if Myka ever told her how much she loves that Helena just _listens_. How compliant and trusting she is when confronted with Myka’s words. How very much Helena just _does_ what Myka asks of her.

Because Helena goes, without word and without question. She appears in the video feed on Myka’s screen again and it makes Myka’s heart swell. Beneath all the nervousness and anxiety and _worry_ that maybe these things that have been on her mind and in her head, which are now on display for their intended recipient, will be lost in translation.

As it turns out they are not lost at all, or if they had been, Helena had had no trouble finding them out.

 _Ophie: i love you. i love you so much that i don’t have the slightest clue what to do with you. what to do with the fact that you love me. that my love is yours, that your love is mine. after all of these years. helena, you are beautiful in ways that i cannot put into words. in ways that make me want nothing more than to be around you, and with you, and_ yours _, forever. you are beautiful in so many ways and it isn’t just that you are gorgeous. it is absolutely everything about you. and i realize, as i sit here watching you, that it could be nothing more than a show, to some people. to some people, that could be all there is to this, to how they see you. but for me? i am so lucky, helena, because i know_ you _. i know that beautiful mind of yours and i can’t stop myself wondering what is going through it, when you are so quiet, so thoughtful, and speechless. all i have wanted to do, sitting here in front of you, watching you, is pull you into my arms and question that beautiful brain of yours. because you are beautiful. every little piece of you, helena wells, is beautiful._

As Helena reads, as Myka watches Helena’s eyes moving from side to side as she reads the text on her screen, she adds:

_Ophie: my gorgeous, intelligent georgie, whose every inch i have finally had the pleasure of knowing, the point i’m trying to make is that i miss you. quite a bit._

The more Helena reads, the more she hides her face in the palm of her free hand. Her other hand is still holding her phone to her ear.

Eventually she says, “Myka,” and nothing more, for several seconds that seem to stretch into minutes. If not for the video image before her, the faint sound of Helena’s breath into the phone, Myka is sure she’d believe Helena had hung up on her.

“When I think about us when we were younger,” Myka is watching the image of Helena closely and she sits straight, only slightly, and lets her hand fall away from her face only to reveal red eyes, unshed tears, “when I think about how close we were, even then, the time we have spent together? It isn’t the obvious things like going to the movies, having dinner, cuddling--”

“I like those things,” Helena says softly, turning her mouth further into the phone and away from the camera, wiping at tears.

“I know you do, Georgie,” Myka says just as softly and nods, “but when I think about us together, all of the things I miss most about being with you? It’s you convincing a fifth grade me to join the science fair and then spending an entire weekend teaching me things about the laws of physics that I already knew. Or it’s me and you sat side-by-side in the bleachers, doing each other’s homework during the junior varsity games. You would reach over and touch my hand in some small way. We would try so hard not to smile at each other. Or it’s the talking for hours and singing loudly, and very badly, on the drive home from Wichita,” Myka sighs, “museum hopping with, and almost losing, Claudia in London.”

“Geeky stuff,” Helena laughs softly, sniffling, wiping away more tears.

“Yeah,” Myka smiles, nodding, “ _our_ kind of stuff. If I had known that this would be the way to your heart… Helena…”

“Myka,” Helena takes in a deep breath and puffs out another sigh, turning her gaze back to the camera before her, back to Myka, “I love you. And I, in no way, deserve you.”

  
“Helena--”

“No, it’s my turn,” Helena is covering her face, talking mostly into that phone at her ear again, “I love you and the older we get and the more trivial this age gap between us becomes, the more I have come to realize that I do not, by any means, deserve you or your love. The more I think that you were perhaps meant for someone else. That I stole you away from someone more deserving. Abigail? Or… someone you haven’t met yet? Someone that isn’t me. Myka, you mean… _so much_ to me and I don’t… I have a tendency to fuck things up and that’s the last thing I ever want to do with you. I do not deserve you.”

Helena is shaking her head, turning away from the webcam.

“I should let you go.”

“Hold on just… one second, okay, Helena?”

“Myka--”

“One second.”

Myka takes a chance in Tracy’s room, with Helena still on the line, questioning what she’s doing, asking if she’s okay when she hears _something_ toppling over. Myka finds what she is looking for, on top of the mess that it is Tracy’s desk, and retreats, having survived the chaos, back into her room.

She plugs in the webcam, initiates the video. It takes a while. Eventually, she receives confirmation that it is working in the smile that appears, wide and brilliant, on Helena’s tear-stained face.

“Hi,” Myka smiles back, phone still at her ear, “I’m going to hang up on you now, okay?”

Helena nods, quietly, and Myka ends the phone call, setting the phone back on the base. Helena, too, sets her phone down on the vanity and Myka returns to that space, lying on her belly, in front of her laptop.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Myka grins.

“Good morning, my love,” Helena’s cheeks, thousands of miles away but somehow still within Myka’s reach, flush red. She imagines the warmth of those cheeks that she knows so well, reaches out to touch them, fingertips pressing against the cold hard screen of her laptop.

“Do you want to know something that I have never told you before?” Helena, when her eyes look back at Myka, at the image of Myka on her computer, appears hesitant but she nods anyway. It is almost unnoticeable, that nod. It is so slight but it is there. “I’m in love with you, Helena Wells.” Helena’s smile grows, both shy and amused, and her eyes begin their ascent toward the heavens and into the most exaggerated eye roll Myka has seen to date. She laughs and says, “Stop, I know what that look is. You’re thinking, ‘But Myka, you have _always_ been in love with me.’”

“Haven’t you?”

“Don’t get a big head,” Myka teases a suddenly quite smug Helena, whose expression turns skeptical. Absolutely _adorable_.

“The thing is, I have always loved you. Maybe it started out childish and foolish and blossomed just a tiny bit into something else that was smitten, if not a little juvenile. But at some point, after the crush, the infatuation and the puppy dog eyes--”

“ _After_ the puppy dog eyes? Have we truly passed that stage?”

“ _During_ the puppy dog eyes,” Myka says, pulling her lips into a smirk for a second before rolling her own eyes back at that woman, “at some point, after all of those things, these feelings that I have had for you, for so goddamn long? They became so much more than that, Helena. I do not _just_ love you.”

Helena’s smile falls into something small and she pulls her lips in, presses them together tight and turns slightly away from the screen again.

“If I had the nerve to think that I was in love with you when I was thirteen,” Myka smiles, puffing out a soft laugh, much to Helena’s amusement. They are both wiping away their own tears as Myka shakes her head and continues, “let’s just say that I know better now because this… the way I feel about you… _now_? It doesn’t feel possible.”

They both fall quiet for a long period of time, until Helena grins and covers her face again, laughing into the palm of her hand.

“I’m glad my lovesickness amuses you--”

“It isn’t that,” Helena says quietly, smile softening as she sits straight and lets her hand fall away from her face. She looks up, at the ceiling, maybe, somewhere over the vanity, and rolls her eyes, again, too. “I was just thinking about a younger you. About how you never used to talk to me. How shy you have always been around me. And,” Helena shrugs, eyes falling back to Myka, “some of the things that you say, Myka. The things that you say even now,” she laughs softly. “The feeling is mutual. All I want to do is pull you into bed with me and talk for hours on end.” Helena nods, seeming to succumb to the reality that this isn’t a thing that can happen. “And then do everything but talk until the sun comes up.”

She’s wiping away tears again when Myka tells her, “I miss you and I love you. Beautiful valentine of mine. Thousands upon thousands of miles away from me.” Myka wipes away her own tears.

“I miss you and love you also. I don’t want to make you late for your dinner at Jane’s,” Helena nods, “please, tell everyone I said hello and that I miss them as well.”

“Sure thing,” Myka smiles.

“Goodnight, Myka,” Helena says, touching the tips of her fingers to her lips, kissing, and then giving Myka a small, bashful and sleepy wave.

“Good morning, princess.”

_Georgie: xoxo_

_Georgie has signed off._

***

“ _Princess_?”

The look on Pete’s face when Kelly tells him this thing that Myka calls Helena now, that she has overheard on several occasions through several of their video chats, is that of disgust.

“Gag me with a spoon and then shove five Q-tips into each of my ears. When the hell did you become so grotesquely sentimental?”

“When the hell did you incorporate words as large as _grotesquely_ and _sentimental_ into your vocabulary?”

“Princess is a nickname for four year old girls, Mykes,” Pete says, completely ignoring her rebut.

“She calls me her prince,” and when Myka says this, it is almost entirely under her breath because she isn’t entirely sure she wants Pete to _know_ this. Even if she is trying to prove a point.

“I’m sorry, what? Speak up, I think I just heard you say that she calls you her prince?”

“That’s exactly what you heard,” Kelly says, quite proud of herself. “And she does.”

“Why are you eaves dropping on my conversations anyway?”

“Involuntary torture due to being within earshot of your mushy ass conversations is not _eaves dropping_ , Romeo. It is _involuntary torture_.”

“Torture? If your having to sit through a long-distance conversation between me and Helena is torture, I can only imagine what my having to be _here,_ with the both of you, might be classified as.” Myka scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Launching me into space without a space suit would be a thousand times more tolerable than the two of you.”

Pete and Kelly, simultaneously, begin their verbal assault tag-team routine:

“Don’t be a hater, Mykes--”

“Oh no, don’t you even _start_ with that, _cabrona_ \--”

“I have endured a decade of you talking about _H.G._ \--”

“No one is asking you to look--”

“Ten years of supporting you pining over that woman, playing wing-man, and this is the respect I get--”

“Do not _even_ get me started on this right now—“

Myka is already waving them off as she heads out of the front door to the bookstore..

“We’re going to be late and then both your mom and my mom will have all three of our heads served on a platter for the next family dinner.”

***

“Long time no see, Bering.”

It is late February when Sam first comes around. When Sam starts bringing all of Myka’s problems around right along with him.

“Huh?”

She is at the top of a step ladder and she is pushing her glasses further up her nose, eyeing only the vaguely familiar presence of a tall, mostly blonde Sam and the much taller, far more muscular frame that is Kurt, his cousin, standing just behind him.

“Oh,” Myka forces a friendly smile, “hey, Sam, Kurt. How have you guys been?” She doesn’t leave her perch. “It’s been a while.”

She is instantly reminded of the conversation with her mother and with Jane, about Sam’s mother, about Sam’s mother wanting them, for some reason, to meet up again. Why? Myka didn’t know then. Myka still doesn’t know now. But having known Sam’s mother at some point in her past, having known Sam too, she’s certain she doesn’t even want to know.

“I think she’s trying to save you,” Jane had told her after another encounter with that woman, shortly after the first. “She’s lucky I wasn’t feeling scrappy.”

Myka smiles to herself now, thinking of the way her mother had looked at Jane and said nothing at all, yet still managed to get her point, of incredulity and slight embarrassment, across to the other woman.

“I’m good,” Sam smiles, it is genuinely friendly and Myka almost feels bad because she is not in the mood for whatever this may be leading to. She turns her attention to the book in her hands and flips it open, pretending to be distracted by the words on its pages.

Still, she asks, “Are you a professional wrestler yet?”

She hears him laugh softly and the laugh is so strangely familiar to her, so oddly comforting in its familiarity, that she is internally scolding herself for smiling at a distant memory of her and Sam, ten years old and chasing each other on the playground of the elementary school that Claudia now attends.

“Not quite,” and when she looks to him, he is reaching a hand to the back of his neck, rubbing it and lowering his gaze to the ground. "Still trying to get through school, actually." Myka shakes her head, not in judgment but disbelief perhaps, and turns her attention back to the book in her hands.

“So, how can I help you?” she asks this hoping he is here because she owns a bookstore and no other reason than that.

Myka lucks out just this once in the presence of Sam Martino.

“Actually, there's this... _rumor_ going around,” Sam says. Myka is already rolling her eyes, throwing her head back and turning to look at Sam with all of the annoyance she can possibly muster.

“Do I even want to know?”

Sam nods, “Yeah, actually,” and he looks back at Kurt, oddly quiet for what Myka remembers of him, before taking a step toward Myka where she still stands at the top of that stool, “a couple kids around town said you're the person to go to... for cheap textbooks?"

Myka is suddenly overwhelmed by a combination of what is both relief and excitement. She turns immediately, too fast, back to Sam. She is trying hard to tamper the grin that grows across her face as she pushes again at her glasses, pushes them higher up on her nose. She then tries, and fails fantastically, to keep her balance on that stool.

Her fall is quite fantastic too.

Myka almost expects to be caught as she falls. She sees, just out of the corner of her eye as she goes down, that both Kurt and Sam are stepping forward and reaching out and then, they are wincing, unhelpfully albeit sympathetically, as she hits the ground. Her back takes the force of the fall.

“Are you okay?”

“Dude, are you all right?”

Myka opens teary eyes to find Sam and Kurt hovering, hesitantly above her.

“ _Fuck_ , that hurt.”

Sam’s brow arches, a wry smile appearing across his lips.

“I’m glad this is amusing for you.”

“You swore.”

Myka groans again, slowly lifting her head as Kurt and Sam finally reach down to help her up. She manages to get to her feet without slumping immediately to the floor again. Reaches a hand to her back to rub a too familiar ache, returned and exacerbated by her continued clumsiness.

“You said a bad word,” Sam says with a bit more playfulness in his voice. “You always used to say that you wouldn’t ever say bad words.”

“I also used to be ten,” Myka stretches her neck and makes her way to the counter, pulling her arm away from Kurt’s grasp on one side of her, waving away Sam’s grasp on her other arm, “I had fond dreams of becoming an astronaut then, too. Until I saw the menu.”

It’s meant to be a joke but neither of those boys laughs.

“You know, something tells me that you could be an astronaut,” Sam’s smile grows wider as he leans against the counter just opposite where Myka moves to seat herself carefully on a stool. “You’re super smart. Smartest person in our graduating class.”

Myka sighs, stretching again, and turns her unamused glare back on Sam.

“How are you passing your classes without a textbook?”

“Who says he’s passing?” is the first thing of significance that Kurt has said since they’ve arrived and he playfully hits Sam’s arm with such a force that it actually knocks Sam off balance. It seems mostly unintentional, Kurt’s strength, but it reminds Myka so much of how they were as kids.

Sam had been tall but shy and lanky and awkward, a lot like Myka had been (she’s sure that’s why they’d become friends) and Kurt was, just as he is now, solid and agile and rugged and statuesque. Bit of a dreamboat, really. To some girls, anyway.

Myka’s sure that _other_ girls would have described him that way.

  
She clamps her lips shut to hide her amusement while reaching beneath the counter for a pad of Post-It notes.

“Here,” she says, freeing her smile to reach for a pen and setting both that pen and the notepad down in front of Sam.

“So the rumors are true then?” Sam asks raising both hands in the air, triumphantly. The only response Myka offers is a roll of her eyes and the still very present smile on her face. “How much?”

“That depends on the book,” Myka shrugs.

“I only have the ISBN codes,” Sam says reaching into his pocket and pulling out a cell phone, opening it and navigating the menu until he finds what he’s looking for and starts writing down the codes onto the Post-It note. “Three books, all over ninety bucks on campus.” He hands the notepad back to Myka and she eyes them for only a second before she looks back up at Sam.

“Criminal Justice major?”

Sam’s smile falls and he looks back, momentarily, to Kurt who only shrugs before turning a curious gaze back on Myka, “How did you…”

“Books,” Myka says, waving her hand toward the aisles of books before them, “and numbers,” she reaches for the pen and writes “Smartino” on the Post-It before placing it on the monitor of the computer register, “they’re kind of my thing.”

“Right,” Sam laughs softly, a slight blush creeping into his cheeks when he spots what she’s written. He again reaches a hand to the back of his neck and nods, “I forgot about the,” and waves the index finger of his other hand in a circular motion in Myka’s direction, “memory thing.”

“Yeah,” Myka laughs softly. Her phone vibrates in her back pocket, “your detective skills aren’t looking very promising.”

Sam throws his head back at that small tease, says softly, “Harsh,” as Myka eyes the screen on her phone.

“I’m sorry, I have to take this,” she says stepping away from the counter, bringing the phone to her ear as she answers, “Why aren’t you in class, Trace?”

“Myka? It’s Kevin Cho.”

“Oh,” Myka’s curiosity turns swiftly to worry, “hey, Kevin. Did Tracy lose track of her phone again? I swear to God, I’m gong to have to duct tape it to her face--”

“Tracy just had a seizure. They’re loading her into an ambulance right now and transporting her--”

“She goes to the crisis hospital in the city.”

“Huh?”

  
“Tell them to take her to the city. That’s where she needs to go. They will _not_ take her to this shit hospital in town, so help me--”

“Okay, I’ll tell them.” Myka hears Kevin telling the paramedics exactly that before asking Myka, “Should I go with her? I should go with her right? I’ll go with her.”

“Kevin, it’s okay. I’ll be right behind her.”

If he says anything more after that, Myka does not hear it. She is hanging up the phone, grabbing her keys, ushering Sam and Kurt out of the store, offering them only a quick, “I have to go,” as she does.

***

Tracy is knocked out.

They are home from the hospital and the doctors have cleared Tracy, said everything is fine and normal, outside the fact that she is still epileptic and, despite her best efforts to wean herself from her medication, now requires a much higher dosage to manage the seizures. So Tracy is okay but this doesn’t stop Myka from peeking into her room, from sitting at the edge of her bed, in darkness, and running the palm of her hand over Tracy’s cheeks and her eyes and forehead.

She’s feeling for warmth, for fever and swelling, any signs at all that the condition she had suffered almost four years prior might return. That it might be returning, _lingering_ just below the surface of her skin, where new flesh has grown and healed with a much lighter complexion than the old.

“Myka.”

When Myka looks back to her mother, standing in the doorway, she already knows what she is going to say.

“She’s _fine_.”

Myka nods, turning back to Tracy, sound asleep and completely oblivious to anything that is going on around her. She’ll be this way for a while. Myka recalls her sleeping for hours after her seizures. Waking up groggy, disoriented, _confused_. Staying in bed the entire day after that.

“Helena’s on the phone,” and when Myka turns back to her mother she adds, “I guess she saw something online?”

“Okay,” Myka leans in to press a kiss to Tracy’s temple, stands and makes her way to where her mother stands in the door, moves carefully past her.

“Hey,” her mother says softly, a hand wrapping swiftly, gently around her wrist, stopping her as she passes through the doorway. Myka lowers her head for just a moment before allowing her eyes to meet her mother’s eyes, to meet the smile on her mother’s face. “I… am so proud of you, Myka,” and she pauses a moment, sighs before she continues, “of this beautiful human being that you are growing up to be, or that you have, apparently, always been.”

Myka smiles and rolls her eyes. She shakes her head in mild disbelief, embarrassment even, and she protests, or begins to, with a hushed, “ _Mom_.”

“I mean it, Ophelia,” her mother nods and pulls her closer, into her embrace, pressing a kiss to Myka’s cheek. “What you’re doing with the bookstore while working on your degree, looking after your little sister, helping with Claudia, giving Kelly a place to call home,” Jeannie shakes her head and that smile grows wider, more proud by the second.

Myka is trying very hard not to smile too, when her mother smiles this smile at her. She tries very hard not to become emotional when her mother’s eyes begin to glisten.

“I mean, what you have with Helena could use a little work but--”

“Oh God, Mom,” Myka throws her head back, laughing softly and leaning into the door jamb at the opposite end of the doorway from where her mother stands, “you ruined it. The moment has ended.”

“Well,” her mother shrugs, “I am only human.”

“Go home to your wife,” Myka smirks, returning the gentle squeeze of her mother’s hand around her wrist by bringing her own hand to wrap around her mother’s wrist.

“Go talk to _yours_.”

***

“You didn’t answer your phone, I was a bit worried.”

“I’m sorry,” Myka is sighing into the house phone, wedged between her ear and her shoulder, moving into the hallway from the living room, “the battery died while I was at the hospital and I keep forgetting to plug it in.”

“It’s fine,” Helena says softly, “as long as everyone is okay. How _is_ our darling Tracy?”

“Passed out. She’ll be useless tomorrow,” Myka laughs softly.

“Myka--”

“I’m just joking.”

Helena sighs. Myka can already picture that hand of hers running through long black hair.

“It’s early,” Myka says pushing open her bedroom door and moving into her room, allowing herself to fall into her bed, “you have another early morning meeting?”

“No. I just couldn’t sleep. I happened to see someone posting on Tracy’s profile page asking how she was doing and wanted to make sure everything was okay. Your mother said this was her first seizure in four years…”

“Yeah. She’s been off the medication for the past two years but that obviously isn’t going to work anymore,” Myka smiles, moving her hand to the phone against her ear and curling into pillows, closing her eyes tight. “Thank you for checking in. I will always welcome the sound of your voice in my ear.”

This makes Helena puff out a soft laugh. Myka _knows_ why she does this but she waits for Helena to say something, anything at all to suggest _why_ she is laughing.

The explanation never comes and Myka is fine with that. She is fine with the fact that they don’t always talk about these things that they do when they aren’t doing them. She is fine with not vocalizing the secrets they keep just between the two of them. The conversations they have, thousands of miles apart. The hushed, private thoughts and ideas they share with only each other.

It is a bond that has been growing between them for what sometimes feels like an eternity. At other times it feels so much more recent than that. But then Myka thinks back to that one year they had together in high school. To afternoons sat in gymnasium bleachers. To homework, half done. To fingers barely touching. To knowing there had been so many small moments, seemingly insignificant, like this in their past.

It has made their relationship what it is today. It has made this bond far more rich than they could have ever truly imagined.

Eventually Helena yawns and it is followed by, “I love you, I’m glad Tracy is okay and I am going to at least attempt to go back to sleep. I may even sleep in today.” She sounds so very proud of herself when she says that. The amount of pride in her voice makes Myka smile, makes her heart absolutely ache for this girl.

“Dream of me,” Myka says softly, smile growing wide.

Helena says in return, “I, of course, will dream of nothing else.”

***

Sam and Kurt reappear in the bookstore the very next day. Sam says hello with that blush on his cheeks, with that hand at the back of his neck, while Kurt idles quietly in an aisle for several minutes before eventually asking, “Do you have any sports books?”

“Back of that row,” Myka says, gesturing in that particular direction as Kurt disappears between stacks upon stacks of books upon shelves. She turns back to Sam, who is standing across from her where she sits on her stool behind the counter. “I haven’t had time to order your books.”

“Oh, I um… _actually_ , we… just came to see how your sister was doing.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Sam puffs out a soft laugh and Myka arches a curious brow at him in wait. “Is she all right?”

“Yeah, no, she’s good,” Myka nods. “You know, she hasn’t had a seizure in four years, since she was in the ICU, so it was just a little _jarring_. Sorry I had to kick you guys out so quickly.”

“No, it’s no big deal,” Sam shrugs. “I think I forgot to leave you my cell phone number, though,” long awkward pause as Myka arches her brow in his direction again, “for when the books come in?”

“Here,” Myka says reaching for the Post-It note with Sam’s ISBNs listed on it and handing it to him, along with that pen which is still sat on the countertop where she had abandoned it the day before. “And none of your chicken scratch.” Sam laughs in such a way that makes Myka believe he’s actually nervous, then writes his number down and puts that Post-It back on Myka’s register screen.

“There, now you can call me,” Sam smiles shyly before adding, “when the books come in.”

“Smooth,” comes the sarcastic voice of Kurt, floating up from somewhere at the back of the store.

When Sam’s cheeks flush again, Myka wants to roll her eyes.

Myka _does_ roll her eyes. And in the process of doing so she begins to say something to the effect of, “Sam, you should know that I have a girlfriend and, despite being thousands of miles away from me, she is still mine and I still love her and she is extremely hot,” which would also be followed by something like, “so that thing we had when we were five and six and seven and eight and and nine and ten, which was not really a thing at all? It’s not exactly going to work.”

Those are the things that she _wants_ to say but all that she manages to say is, “Sam, you should know--” before she sees an all-too familiar figure out of the corner of her eye, through the picture window at the front of the store and headed in her direction, “Dad.”

Sam, clearly confused, asks, “I should know,” then pauses, curiously, “your dad? Because I do… well, I used to but I haven’t seen him in--”

“No, my dad. He’s _here_.”

***

“ _No_.”

“Myka.”

“Please, go away.”

Myka is standing, frozen in place on the steps which lead up to her apartment, her hand gripping tightly to the rail.

“Myka, honey--”

“Do not call me _honey_.”

“You should probably go, Mr. Bering.”

Myka’s father turns slowly to Sam, where he stands just in front of Myka, and eyes him with some suspicion for the longest time before recognition sets into his expression.

“Sam, you don’t need to--”

“Martino,” he says in a familiar tone. “Long time--”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Myka says shaking her head and when her father turns his gaze back on her, standing just behind Sam and Sam standing just behind Kurt, it is with something akin to sorrow.

“Mr. Bering,” Sam says with a hint of warning and it is all he says in that moment.

“How is Tracy?”

Kurt glances back at Sam and then Myka with a brow arched and he tilts his head toward her father as if he’s just waiting for Myka to say the right words.

“I just came to see how Tracy is doing.”

“She’s fine,” Myka tells him, allowing him at least that courtesy. And it is far more than he deserves to know but Myka tells herself that it isn’t for him, that knowledge or the sense of relief that comes with that knowledge.

It is for Tracy, who actually spends time trying to rekindle some inkling of a relationship with their father. It is for Tracy that she tells their father that Tracy is okay and it is not for anyone else. Least of all, their father.

“She’s in good hands,” Myka adds with a slight nod and just because he may need reminding, “hands that won’t slap her across the face for absolutely no reason.”

“Myka,” her father begins, “we’ve moved on--”

“Good for you,” she says quickly, interrupting. Her voice surprisingly strong, dripping with sarcasm.

“Tracy has forgiven me--”

“That’s great when there’s almost nothing to forgive but you know what? I’m proud of her for that. I’m proud of Tracy for having faith enough in you, in anyone at all really, to offer her forgiveness. To invite you back into her life but,” Myka shakes her head, “I am not that noble.”

There is a long moment of silence to follow, where Myka’s father looks back to Sam, glances quickly at Kurt, who seems to grow in both height and mass with every passing minute as he looms more precariously over and into her father’s space.

Eventually, Myka tells her father, “I asked you to respect my space.”

His only response, after several more moments of silence, is to nod and say, “The store looks good.”

“You should probably leave now,” Sam manages, clearing his throat, “Mr. Bering.”

He nods again, Myka’s father, barely vocalizing a soft, “Yes,” followed by, “tell Tracy I came by,” to which Myka acknowledges only by looking away from him.

Any acknowledgement at all, Myka thinks as her father turns and goes, is more than he deserves.

***

The pressure that has built inside of her chest that Myka thinks is from a lack of breathing, from holding her breath in for too long, is only relieved when she can no longer see him. When he has walked back to a car, parked across the street, gotten into it and driven away.

The relief of that pressure comes out like a giant gasp and there is little Myka can do to stop herself from falling, to stop her body from giving way to this overwhelming _emotion_ of what feels like fear and anger and sadness and intrusion, all balled up and crumpled into one giant knot that encases her whole heart.

She drops down fast to sit on the stairs and when she falls, when Sam and Kurt reach for her this time, they almost do catch her. But her hands are in the air, waving them and all of their voiceless concerns away.

“I’m fine,” she tells them and she’s sure that the way she doubles over, folds herself forward, buries her face into her knee and the way she tries and fails miserably to control her sobbing, is telling them a completely different story.

But they are smart boys. They maintain their distance. They leave her be.

For a short while anyway.

Eventually, a group of kids wanders toward the store and when Sam tries to turn them away, Myka straightens and takes in a deep breath and wipes her face free of tears. She says, “It’s all right,” to Sam, and to the kids whose faces she knows, who are no strangers to her bookstore, she says, “C’mon in guys.”

They do come in, though it is with some hesitation. They come in offering her their worried glances but for only a second or two before she smiles and waves them further into the store. So they drop book bags on tables, pull out notebooks, wander into aisles as they tend to do. Eventually wandering out of ear shot.

“We can stay,” Sam offers and Myka is already shaking her head.

“No,” she forces a smile, “I appreciate it but I’m fine I just… when I _see_ him--”

“I get it,” Sam nods, glancing back at Kurt whose eyes are averted, cast down to the ground, then up to Myka again. “No need to explain. But you have my number,” Sam sighs, “if you need anything. If he comes back? I still live on Weber, so I’m close.”

“I’m fine,” Myka shakes her head again, forcing her smile to grow wider, “really.”

Myka turns, waving off their concerns and making her way back to the counter with Sam and Kurt following distantly and still with some caution. “Thank you. Both of you but it’s nothing I can’t eventually handle.” She pulls herself back onto her stool and pulls Sam’s Post-It off of the computer monitor. “I’ll call you,” she is wiping more tears from her cheeks, trying to steady her breathing, “when the books come in.”

Sam must remember a great deal about their childhood together. About Myka’s intolerance for people who try to push their way into her private life. Because he leaves it at that. He tells her he’ll see her soon and without much more than that to say, he and Kurt leave the bookstore.

***

“Ophie.”

“Trace, you’re awake.”

She is awake, though just barely. When Myka leans over her little sister, from where she lies just behind her in her bed, the soft grunt that Tracy lets out is the only other evidence she has of Tracy’s consciousness.

“Are you hungry? You want some water? Can I get you anything?”

“You can stop rubbing all of your hormones on me. For starters,” Tracy makes a pitiful attempt to shake Myka off of her but Myka does not budge.

“Shut up,” Myka says, wrapping her arms tight around Tracy and burying her face into the back of Tracy’s shoulder.

“How long have I been out?” Tracy asks this and it is immediately followed by a yawn. “What time is it?”

“It’s Saturday afternoon,” Myka says softly, her voice slightly muffled from where her mouth rests against Tracy’s shoulder, “but I figured I would let you sleep as long as you needed to… before bringing you your medication.”

Tracy’s only response to this is a deep sigh.

“How long has it been?”

“Hardly two years,” Tracy whispers, shaking her head. “I don’t know what happened. If something triggered it or…” she allows her voice to trail off before turning, slightly, to look back at Myka. “I hate that stuff, it makes me feel… _moody_.”

“I know, Mom told the doctor,” Myka offers Tracy a sympathetic smile and brings her hand up to the side of her face, to pull hair out of Tracy’s eyes, “they gave you something new to try. The dosage is a lot higher but the doctor said not as many side-effects. Except…”

“Except?”

“Mom wanted me to let you know… that if you’re taking birth control or--”

“Oh god, just stop,” Tracy laughs softly, rolling back onto her side, letting go of another deep sigh. “Mom is digging, sending my lesbian sister to ask me about birth control. I will check for myself.”

“Trace, I’m not… wait, does that mean you do take birth control?”

“Just be glad you never have to deal with keeping that sort of thing from Mom,” Tracy sighs, “and that I won’t be making you an aunt anytime soon.”

“Trace, you know that stuff isn’t one hundred percent effective--”

“Spare me, Myka,” Tracy is once again attempt to push Myka off of her, to no avail, “or have you forgotten that my boyfriend’s mother is a gynecologist? We’ve had enough awkward dinner-table sex talks to last a lifetime.” Myka is laughing as Tracy says this. Myka is laughing because she knows about this all too well. “Anyway, sorry to leave you to deal with the store by yourself.”

“We have already had this talk,” Myka sighs, “about our inability to control certain aspects of our lives. So many certain aspects of our lives.”

“I’m still sorry--”

“Dad came by to see you,” Myka interrupts her sister’s unnecessary apology to say this while rolling onto her own back and allowing her grip to fall away from Tracy. “See how you were doing.”

“Why did he do that?”

“Wondered the same thing myself.”

Tracy turns onto her other side to face Myka.

“Are you okay?” Myka just shakes her head and allows it to lull to the side. She arches a brow at her little sister, “I’m sorry for that, too.”

“Don’t apologize for him, Tracy,” Myka sighs, bringing her hand to Tracy’s side and playfully slapping at her thigh. “He _knows_ that I don’t want him here. Using you as an excuse to come here is just more of him being who he has always been.” Myka turns to face the ceiling again. “Manipulative, selfish, abusive asshole--”

“Only when he was drinking…” Tracy says, softly, quietly, letting her voice fall away in the end of that sentence. Already _knowing_ …

Myka turns a skeptical glare back on her little sister and shakes her head, “So _always_?”

“You make him sound like a monster sometimes. He isn’t that bad--”

“He was never that bad with you, Tracy,” Myka laughs and it is incredulous, that laughter. Disbelieving and amused by her sister’s naivety but also understanding because she gets it. She gets _why_. If Myka could un-know everything she knows about her father, everything she has been through, if she could just forget and not think about it and move on? If it had happened to anyone else but her… anyone else but her and her sister and her family... her attitude might be the same as Tracy’s. Forgiving and almost nonchalant. His faults _might_ be as easy for her to dismiss.

“I’m sorry,” Tracy says softly. “It’s just--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Myka says pulling herself up and off of Tracy’s bed, “I’ll go get your medication and some water.” She turns back to Tracy only when she makes it to the doorway, “Are you hungry?”

Tracy shakes her head.

“All right,” Myka smirks, “be right back.”

***

Pete comes by for dinner and that is rare because usually Kelly is with Pete out at the military base, even despite his living in the barracks. But he is currently moving _out_ of those barracks, moving so much of his stuff back into his mother’s house.

He is a little over a week away from shipping out but no one talks about that much anymore. They talk about absolutely everything except that.

“Ran into Sam at the gym in town earlier,” Pete announces. “He told me what happened, with your dad.”

“Sam came by?” Tracy asks with a mischievous smile pulling into her lips. “Here?” Myka gives her sister a warning glance and that mischievous smile escalates right into a grin.

“He’s been making regular appearances,” Myka sighs, pushing food around her plate.

“Who’s Sam?” Kelly questions.

“This kid we knew growing up,” Pete offers. “He’s been in love with Myka since kindergarten.”

“Preschool,” Tracy corrects. “I’m pretty sure Mom would say preschool.” She holds a hand up to the side of her mouth, leans closer to Kelly and says, “There was an incident involving Play-Doh in the shape of hearts.”

“Oh, really?” Kelly is grinning now, too.

“Don’t tell her _things_ ,” Myka warns her sister. “All you’re doing is building up her arsenal of embarrassing ammo against me.”

“Myka, I am hurt,” Kelly feigns sadness, bringing her hand over her heart, _pouting_. “I would never use any _chisme_ I have on you for future blackmailing.”

“I didn’t even say--” Myka starts but Kelly, with her attitude perking back up to its usual resolve, cuts her off.

“So, how come I’ve never met this guy? If he’s been coming around. Often you say?”

“You know, every time he shows up something _bad_ happens,” Myka says, letting her fork fall to her plate and furrowing her brows in thought. “I am this close,” and she holds her fingers up and very closely together to demonstrate exactly how close she is, “to banning him from the store. My life. This _town_.”

“I don’t think you have that kind of pull, Mykes,” Pete laughs. “His mother being the chief of police and all.”

“Nepotism. That fully explains how he has managed to maintain a passing grade in all of his criminal justice classes without a proper textbook,” Myka says, retrieving her fork.

“Also, the _internet_?” Tracy offers with a slight eye roll.

Myka, with a quick jab of her fork, steals a bite off of Tracy’s plate.

***

The next time Sam comes into the store, one week later, he is alone and Myka is twenty minutes away from closing.

“I have a girlfriend,” is the first thing Myka tells him at the slightest evidence of a blush on those pale cheeks of his.

“What?” He doesn’t sound upset, he sounds confused. And this, in turn, confuses Myka.

“I have a girlfriend, I just… thought you should know that.”

“Yeah,” Sam puffs out a soft laugh and his hand is immediately at the back of his neck, “I know. You and that hot English girl. _Everybody_ knows that.”

“Everybody does _not_ know that,” Myka rolls her eyes and shakes her head, “and anyway, if you knew, why are you always coming in here, trying to talk to me?”

“Because…” Sam’s voice trails off and he looks elsewhere. Anywhere not at Myka. And by the time he opens his mouth to speak again, to say, “Look, I just--” Tracy is coming down the stairs and calling Myka’s name and she has the cordless phone in her hand, holding it out to Myka saying, “Your girlfriend needs you.”

The timing is both perfect and suspect.

Myka furrows her brows and glances at her watch because if it’s this late on a Friday afternoon where she is, just minutes away from closing the bookstore, then it is at least three or four in the morning for Helena. Tracy is still walking toward her when Myka, looking up from her watch and back to Sam, says, “I ordered your books. They’ll be here in another week.”

Tracy reaches Myka, hands her the phone and Myka barely has it to her ear before she hears Helena crying and then yelling on the other end.

“Well, how much do I owe you?” Sam asks but Myka shakes her head, holds her hand up to silence him, stepping slightly away from the counter.

“Helena?” There is no way Helena can hear her over her own yelling. Myka pulls the phone away from her ear to ask Tracy, “Did she say what was going on?”

“Something about an ex-girlfriend,” Tracy arches a brow, “she sounds _really_ drunk.”

“Great,” Myka sighs, throwing her head back and bringing the phone to her ear again. “I’ll be in the back,” she says to both Tracy and Sam as she makes her way toward the back office. She hears, as she goes, her little sister saying, “Long time no see, Sammy boy.”

***

Myka gets Helena’s attention.   She is audibly upset and arguing with someone, Maggie, Myka thinks is who that other loud voice is in the background.

“You didn’t answer your phone,” Helena cries.

“I’m _working_ ,” is Myka’s calm response, “what is going on? Are you okay? And why are you awake?”

“Maggie won’t stop _following_ me,” and Myka assumes that emphasis is for Maggie’s sake.

“You’re going to get yourself killed!” is Maggie’s retort in the background.

“Why are you even with Maggie to begin with?” Myka wonders aloud, eyeing her watch. “It has to be at least three in the morning there.”

“She’s in my program, Myka! If you think I voluntarily subject myself to being in her presence, week after week, you are out of your mind.” Myka is already rolling her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between her thumb and pointer finger.

“Where _are_ you?” Myka asks.

“Leaving our professor’s house,” Helena answers. “You know, that place where Maggie slipped you her phone number?” Her voice rises but she is clearly talking to someone else when she adds, “I know how the fuck to get home on my own.”

“Helena, you’re _drunk_ ,” Maggie yells back.

“Oh, piss off, Maggie.”

Myka sighs and leans back in her office chair, leans her head all the way back too, and she covers her whole face with her free hand. Groans slightly into it.

“Helena,” she says, voice still calm.

“ _What_?” Helena is anything but that.

“Give the phone to Maggie,” Myka tells her.

“You cannot be serious!”

“Helena, I love you but I am _thousands_ of miles away and you have clearly lost your mind. So, please, give Maggie the phone.”

It isn’t in Helena, Myka thinks when the older girl scoffs, to do what a lot of people would do. Tell her to sod off and hang up the phone. Myka half-expects that sort of reaction but it isn’t what Helena would do. Because Helena is so compliant when it comes to Myka, and here she is, thinking again, about how upset Helena would be if Myka ever told her how much she loves Helena’s compliance. Helena’s willingness to listen and just do whatever Myka asks of her.

It’s a matter of trust, Myka is beginning to learn. Helena trusts her implicitly and she hasn’t quite figured out yet if that is a good thing or not.

Helena gives Maggie her phone.

“She is piss drunk,” is the first thing Maggie says.

“And you’re not?”

“I am _not_ ,” Maggie responds. “I’m just trying to make sure she gets home all right. She can barely stand straight and she got into a big fight with Liam at the professor’s house.”

Myka sits straight but her face is still pressed into her palm and she lets go of a heavy sigh.

“You guys are all twenty-three, right?”

“Myka--”

“Look, Maggie, I know I don’t really know you that well but as you claim to be someone who cares about Helena, I’m going to ask if you could please just walk her to Will’s house.”

“We’re only a few blocks from her house--”

“No,” Myka is shaking her head. “No offense but I don’t trust you _that_ much. Her dad probably isn’t home and the last thing she needs is to be alone or alone with _you_. Take her to Will’s house, have him call me or text me when you get there.”

Myka is sure, by the fact that Maggie does not protest, that she must be just a little bit drunk, too. But there is a lingering silence from that girl on the phone. Helena, in the background, eventually demands her phone back, demands to talk to her girlfriend, and levels Maggie’s ego, Myka’s almost sure of that, with another colorful shower of profanity.

Myka hears Maggie sigh.

“Because I really do not want to deal with this shite right now,” Maggie says, “ _fine_. Here is your girlfriend back.”

Immediately, “ _Why_ do you need to talk to _her_? So she can give you her phone number again?”

“Helena,” Myka tries but Helena goes on. She continues on and on, “Georgie,” until finally Myka raises her voice to say, “Helena George, will you be quiet for two seconds and listen to me?”

“Do not make me get on a plane, Georgie,” Myka says softly, followed by an exasperated sigh.

“That is exactly what I _want_ you to do,” Helena’s voice is calm now. Her voice is just a little bit sad with the slightest hint of a cry. “Get on a plane. Come _home_ to me. _Marry_ me.”

“ _God_ , Helena, you really are drunk aren’t you?”

***

“I can’t decide,” Myka says with a pensive shake of her head, “if the word _shite_ annoys me because it isn’t _shit_ or if it’s just that _Magdalena_ was the one saying it.”

Will… _Wolly_ , is laughing softly on the other end of the line, despite the hour, and it makes Myka think about just how much she _likes_ him. How much she wishes she’d spent more time with him while in London. At the same time, not regretting a single minute of time she’d spent held up inside, away from the world, with Helena Wells.

He yawns and before that yawn has faded away, he says, “It’s _her_ ,” and then a little more clearly, “trust me. I think our Helena has finally seen the light.”

“Thank you, Wolly,” Myka sighs, “I mean, I know she’s your best friend and you would be there for her without me asking but it means a lot to me that I _can_ ask. That she has at least you to look out for her.”

“Thank _you_ for calling me,” and his voice drops low when he also says, “this works out, actually, as I have been meaning to talk to her. She’ll be a fairly captive audience by morning.” There is a long pause there but Myka knows he isn’t finished speaking, when he sighs, blowing out a long breath and clearing his throat. “Don’t be surprised if you get a call tonight.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Myka laughs softly, shaking her head.

***

The call comes at three o’clock that following morning and Myka has not, in fact, been waiting for it. She has actually been asleep since ten o’clock..

“You hate me. Rightfully,” is the first thing Helena says when Myka answers the house phone just beside her bed and barely manages to prop the thing against her ear in her half-sleep state. But that sound in Helena’s voice, all sad and pitiful and self-loathing, wakes Myka up just a little bit. It wakes her up enough to speak coherently when she tells Helena, playfully, “Shut _up_.”

These old habits die hard.

Helena is insistent and apologetic. Myka wants to be annoyed because it’s late, or it’s early, and she’s tired and she hadn’t really been that mad at Helena to begin with. She, in fact, had not been mad at all. Once Helena had made it to Will’s house and Will had confirmed Maggie, though she tried to linger, was promptly sent on her way?

Myka was perfectly at ease, or at ease enough to return to her own day, her own drama, her own evasion of lingering followers.

“Helena,” Myka finally says loud enough to get Helena’s full attention, “I love you but this isn’t the thing, Helena. The thing that you think you’ll say or do that will scare me off.” Silence on the line, for the longest time. Myka soon says, “Tell me you love me.”

“I love you,” Helena says, obediently, and then again, “I _love_ you.”

“Now,” Myka yawns, “repeat after me. I, Helena Wells.”

“I, Helena Wells,” and it makes Myka grin, that Helena does not question this at all.

“Will not call my girlfriend at three o’clock in the morning,” Myka continues, her smile growing as Helena repeats every word, “in either my timezone or hers.”

“ _Myka_ ,” it’s a weak scold. One Myka replies to simply by saying Helena’s name in the exact same tone. Helena, Myka’s sure, is rolling her eyes but she does finally say, “In either my timezone or hers.”

“For as long as we both shall live,” Myka concludes.

“For as long as we both shall…” Helena’s voice trails off, her end of the line falling so quiet that Myka, in that silence, almost falls asleep again, until she hears the gasp and Helena’s voice, appalled, _horrified_ , asking, “Did I ask you to _marry_ me?”

Myka can’t help the grin that spreads across her face as the laughter bubbles up inside of her, remembering those words Helena had said.

“ _Demanded_ , more like,” and there is a faint groan on the other end of the line. “But don’t worry,” Myka continues, “my hopes are not quite as high as they were when I was thirteen.”

***

Sam is back on Wednesday.

“Oh no,” Myka is already shaking her head as he comes through the door, “no, no, no, no, no, no, no,” a smile grows into place on his face as he walks toward her, where she is sat at the counter. “ _No_ ,” she insists and he rolls his eyes, reaching for an old, tattered box that he has tucked under his arm. “No, Sam. Every time you come in here something _awful_ happens.”

“All the years that I have known you, Bering,” Sam says, setting that box down on the counter with a heavy thump, causing dust and dirt to fly up and out and absolutely everywhere, “awful things have been happening to you.”

Myka opens her mouth to speak, to protest, to say anything at all but her thoughts, the words she was so sure she was about to say, vanish from her mind, her tongue, the back of her throat. She closes her mouth and follows this action with an exaggerated roll of her eyes, a loud and heavy puff of a sigh, and a dramatic slump of her shoulders.

“What’s in the box?” she asks, annoyed at the defeat she has opted to completely ignore.

“You don’t recognize it?”

Myka arches a brow at Sam for a moment then shifts her gaze down to the box and shrugs. But she is registering her name on that box, just beside Sam’s name, written in her handwriting, his written in his own handwriting.

“Time capsule,” she reads softly, a smile pulling into her lips.

“Time capsule,” Sam nods, sounding more sure of himself than Myka has ever heard.

***

“What’s in the time capsule?” Kelly is asking. She’s eying Sam, whom she’s been newly introduced to, and waving a spatula at the box suspiciously. “And why is it sitting on my table?”

“Probably a lot of black mold,” Myka shares the same suspicious look.

“So again I ask… why is it sitting on the table… where we _eat_?”

“It’s cool, my mom cleaned all of the bugs out already,” Sam shrugs.

Myka, Kelly, and Tracy cast the same arch-browed judgmental gaze in Sam’s direction.

“It’s not like I _ask_ her to do these things,” Sam protests.

“He’s always been a bit of a mama’s boy,” Myka teases, side-whispering to Kelly whose expression, in response, is anything but surprise.

“Well, when your mom is all you have…” Sam responds, his voice wavering in the end, falling away as his eyes too drift elsewhere.

An awkward silence threatens to fill the room in the moments after this but Kelly, with her spatula in hand and her personality being what it is, waves that spatula at Sam and says, “Oh no, none of that, _cabron_.”

When Sam looks back at her abruptly, confused and curious, she is shaking her head, resting her free hand on her waist, pointing between Myka, Tracy and herself while waving that spatula around in a circular motion.

“We don’t do self-pity in this house. We all came from fucked up homes with fucked up parents, so if you want to hang with this crowd, you’d better wipe your man tears, tuck your _juevos_ between your legs, and put on your big girl chonies.”

Sam’s eyes are wide. Myka reaches to hide her smile, presses her lips together tight as she eyes Kelly with that look, the one that she hopes asks, “Is that all?” Tracy, being who she is, who she has always been, who she will never stop being, has a large, unrestrained grin on her face.

“Have you met Kelly yet?” Tracy jokes.

Myka nods, turning back to Sam, and says, “You’ll get used to her.”

Whether Sam will or will not is yet to be seen because he doesn’t stay for lunch. And whether that has anything to do with Kelly’s vivid lecture, her insistence that he tuck his eggs, _those_ eggs, between his legs and take on life like a woman would, Myka does not know.

All she knows is that the second he is out the door, whatever it is that Kelly has been cooking on the stove burns to an instant crisp, fills the kitchen with smoke, sets off the smoke alarm.

“Every _single_ time,” Myka sighs.

***

Sam leaves the box.

“You scared him off,” Myka teases Kelly not long after he’s left.

It’s not long afterward that they’ve opened windows, cleared the apartment of smoke, and resorted to eating sandwiches. She is grabbing her books, her bags, her pens, her laptop. She is preparing to leave the apartment and head into the city for the two classes she’s managed to squeeze in on Monday and Wednesday evenings, another two on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

“If he can’t play ball with the big girls,” Kelly says and that is where she ends that sentence, seated on the couch and never looking up at Myka from the magazine she flips through.

Myka is at the door, ready to go, “I’ll see you tonight?” And this gets Kelly’s attention, an arched brow, a mouth wide open in thought.

“Actually,” she says and Myka is already smiling, rolling her eyes, waving her off.

“I know, you’re staying with Pete,” Myka says, opening the front door and stepping partially through it.

“It’s… _convenient_ that his roommate is gone,” Kelly shrugs and it is almost guiltily.

“I’ll see you on Saturday for Pete’s dinner, at least.”

“Briefly,” Kelly nods, “I mean, for the eating part, of course. Like Pete is going to miss out on that but since it’s our last weekend, ya know? You _know_.”

“No matter how much I don’t want to,” Myka teases as she is backpedaling her way through that door. “I’ll see you Saturday.”

“Bye, nerd.”

“Later, menace.”

***

It’s two weeks before Myka’s birthday, the night of Pete’s farewell dinner, two nights before he’s set to leave, when Sam shows up in the book store again. This time his books are there, too.

“You almost burned my house down,” is the first thing Myka tells him when she sees him coming in. She is already pushing his books across the counter when he approaches, also saying, “I can’t _wait_ to figure out how you’re going to ruin today.”

“I thought this was a self-pity free zone?” Sam questions in response.

“You’re confusing my annoyance for self-pity.”

Sam shrugs, “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh and shakes her head, “You _are_ your mother.”

“What does that mean?”

“She used to say that _all_ the time.”

“Ah,” Sam grins, “so you _do_ remember back then. When we were actually friends.”

“Did I give you the impression I’d forgotten?”

“Yeah, actually,” Sam nods. “What with your stone cold expression and rigid stance.”

“Did you just call me frigid? As though I’m some sort of ice queen?”

“ _Rigid_.”

Lingering pause.

“You know, I’m not so sure that there really is a difference between the two.”

“Stand-offish?” Sam tries.

“If I were a guy, that would just make me cool.”

Sam blinks, opens his mouth, says, “I…” and then shrugs and closes his mouth.

“I thought so,” Myka responds with a tilt of her head, a small accomplished smirk playing across her lips. “Your textbooks,” she adds, pushing those books further across the counter, toward Sam. “Maybe now you can actually do your work.”

“Did you go through the box?”

“Sorry, I haven’t had time,” Myka says, tending to some new task on the counter before her. “Between the bookstore all day, school all evening. I’m lucky if I have enough time to eat. Hell, I’m lucky if I have enough time to sleep--”

“Do you want to go... grab some dinner with me?”

Myka frowns, “Huh?”

“If… you haven’t eaten, I mean. If you have time…”

“I told you. I have a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, you said that two weeks ago. I just thought... maybe you needed some company,” Sam is reaching for those text books, “I saw Helena’s… I mean, I assumed you guys had... not that it matters.  We could just go as friends…” and just like that, Myka thinks, they are back to square one. Sam’s face is flushing, his hand moving to rub at the back of his neck, eyes anywhere and everywhere, except on Myka.

“You just assumed? _What_? My having a long distance relationship isn’t real enough for you?”

“No,” Sam speaks up quickly, eyes back on Myka, then, “I mean, _yes._ ” He sighs, scooping those text books into his arms and reaching into his back pocket. “I’m sorry, how much do I owe you? For the books?”

Myka’s next sigh is exaggerated, as is her eye roll, “Don’t _worry_ about it.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam flashes Myka a sheepish smile and shrugs slightly, “I guess I just assumed… that you two had broken up.  That you might need the company.”

“What? Why?”

“The pictures of Helena?  With that guy?”

“What _guy_?”

"Um..."

The bringer of disasters that is Sam Martino strikes again.

***

Myka, for the umpteenth time, is ushering Sam _out_ of her store, rushing upstairs with Tracy’s name in the air way ahead of her. And Tracy is already in the hallway, by the time Myka makes it up those stairs, she is asking Myka what’s wrong, being snatched up by the arm, being dragged into Myka’s room just behind her.

Myka scoops up her laptop, opens it, logs in, hands it to Tracy.

“Show me Helena’s internet web space profile _thing_.”

“Myka…”

Tracy hesitating... this is already a bad sign.

***

Myka is livid and she is only keeping herself together long enough to make it to Pete’s dinner because it is the polite thing to do.  It is polite and, in the grand scheme of things, Pete’s last night with the entire family takes precedence.

Finding photos of Helena, smiling and too close and touching Liam however she is touching him, does not.

Helena with Liam, in that way she is with Liam, is a topic of discussion that will have to be put on hold.

It is on hold for Pete’s dinner. It is on hold and in wait of Myka’s patience.

t is mostly on hold because Helena is asleep and doesn't answer the first time Myka calls.

***

“Myka,” Tracy’s voice is low and cautious in the car.

“Now is not the time” Myka says.

“I think now is _exactly_ the time,” Tracy says, voice still soft, arching a brow at her sister from the passenger seat. “If you think you’re masking your anger well, or at all? I’m here to tell you, Sister. You are not.”

“You _knew_.” Myka steels her face even more than it already has been. She doesn’t face her sister but glances at her from the corner of her eye. Sure to train that look on her face into one of absolute discontent. “Why didn’t you _tell_ me?”

“I assumed that you also knew, Myka,” Tracy’s voice rises but she continues speaking slowly, as if she is trying to make a point and Myka gets that point, the point Tracy makes next, which is, “because she’s your girlfriend, a girlfriend that you are in an _open relationship_ with?”

Myka _knows_ the point. She is _fully aware_ of that point. She is choosing to _completely ignore_ that point because, “It’s only been two months.”

“Open relationships don’t have probationary periods, Ophie,” Tracy counters. “They just are.” Myka remains unresponsive. “Here’s another thing that you should know about open relationships, Sister. They tend to work far better with open communication. _Most_ relationships work a lot better with open communication. The fact that you didn’t know, the fact that she didn’t tell you? That is what you call a _red_ _flag_.”

“Helena and I have maintained a relationship for two years on our own, Trace. I don’t need my little sister telling me how to make it work --”

“Oh, no you don’t!” Tracy, Myka thinks, by the way she laughs incredulously and raises her voice, has reached her very limit. “Don’t even _tr_ y pulling that shit with me. Two years Myka? Two years out of how many fucking years that you two idiots have been going back and forth?” Myka’s mouth falls open and she narrows her eyes at her sister, turns to give her a piece of her mind, only to be cut off, “Do you want to hear something incredibly stupid?” Tracy turns in her seat, to face Myka, and again gives her no time to answer, “I’ve been with Kevin since elementary school, practically. We might not have actually _been_ together, it might not have meant _anything_ to anyone back then but it certainly means something _now_.

“But because _I’m_ the irresponsible one, _I’m_ the aloof one, the loose-lipped firecracker of the family, as both Mom _and_ Jane have said, no one, absolutely _nobody_ takes my relationship with Kevin, healthy and prosperous as it has been, seriously.”

Myka wants to concede to this point and this point alone because, and she will admit, Tracy has been the focus of a lot of teasing, by her, by her mothers, by everyone else in the family. But because Myka knows, she knows exactly where this outburst is leading to, all she can manage is a slightly sympathetic, “Trace,” before rolling her eyes, sighing loudly, tightening her grip on the steering wheel.

“But _you_ ,” and this is it, Myka thinks, her sister is about to sound off on her relationship with Helena, on the ongoing instability of that relationship, the distance in that relationship, the rocky foundation upon which that relationship began. Myka thinks her sister, once small and naïve and a pain in her ass, is prepared to bring to point how, despite all of these faults in this relationship, Myka, being the more responsible one, the more reserved, quiet sister of the two of them, receives far less in the way of indignation. From their mother, from Jane, from Pete and Jeannie. From even Kelly.

But Tracy falls quiet. She is quiet and she turns back in her seat to face forward and then turns in the other direction entirely, to look out the window. She sighs, bringing her hand to her mouth, her fingernails between her teeth, and begins biting down on those nails furiously.

They stay this way for the rest of the car ride, which is not very long at all, before they are pulling up in front of the restaurant where they are meeting their family.

Myka parks the car, cuts off the engine, removes the key and sits back in her seat with a heavy sigh.

“But me?” Myka asks, finally.

It is only then that Tracy turns back to her, with furrowed brows and wrinkles in her forehead that show her upset, her frustration, how annoyed she can truly become.

“I get it now,” Tracy sighs.

“Get _what_?”

“It doesn’t feel right,” is her response, her expression turning from that previously frustrated look into something far more sympathetic than Myka ever expected. “Berating you about Helena… about your relationship… with all the absolute shit you guys have been through and all the shit you put each other through. It just doesn’t feel right.”

Myka, in less than five seconds, goes from heated and angry to sad and discontent.

Tracy’s hand is pulling on the lever of the car door when she also says, “You make so many problems for _yourselves_ on top of all the problems you both already have and I get it now, why Mom and Jane leave you two alone. Why they don’t hesitate to make light of my relationship with Kevin but worry over you and Helena as if you're a pair of porcelain baby dolls.”

Myka is quiet, as Tracy pushes that door open, moves her feet out of the car and slowly moves to lift herself out of that car, too, but stopping short. She turns back to Myka once again with that suddenly understanding look on her face.

“You and Helena, your so-called relationship, isn’t strong enough to survive that.  You don't have the sort of comfort that we have.  You _definitely_ don't have that security.  Even after all of these years.”

Myka cannot find words.  Her mouth is open, ready to speak.  Her sister is quiet and waiting but nothing comes.  Not quickly enough, anyway.

Tracy is out of the car, closing the car door, and walking into that restaurant before Myka can find anything not right about everything she's said.

***

Myka almost makes it through dinner.

Swimming in so many emotions, trying hard to focus on the present, to see only her family and the happiness, the combined sadness, that they exude in this evening. She tries to be present for Pete because it is his night, it is the second to last night before he will be gone for eighteen months, away to a war-torn country, fighting a battle that is hardly his own. A battle that he never asked for in the first place.

When Jeannie Jr. and Jules show up, she is far more useless to the table conversation than she had been because now she is staring at that man across the table and thinking of him in the only way she has ever been able to think of him. Since the day she first met him.

_He is Helena’s first._

He is the first person she had ever been with. The father of a child that could have never been born but had existed, in some small way and in some heartbeat of time in Helena’s past. She is thinking of what that child could have been, what that child would have looked like, how very _different_ her life would be if the billions of things that needed to happen in order to create that human life... had actually _worked_.

She tries not to be relieved about that. She tries really _really_ hard.

“How’s Helena,” Jules will eventually ask her, as he always does, with some small smirk playing across smug lips because he knows what they have now.  He knows and it has always amused him to think of Helena in _that_ way, to know that he had always been the only one, the only _guy_ in Helena’s past that she’d loved.  It amuses him and he has never been shy about expressing _that_.  

“She’s good,” Myka will respond and that is all she will say. Out loud, anyway. Internally, she is screaming. _Don’t fucking worry about it_ and _she’s mine now_ and _you had no right, in the first place_. Because he didn’t, at seventeen, with Helena at fourteen.  He had absolutely no right

Myka won’t even begin to touch on the irony of Jules being more present in her life than Helena these days.

It’s worse tonight because Myka wants so badly to reach across this table, to smack that smile off of his lips, and to tell him, “You’re not the only one anymore.”  She wants to shove these images into the arrogant expression that sets in across his face. Images in her mind that she cannot pull herself away from long enough to be fully present at this dinner.

She wants to take all of these images and stuff them into his mouth and down his throat until he chokes on the realization that he isn’t the only guy anymore.  Because why does it matter to him in the first place?  Giselle had meant more to Helena than him.  _Myka_ means more to Helena than him. But the _only_ thing that will knock him down from that pillar of his... is knowing how much Liam must mean to Helena, too.

If the images are any indication.

***

Helena smiling, with Liam on one side of her, with an arm wrapped around her waist, with someone Myka only vaguely recognizes from her program on the other side of her.

Helena on a couch somewhere in London with a drink in her hand, with Liam sat beside her, with his hand on her leg, with a smile on her face.

Helena with her arm linked with Liam’s arm, leaning _into_ him, _against_ him, her face, the smile upon that face, turned _to_ him, his face turned to hers.

It’s the look she gives Myka.  Right before she’s about to kiss her.

Myka knows that look well.

But for Myka, what does her in entirely, is that the time stamp on those photos, the ones that make her useless and jealous and angry and more sad than she will ever bother admitting, shows that they were taken on Valentine’s Day.

Suddenly, Helena’s insistence that she isn’t worthy of Myka, that she doesn’t _deserve_ Myka, makes so much more sense. Suddenly, Myka wants to go back in time and tell Helena, “You are absolutely right, beautiful human. You do not deserve me at all.”

But that would be the brave thing to do. Myka is not so brave. Myka, in fact, is scared to death about losing Helena over all of this.

***

When Jules asks Myka, “So, when are you two getting married?” she wants to kick his pretty white teeth in.

Never mind that they couldn’t, even if they could actually pull themselves together long enough to do so. For _legal_ reasons, for _distance_ reasons, for the mere fact that Helena has already found someone _else_. Someone she has known, someone who knows her, some who likes her, who has kissed her. Someone who she has vehemently denied liking back.

Someone she could very well marry if she ever really wanted to.

***

Myka reaches her limit.

She stands so fast in her chair that it falls back and crashes to the ground. It gets the attention of the entire restaurant.

She wants to scream, anger rising inside of her again, knotting up in her esophagus, burning a hole in her heart. She wants to reach across that table and snatch that boy up by his collar and tell him to fuck off talking about her girlfriend, to fuck off dating the only other older girl in her life who has looked after her like she were her own sister.

Myka inhales deeply, exhales slowly through her nose.

“Excuse me,” she says softly, calmly setting her napkin down onto the table, “I just... need some fresh air.”

***

Myka leaves as fast as she can without running before the tears come. Before anger and utter sadness crush her down to the point of being immobile. Useless.

She is in the car.  She is driving home and it might be reckless through the blur of tears in her eyes.  But she makes it in one piece. 

Myka makes it home and she is slamming absolutely every door that she has walked through.  She is calling Helena again.  She is crying into Helena's voicemail once more.  She hangs up.  She throws the phone across the room, and she manages, somehow, to put her fist through the flimsy hollow wood that is her bedroom door. 

She is tired.  She is absolutely _done_.  She lays down on her bedroom floor and she passes out there, in a fit of tears.

***

“Doc says you’re lucky nothing broke. She’s pretty sure there isn’t a fracture but just to be on the safe side...”

Pete had been the one to find her, asleep on her bedroom floor. Pete had been the one to wake her, to sit her up straight, to help her stand. To slap a bit of perspective on her by asking, “Rough day?”

The standing did not last long before she fell into his arms and continued to cry.

Now she’s telling him, “I didn’t mean to ruin dinner.”

Being awake again had not been ideal. Being conscious and aware and remembering. Having all of those images of Helena and Liam, smiling in photos. Together, _close_. Realizing it had not, in fact, been a dream.

“You didn’t ruin dinner. You know what ruined dinner? Jules ruined dinner when he proposed to Jeannie right after your grand exit. That guy has _awful_ timing.”

They are sat side-by-side in a hospital waiting room, waiting for X-ray images of Myka’s hand to return, to confirm that it is not actually broken or fractured or made of adamantium, as Pete had suggested back at the house.

“He proposed?”

Pete’s only response to that is a wide-eyed nod. Myka suddenly can’t shake the thought of Helena in Jeannie Jr.’s place, being proposed to be Jules. Being proposed to by Liam.

He very well could propose. They very well could be married. _Legally_.

“And Jeannie?”

 _Actually_ married.

“Just stared at him like she didn’t know whether to kiss him or smack him in the head.”

Myka manages a small puff of laughter and pulls her injured hand, swollen around the knuckles, into her other hand, further onto her lap.

“I hate him,” Myka says softly, just under her breath.

“No, you don’t,” Pete counters.

Myka sighs and corrects, “I dislike him very much.”

“Well, you and Mom have that, and so much more, in common,” Pete says, gesturing to her injured hand. “It didn’t stop Jeannie from eventually saying yes, though.” Myka, when she looks back to Pete, arches a brow incredulously, suspiciously. “I know,” Pete offers with a slight shrug. “He’s good to Jeannie. Also, I don’t feel like killing him, so,” another shrug, “he can’t be all that bad, right?”

“I’m sorry,” Myka lowers her head when she says this, stretches her legs out in front of her.

“Again, you didn’t do anything. So,” Pete pauses and swats playfully at Myka’s arm with the back of his hand, “about Helena--”

Myka closes her eyes at the sound of her name. _Sees_ her. Sees her with _Liam_. Not in those pictures she had seen online but in the way they had been, in London on New Year’s Eve.

Smiling, laughing. _Touching_.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Mykes.”

It’s a warning tone. A reminder. Because Pete doesn’t let her get away with not talking about things. He has never in the past, he certainly won’t start now. Especially when it comes to Helena. When it comes to Myka injuring herself in the wake of her feelings over Helena.

“You know I love you, right?”

Myka nods at this, Pete’s admission, which isn’t really an admission at all because Myka _knows_ that Pete loves her. She loves _him_. That’s just how they have always been. So she nods at this reminder and says, “I love you, too, Pete.”

It comes so easy now. Saying I love you to someone she isn’t absolutely in love with. Saying those words to her family, to her friends. To the people she genuinely cares about. She has Helena to thank for that.

Pete nods. One single, sure nod, before going on.

“So, I’m just going to be straight with you when I ask you this next question.”

Myka tenses.

“What the hell were you thinking?”

“Pete.”

“An open relationship?”

Myka remains quiet.

“Myka, you get jealous of gentle breezes blowing through Helena’s hair.”

Myka doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry at this… so she does both at exactly the same time. She is puffing out a soft laugh and wiping her face free of tears with her one good hand.

“You tend to manage your rage against gentle breezes a bit better than this but I know the rage is still there. I know you’d swat the hell out of those gentle breezes, if you could, and bring them straight to the ground,” Pete smirks, “for touching your woman.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Myka nods, “gentle breezes be damned.”

“So, why? Why did you agree to be in an open relationship with Helena? What were you _thinking_?”

“It’s what she wanted, Pete,” and Myka looks back up at him, her best friend, through the thickest and the thinnest of ordeals, and smiles, “it’s what she needs. I wanted to… put things on hold but she insisted… that she wants to stay together. She wanted it.”

“So you just gave it to her,” Pete sighs, “of course. Because you’re Mykes.”

“Because I am _me_. Because I didn’t think it would be anything more than her... needing a warm body to sleep next to.”

Pete shakes his head, “You have got to stop that.”

“What? Stop what, Pete? Loving this woman? Leaping off of buildings for this woman? Testing my patience for her by bending over backward for her? Giving her everything--”

“All of the above, man,” Pete sighs, sounding exasperated, and this makes Myka feel an immense amount of guilt because Pete shouldn’t be worried about this. He shouldn’t be worried about her or Helena or all of the dumb shit they manage to get themselves into. Not right now. Not when he has more important things to think about.

Even if it wasn’t his deployment, he would still have so many more important things to think about than this. Than Myka’s next big fuck up.

“Mykes, I love Helena and I love that you love her but she doesn’t _get_ you. As much as she loves you, as much as you love her and for as long as we have all known each other? She doesn’t get you. She never has and she acts like she never will.”

“What is there to get?” Myka asks with a shake of her head, sitting back in her seat and furrowing her brows in frustration when she looks back at Pete. “I’m not that complex. What could there possibly be about me that isn’t surface level? That she couldn’t possibly already know?”

“Uh, well, how about the fact that you aren’t open relationship material, for one?” Pete adjusts his seated position, turns slightly more toward Myka, “If she knew you, like I know you, like she _pretends_ to know you, she would have never asked that of you to begin with. It is the most asinine thing I have heard the two of you come up with in years and,” Myka opens her mouth, Pete raises his voice just a little bit to emphasize the point that she is already trying to argue against, “do _not_ try to convince me otherwise. You are talking to the king of asinine ideas. You know that I know what I’m talking about. You _know_ that this was an asinine idea, otherwise you would have told me about it. Instead of me having to hear it from the Moms and Jeannie and Trace.

“I know we aren’t as close as we used to be but I know you, Mykes. So don’t try to sit here, with your little shocked face, and tell me that you didn’t purposely keep that information from me. Because you knew, you _know_ that I will tell you, straight up, how stupid that idea is for you and Helena.”

Myka lets her head fall back and lull to the side, to stare at Pete, to give him the most exaggerated eye roll she can possibly muster in this moment. She sighs exasperated, sits straight again.

“You also know… that I would give my left eye for Helena.”

“Your left eye, your right eye, a chunk of your hair, four arms if you had that many to begin with,” Pete smirks before playfully poking Myka with his elbow against her forearm. “And that’s all good. The real problem, Mykes, is you giving her your heart. You give her _all_ of it, all at once. And the older we get, the more I realize that she doesn’t deserve even half of it. Not like this. Not if this is how she’s going to treat it.”

There is a long moment of silence before Myka leans forward, resting her elbows against her knees and letting go of another deep sigh. She blows out a long, steady breath through barely parted lips. She turns her head slightly toward Pete and says, simply, “She’s _Helena_.”

“And you’re _Myka_ ,” Pete responds. “This isn’t The Helena Show, you get to be happy, too. You get to be secure in your relationship, too. It isn’t just about what Helena wants or needs or benefits from having. It’s about you, too, Mykes.” Pete leans forward also, elbows against knees, turning toward Myka, and lowers his voice when he tells her, as a reminder, “Try not to forget that.”

***

“Thank you for the pep talk,” Myka sighs, leaning into Pete’s arms, resting her head against his shoulder, where they stand just outside of the bookstore in near darkness.

He wraps his arms around her and squeezes tight. He rests his chin in her hair and sighs.

“What are you going to do without me around to keep you sensible.”

Myka laughs at that. Pete, she thinks, _is_ the sensible one now.

“A year and a half,” she sighs and stretches her neck back to look up at Pete. Pete who shrugs and tilts his head to the side nonchalantly.

“You can always email me,” he offers. “If you need to blow off steam.”

“No girlfriend, no best friend. A sister who is probably not going to talk to me for days…”

Suddenly Pete has an amused smirk on his face, looking somewhere past Myka and saying, “Plenty of Sam, though.”

“What?” Myka asks, pulling slightly away from him. Her glare is skeptical at the very least. His only response is a nod gesturing behind her.

Myka is already closing her eyes, already sighing, turning reluctantly around and only to be met with Sam and Sam’s uncertain expression, cautiously approaching the two of them.

“Harbinger of doom,” Myka greets him, crossing her arms in front of her.

“Deflector of friendships,” is his equally _rigid_ response.

“Couple of nerds,” Pete adds, not quite under his breath.

“Hey Pete,” Sam greets him with a handshake, eventually, then turns back to Myka. “Are you… available? To talk?”

“That’s my cue,” Pete turns to Myka, twirling his car keys in his hand, and leaning in to press a kiss into her temple. “See you tomorrow, nerd,” he whispers into her hair and she smiles at the sentiment, playfully pushing him away. Waving after him as he goes.

“I apologize.”

Myka turns back to Sam, crossing her arms in front of her, sparing her injured hand any unnecessary pressure, arching a brow.

“It was rude of me to just assume... to just ask you like that.  I didn’t really mean it that way… I just thought you’d be more amenable to the idea… of hanging out... if you _had_ , ya know, broken up… with your insanely hot girlfriend.”  Sam heaves out a deep sigh, palming the back of his neck again. “Can I start over again?”

Myka remains silent, allowing her brow to arch higher.

“I just need someone to talk to and the only person I have ever been able to do that with, other than Kurt, is… you.  Even if you never really talked back.”

“Jesus Christ, Sam,” Myka lowers her arms to her side and throws her head back.

“I know, it’s stupid. It’s just that… when we were kids and we were forced to hang out together through all of those Al-Anon meetings and talking to you just came easily. And after my dad… well, after everything--”

“Why didn’t you just _say_ that? Instead of coming around like a creeper, asking me to order you textbooks two months deep into Spring semester?”

“I--”

“Did you even _need_ those books? Please don’t tell me I wasted fifty dollars plus shipping charges on your sad attempt at reaching out to someone to talk to.”

“ _I_ didn’t need the books…”

“I _knew_ it!” Myka groans as she turns and walks further down the sidewalk, away from the bookstore, away from Sam. He is on her heels anyway. “You are a piece of work, Smarty. A real piece of--”

“You’re misunderstanding, Bering,” Sam says, catching up to her, keeping pace, turning toward her as they continue walking down the sidewalk. “ _I_ didn’t need the books. _Kurt_ needed them.”

Myka stops walking. She stops so suddenly that Sam is steps ahead of her before he realizes that she has stopped. He turns back to her, arching a curious brow and shoving his hands into his pockets.

“Kurt?” Myka questions and Sam nods, his gaze falling to his feet before rising to meet hers again.

“He’s kind of a proud guy,” Sam shrugs. “We try to help... as much as we can but... you know.”

Myka sighs and drops her head back again.

“You’re going to hurt your neck doing that,” Sam teases, his own hand finding the back of his neck again.

Myka straightens her posture and turns an unamused glare on Sam.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Myka says, stepping to where he stands just feet ahead of her. “I have had my absolute fill of lies and omissions and miscommunications for the year.”

“Right,” Sam nods, “who wouldn’t be over that?”

“If I’m going to get it from anyone, if anyone on this planet is going to get away with any of _that_ , with _me_? It’ll be my beautifully misguided, insanely hot girlfriend who is still, in fact, my girlfriend. Despite how much I want to pull all of her gorgeous hair out of that annoyingly precious scalp of hers.”

Sam makes a face to match the concerns he verbalizes when telling Myka, “That’s really graphic.”

Myka simply shrugs. “You hungry?”

"Not really... after _that_."

“Do you want someone to listen to you man-cry or do you _not_?”

Sam narrows her eyes on her and says, softly, “ _Rigid_.”

Myka hopes the smile she gives him in return is as accomplished as it is wide.  From the look he gives her in return, it is close enough, so she heads off toward the diner with Sam keeping pace by her side.

“And this isn’t a date,” she says lowly, without ever turning to look at that boy walking next to her. But she can see, out of the corner of her eye, the amused and bashful smile that takes over his expression.

"You're not my type."


	21. 19 & 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More drama! More moodiness! More fighting! More angst! Welcome to Ages. Takes place after Myka's birthday and picks up with Leena right where 19 left off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I accidentally posted this before finishing the editing, so I'm just going to leave it up as I edit!

“I am in no mood to talk to her,” Myka tells Kelly, who is holding their brand new replacement cordless phone, urging Myka to take it. 

The brush off isn’t Myka’s thing even when she’s angry.  It isn’t a thing that Myka wants or likes to do, or a thing that Myka takes any amount of pleasure in doing.  (Maybe just a tiny bit of pleasure.)  But it _is_ something that Helena does and has _always_ done.

And Myka has committed herself, stupidly (very _very_ stupidly) to giving that girl a taste of her own medicine.

“She’s _crying_ ,” Kelly says softly, angrily waving that phone in front of Myka’s face, where she sits in the darkness of her office.

“And I’m not?” Myka asks with not attempting to lower her voice, knowing very well that Helena can hear every word she says. Knowing very well how biting every word that she says must sound in Helena’s ears.  “If you don’t mind, I have a shit ton of writing to do.”

Kelly drops her arm, still holding that phone, down to her side in what looks like defeat.   She stands there for quite some time in silence.  She is, Myka presumes and she presumes this mostly because she can _feel_ it, glaring at the back of Myka’s head as she tends to the open document on the laptop before her.

Myka _knows_ she is pressing her luck with Kelly.  She has known it all week and she knows it, in it’s true value, when Kelly finally snaps.

***

Myka’s laptop crashes closed, almost on top of her fingers. 

Kelly, with her hand still on that laptop, is leaning her weight onto it.  She is leaning closer to Myka, bringing the antenna of that cordless phone up to Myka’s face and saying very sternly, very steadily, and enunciating each and every syllable, “I don’t care how _justified_ you think you are in your anger for this woman.  If you think for one second, _cabrona_ , that I’m going to be the one to put up with your attitude, you are sadly mistaken.”

“Kelly--”

“I’ve broken jaws on men twice my size for far less than treating me the way you have treated everyone in this house for the past week and I am _sick_ of your collective bullshit.” 

Myka’s mouth falls open but the thing she thinks she wants to say leaves her mind, disappears. It vanishes beneath the looming shadow of one very pissed off Kelly, too close and all but growling her words. “ _Say_ something,” she dares and Myka furrows her brows and lets her mouth close again.

Kelly, with her hand balling into a fist over Myka’s laptop, brings the phone to her ear, brings the receiver to her lips, keeps her glare trained on Myka.

“Pete is _gone_ ,” and when that girl’s voice breaks, when Kelly says this, any anger or upset or defensiveness that Myka may have been feeling in this moment, sinks slowly away.  Right with her heart, into the pit of her stomach. “All I can do, all _you_ can do is pray, _actually fucking pray_ , to a god that I don’t even believe in, that no harm will come to him for the next eighteen months that he spends defusing bombs and dodging fucking shrapnel.  And you two _cabronas_ over here can’t even keep your fucking shit together long enough to make it through your _pinches_ _programas para las que no tengo dinero?  Nada en este mundo es valioso para tú._ Open your fucking mouths and _talk_ to each other like civilized human beings!”

The only sound to be heard after that is Kelly’s heavy breathing, Myka’s quickened pulse in her own ears, and what she’s fairly certain is the sound of Kelly’s heart about to beat right out of her chest.

All this silence is soon punctuated by Kelly slamming that cordless phone down on the desk. By the heavy huff of breath she heaves out in Myka’s direction.  By the quickness with which she turns, on her heels, and heads out of the office door.

“Kelly, I--”

“Neither of you talks to me,” Kelly is yelling over her shoulder, “until you learn how to talk to each other!”

In five seconds, she is out the front door.

When Myka picks up that phone and sets that phone to her ear, it is to near silence. The only sound she can hear is the too-heavy breathing of Helena Wells on the other end of that line.

Myka sighs audibly, frustrated.  She is full of reluctance and guilt. She is full of so many other feelings that she cannot quite verbalize.  That she cannot quite do anything more with than internalize.

She hears Helena’s voice for the first time in a week, “This is not okay.”

“No,” Myka says softly in response, “it is not.”

It feels like the first time they have agreed on anything since Valentine’s Day.

***

 _This is not okay._  

They have established that much and that is all they have established very much of. It is the only thing that brings them together.  The only place where they stand on common ground.

And it is fleeting.

To Myka, this feels like traveling in circles along unpaved roads.  It feels like occasionally coming across a freeway and finding Helena there.  For a moment in time Myka is there and Helena is there and the reason for them being there is that they agree with this notion that this is not okay.  They both know with great confidence that _here_ is exactly where they need to be.

But then Helena is running away in one direction, Myka moving reluctantly on in another. And suddenly, just like that and in no time at all, they are no longer on common ground.  In fact, they are miles and miles away from each other.

***

Whatever Helena has to say, it isn’t good enough for Myka. 

All Myka can hear, when she talks to Helena, all she can really think about is how she’s been played.  How Helena has manipulated the situation to work in her favor, to work in such a way that she can carry on doing something that she had either already been doing or has been wanting to do for a very long time.

That thing, Myka concludes, is Liam.

Helena insists it isn’t like that.  She insists Myka is overreacting.  But then she insists that this is what they agreed to.  This is what they both wanted.  As if Myka had ever been tempted by anyone, to be with someone other than Helena.  Like not needing to be with someone, for as long as she and Helena would not be physically together, would actually present itself as a struggle.

 _No_.

Myka tells Helena this. It would not be a struggle for her.  It would be _business as usual_ because _as usual_ no one, including Helena, could give two shits about loving Myka.  Everyone, and Myka means absolutely anyone, could fall in love with Helena.  And Helena could very well fall right back in love with absolutely anyone.

That, right there, is Myka’s biggest fear.  Helena out of love for her.  Helena moving on.  Helena keeping Myka too close and too hopeful when she eventually does.

“I am not a back up plan,” she’d told Helena at one point.  And she’d meant it.   “You don’t just get to keep me here while you move on.”

So whatever Helena says isn’t good enough and the next three conversations that they have end in shouting and crying and unheard and ignored proposals to break up, to move on, to take breaks, to forget any of this ever happened, to dissolve this asinine idea of an open relationship wherein the only thing open about it, and Myka did say this next thing out loud, is Helena’s legs.

They don’t talk for weeks.

It is now that, for the first time ever, Myka wants to break up with Helena.

***

“We shouldn’t be together.”

Myka doesn’t mean to say this out loud.  She’s not even sure where the thought came from but when Leena stretches her neck to meet Myka’s eyes, as best as she can in the dark, her expression is very knowing. And when Leena turns onto her belly and pulls herself up, to rest on her elbows and to gaze at Myka through that near darkness, her expression is sympathetic.

Leena is quiet and watching in one moment and in the very next she is pressing soft lips to Myka’s in a kiss that is understanding and gentle and intentionally for _this_.  When their lips part, Myka brings her hand to cup Leena’s cheek and pulls her slowly back into her and into another feather light kiss.  It’s a kiss that reminds her so much of Helena, that makes her miss Helena so much.

And Leena, as if able to read Myka’s thoughts, and sometimes Myka is more than certain that she _can_ , says to Myka, “You’ve loved her a long time.”

Myka can’t help the small puff of a laugh that escapes her, she cannot help the small smile that pulls into her lips.  There is far too much about this moment, about being with Leena, about thinking of Helena, about Leena _knowing_ so much of what she thinks about Helena, that Myka finds amusing.

“I’m sorry,” Myka apologizes, moving a hand to grasp Leena’s bare arm and letting that hand fall down Leena’s arm.  She's trailing fingers down soft skin and back up again.  “I shouldn’t be thinking about her.  Not after…”

“She’s still your girlfriend,”  Leena says this with a reluctant smile, with the slightest nod.  It’s not a question she’s asking.  Leena already knows the answer.  “You should always be thinking about her.” Myka’s smile grows and she rolls her eyes, she shakes her head.  “If I were your girlfriend, Myka,” Leena’s voice falls suddenly soft, Leena turns suddenly shy, and she looks away from Myka to stare at nothing at all, “I would hope you were always thinking about me.”

Myka sighs, still caressing Leena’s arm with the tips of her fingers.  Myka runs a single finger up the length of Leena’s arm, the column of her neck, to just below her chin, and to that space just below her lips. Myka lifts that finger over Leena’s lips and she touches the shy smile that forms there. 

“Right now,” Myka says softly, her smile falling as Leena presses a kiss to her finger, still over her lips, and Myka moves that just-kissed finger across Leena’s cheek. She fans the rest of her fingers out across the warmth of that cheek, “you are all that I want to think about.”

That shy smile grows into a grin and that grin transforms into a soft giggle, as Myka pulls Leena into her, hands around her abdomen and reaching, grasping, squeezing much lower than that.  Eventually that beautiful smiling, giggling girl is fully on top of her and straddling her waist.  She is there for only a moment before Myka turns her over and gently pulls that girl’s hips out from under her. 

Leena falls back and into pillows that have managed to stay in place at the head of Myka's bed.  She is lying back on the bed, reaching her hands around Myka’s neck, wrapping her legs around Myka’s waist, pulling Myka down into her.

She stops just short of a kiss, her smile disappearing into something more serious, her brows furrowing with something like concern.

“I knew,” Leena says softly and when Myka arches a curious brow at the beautiful girl below her, at this girl who has grown into this woman that Myka never knew she could see in this way, Leena adds, “about your relationship.  Tracy told me.”

Myka smirks and asks that girl below her, “Is this some sort of confession?” Leena bites down on her lip and nods. Her expression is all worry and guilt and bracing herself for a negative response.  But Myka just smiles. 

Myka smiles and she puffs out another soft laugh through her nose and closes the space that remains between them, to press her lips to Leena’s.  And this kiss, it is nothing like the last kiss. It is not sympathy or sorrow or understanding or regret. 

This kiss is all want and need and the beginning of something that Myka never knew that she could ever have.  That Myka never knew could make her feel like _this_.

***

Myka is alone when she wakes up but she hadn’t exactly been asleep when Leena left her room far too early that morning.  They’d had a thirty minute discussion about the pros and cons of Leena staying in Myka’s bed as opposed to returning to Tracy’s room, where Tracy had last seen her.

In the end a timely text message from Helena had determined the course that morning would take. Leena left her with a sympathetic smile, a very heated kiss, and a much gentler press of her lips against Myka’s after that.

When Myka finally looked at her phone, that text read: _I love you & miss you & I cannot do this without you._ So Myka called. And they’d talked. There had been no yelling this time, there had been very little crying.  But the result of that discussion, like the so many other discussions before it, had been more confusion.  Less understanding.  More frustration and heartache.  And way too many feelings and truths and confessions left unsaid.

Myka still doesn’t know what _this_ is, that Helena cannot do without her.  Myka still doesn’t know if _this_ is worth doing with Helena. 

Myka really doesn’t know if she wants to find out.

***

Myka is awake, or close enough to it, and she is lazily shuffling her way down the hall, into the living room, toward the distantly familiar smell of unburned food in the kitchen. 

She doesn’t know how but Leena and Tracy, where they stand at the stove with their backs to the living room, do not notice her presence.  So Myka hears Tracy telling Leena, “Don’t think I didn’t see you slipping back into my room at three o’clock this morning,” to which Leena’s only response is an untamed grin and, what Myka’s sure is, a completely unrelated licking of _something_ from her fingers.

Tracy swats at her and says, “Really, Leena, my _sister_?” And Leena, turning to Tracy with what looks like an exaggerated eye roll, tells her, “Do _not_ act put out.”  Tracy heaves out a sigh and glares at the other girl but the longer Leena smiles at her, that very big grin that makes Myka smile too, the less annoyed Tracy seems.

“Jesus Christ, I cannot be mad at you,” Tracy groans, turning back to the stove and tending to whatever they are cooking together, “even when you fuck my sister into sleeping in past ten o’clock in the morning.  Even after I told you,” and she turns to Leena, with a spatula in her hand, waving it at the other girl, “I _told_ you, don’t get mixed up in her shit with Helena right now.” Tracy turns back to the stove and adds, “She needs to work that out and… _this_ …” Tracy doesn’t turn to Leena this time but she still waves that spatula around in her direction, “is not going to help.”

“Relax, Tracy,” Leena sighs, tilting her head to the side, pointing at whatever Tracy is tending to, adding, “and stop stirring the potatoes so much, you’ll turn them into mush.”

“Stop stirring my _sister’s_ potatoes,” Tracy counters, “you’ll turn _her_ into mush.” She takes that moment to look at her watch, “Probably already too late.”

Leena laughs and Myka, from where she has stalled in the living room to watch this entire scene play out, brings a hand to her lips and covers her own smile. It is a smile she thinks she should not be smiling.  She should not _want_ to smile.  But Leena is infectious.  Everything about her, even now in the light of morning, _especially_ now, is absolutely intoxicating.

“Calm down,” Leena eventually tells Tracy, “I’m sure your sister couldn’t care less about me.”  And when Leena turns around, when she turns and leans back into the counter, her eyes are immediately on Myka’s.  As if they had always expected to find those eyes behind her and watching.  Studying her from head to toe. 

Myka is studying a head full of tight, brown curls.  Studying that gorgeous, shy smile.  The spaghetti-strapped top she wears, just over short pajama shorts that barely make it to her mid-thighs.  She is study gorgeous brown skin and so very much of it, in arms that stretch up now, in legs that are long exposed.  Myka is studying her all the way down to those bare toes, painted pink and yellow with the tiniest white dots and that makes Myka want to smile even more.

Not even _Helena_ painted her toes.

Leena _expected_ to find Myka’s eyes the whole time and that thought, Myka’s only thought as she stares into those knowing green eyes that catch hers watchingand cause her cheeks to burn and her face to flush, are only confirmed when Leena, without ever skipping a beat, says to Tracy, “Besides,” and she bites down on her lip for only a second before batting those lashes in Myka’s direction, “Myka loves Helena.”

An actual chill hits Myka, from the base of her neck to the very tips of her fingers and toes. She shivers and it is so unexpected and so apparent, that it makes Leena’s smile grow.  From flirtatious to amused that smile grows and Leena’s eyes finally pull away from hers.

How does she _do_ that?

“Yeah, sometimes I think she loves her a little too much,” Tracy says shaking her head. She drops the spatula to the counter and turns to Leena, “Actually, I’m really surprised she--”

“Good morning, Myka,” Leena interrupts, as she seems to know exactly where Tracy’s thoughts are headed, and when Tracy turns to her sister, the look on her face is suspicious.  Skeptical at best.

“Ophie,” Tracy greets her.

“Trace,” Myka greets in return, echoing that skeptical tone.

“You were being a creeper again, weren’t you?”

“I’m just walking into the kitchen of my own apartment,” Myka says, throwing her hands in the air in surrender and stepping the rest of the way into the dining area, just at the edge of the kitchen.  “Morning, Leena,” Myka smiles, taking a seat at the table.

Leena’s grin grows and the look Tracy gives to Myka, then to Leena, and back to Myka again, is bordering on disgust.  Playful disgust, Myka’s sure.  Myka’s… not quite sure at all.

“Stop it,” Tracy commands, pointing between the two of them.  “Stop this immediately.  This is not okay.  You,” she points to Leena, “inspect the potatoes. And you,” her glare is on Myka when Myka looks away from Leena, who turns obediently back to the stove, and to her disgruntled little sister.

“What?” Myka questions.

“ _Stop_ inspecting the potatoes,” Tracy points at her, making a jabbing motion with her finger in Myka’s direction.

Myka is amused by how very backward this seems, that Tracy is the one trying to keep _anyone_ at all in line. That Myka is the one stepping over that line in the first place.

It feels oddly… satisfying.

“You’re cooking?” Myka asks stretching, changing the topic but allowing her gaze to drift back to Leena.  Leena stretches to reach into cabinets overhead (shirt rising to reveal the soft skin of her back that Myka is definitely not imaging herself touching all over again) and pulls out three plates, sets them onto the counter.  “Are you feeling okay?”

“Well,” Tracy begins, “since _someone_ scared off the best cook in the house… by the way, mom and Jane want you to _call them_ … someone _else_ has to pick up the slack, right?”

“And by someone _else_ you mean Leena,” Myka teases. Leena turns a smile on her, in the middle of plating those cooked seasoned potatoes with bell peppers and onion, scrambled eggs and biscuits, too.  It looks as delicious as it smells.  Myka points to that plate, to the girl making it, “So, _this_ is why you invited her to stay with us for the weekend?”

Tracy rolls her eyes and turns around, facing the stove and away from Myka.  She mumbles, not nearly low enough for Myka to not hear what sounds like, “Well, I sure didn’t invite her to be your play thing.” Myka is certain that is exactly what Tracy says when Leena reaches and playfully smacks Tracy’s arm with furrowed brows.

Leena swiftly replaces that admonishing frown with a smile when she turns back to Myka, with a plate in her hand.  “Kelly’s still mad at you?”  she asks.

Myka sighs and lets her head fall into her hand, “As you can see, Leena,” she sits straight again as Leena comes to her side, sets a plate down in front of her, “I’m really good at alienating people.” 

Leena’s hand is next on her shoulder and squeezing gently.   It is a touch that Myka knows well, that takes her back to the diner, to the hundreds of times she has sat in that diner and felt that gentle squeeze on her shoulder and turned to that admiring smile beside her.

It had been once young and playful, innocent and fully of giggles.  Now older and flirtatious, _intentional_.  Myka knew enough about Leena to know that she’d had a crush on her for the longest time but Myka had been so caught up in her own crush, her own love for Helena, that Leena had rarely, before now, crossed her mind. 

Not, at least, in _that way_.

“I’m sure she’ll come around, eventually,” Leena offers, pulling Myka from her thoughts as she bends to press a kiss into Myka’s cheek, while Tracy is still turned to the stove.  Myka reaches and that reach is almost involuntary, like muscle memory from her too few days spent with Helena, with Helena in very short shorts, with Helena in very short shorts in such close proximity to her her reach.  Myka reaches, bringing her hand to one of those bare thighs just beneath very short shorts, and runs her fingers gently down that bare thigh to just below Leena’s knee and back up again.

And as Tracy turns back to them, Myka retracts her hand.  It is just in time for Tracy to not see but the look that Tracy gives them both, because Leena is biting her lip and Myka’s hand is still out of sight and they are still in too-close proximity to one another, is all knowing.

Tracy knows, even better than Myka, what is happening.  Tracy knows, more than even Myka knows, that _this_ is not a thing that _needs_ to happen.

She simply shakes her head in response.

***

Kelly, in her frustration, has been staying with Jane and Jeannie, and they make it a point, Jane most of all, to bring this fact to Myka’s attention. Because aside from Claudia, who is only there part time, they had rather successfully emptied the house of children. Freed themselves of their offspring.  Freed themselves of those who were _not_ their offspring.

Yet, here they are. Sharing their house with one such offspring that is not theirs.  One such offspring who refuses to return home until Myka and Helena, not even under the same roof but an ocean apart, figure their shit out.

“We love Kelly,” Jane tells Myka in the bookstore later that week, “she isn’t a bother, she is always more than welcome in our home and I’m sure Pete being overseas isn’t helping this situation between the two of you but… she has a home of her own, Myka.  With _you_.  Get her back into it or your mother and I are disowning you.”

It is just one more relationship that Myka has to mend before it falls apart at the seams.

***

“Get off of me.”

“No.”

Myka is lying on top of Kelly.

She’d found her in Pete’s bedroom in the Lattimer home.  No surprise there, she’d thought.  It is where she had taken up the most space in the house, according to Jane.  And when Myka found her there, she’d been reading one of Pete’s comic books.  Now that comic book was cast to the side somewhere and Kelly was immobile but _trying_ not to be, beneath the weight of Myka’s entire body.

“I will hurt you,” Kelly threatens.

“Despite our being somewhat at odds, I imagine Helena would still murder you if you did.”

“I doubt that,” Kelly says with her voice now muffled against a Ninja Turtles pillow. “At this point, I’d guess she loves me about five inches more than she loves you.”

“Harsh, Kelly,” Myka is unfazed when she says this directly into Kelly’s ear.  “A whole five inches?”

“You heard me,” Kelly pushes up but it is useless and a groan escapes her as she falls to the bed again.  “ _Ay que la chingada_ ,” she sighs as she gives up, “ _cabrona_.”

“And people wonder how I have mastered the art of swearing in Spanish,” Myka smiles, lowering her cheek to rest against the back of Kelly’s head.  “Kelly, I miss you.  Please come home.”

“No,” Kelly breathes out but it doesn’t sound like a protest.  It doesn’t sound like she’s actually saying _no_.  It sounds more like she’s saying, “yes but only if you beg.” 

So Myka begs.

“Please please _please_ Kelly.  I miss my beautiful Mexican sister,” Myka whines, “I miss your Spanish rants, your Spanish swears.  I miss your Spanish rice most of all,” and Myka is fairly certain that the sudden vibration-like movement beneath her is the hint of laughter.

Confirmation of that laugh comes when Kelly turns her head to the side, stretching her neck in an attempt to see Myka, and says, “It’s a miracle you haven’t starved yet.”

“Who says I’m not starving?”

“The beautiful Mexican sister that you are currently lying on top of says that you are _definitely_ not starving,” Kelly teases.

“Well. Tracy, being the clever one that she is, invited Leena over for the weekend,” Myka sighs.  “Apparently working in a diner since birth is a really great way to learn how to cook.  She made _papas_ for breakfast. How come you never make me _papas_?”

“Leena?” Kelly questions with another soft laugh that causes her to vibrate below Myka’s weight again.  “That explains the suddenly good mood.”

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

Myka, with her guard dropped, suddenly finds herself hoisted to the side, as Kelly turns back and pushes Myka off of her and to the other side of the bed. Myka goes reluctantly, falling into pillows atop that bed and sighing.

“They take too long,” Kelly sighs, too.  “You’re always in a rush.”

Myka allows her head to lull to the side and she affixes her gaze upon that other girl, “What?”

“ _Papas_ ,”  Kelly clarifies, “have you talked with your wife?”

“Yes,” Myka smirks, turning to face the ceiling, “at three o’clock this morning.”

***

**_I love you & miss you & I cannot do this without you._ **

_Myka had been half asleep, telling Leena she should stay. Trying to convince her why she didn’t need to go.  Leena had asked her why she even wanted her to stay and Myka didn’t have an answer. Myka didn’t really have a clue other than knowing that the second Leena walked out of that door, she’d be alone with herself and her thoughts and her thoughts of Helena and what this night, what these actions and what she’s done with someone who isn’t Helena, would really mean for her.  For them. For their future together._

_But then she’d received that text and glanced at her phone, knowing exactly who it was.  Knowing there was no way she could get through this night without thinking of_ her _.  Even Leena had known exactly who that was.  So she’d smiled and left her with that kiss, the smaller kiss to follow, then slipped out of her bedroom and into a dark hallway, leaving Myka alone. Alone with herself, alone with her thoughts.  All over again._

_Right where she’d started._

**_What is it that you cannot do?_ **

****

_Twenty seconds later, Myka’s phone was ringing._

_“I thought I told you,” Myka began when she answered because she was feeling a strange combination of vulnerable and guilty, sentimental and lonely, “no more phone calls at three o’clock in the morning.” It’s meant to be a tease, even if the wounds were still fresh._

_“I don’t want to fight anymore,” Helena responded, ignoring that tease entirely.  Her voice soft and breaking and full of more sadness than Myka had heard from that voice in a while._

_It broke her heart to hear it again.  After so much happiness, after so much time spent together or relatively together.  Not even the arguments they’d had in London could compare to the sadness Myka had felt in these past few weeks.  That she imagined Helena had also felt in these past few weeks. That she_ knew _Helena was feeling because she’d gone so far out of her way to make sure Helena was feeling it.  To make sure Helena felt exactly the way that she felt. The way she felt Helena_ should _feel, too._

_She knew Helena was feeling it, too._ S _he cold hear it in that girl’s voice, in the way she barely spoke, in the way her words almost didn’t make it out of her throat._

_Myka could not, still cannot, remember a time when they had fought so aggressively.  When she had felt so completely disconnected from Helena.  So hurt and pushed aside and unwilling to move forward with Helena by her side._

_She tried to remember their best moments… that feeling she felt when she’d foolishly asked Helena to marry her by the lake almost two years ago.  She tried to recall the kiss they’d shared then, the numerous kisses they’d shared before and since. The first time they’d ever kissed._

_She tried to remember the way it felt when she’d seen Helena again in London.  The way it felt to leave Helena behind._

_Things were not the same.  But what she had thought, in these past few weeks, to be her waning love for the woman on the other end of that phone line?  Myka knew now, at the sound of that voice behind tears and trying desperately to mask that sadness… Myka knew now that things weren’t waning.  They were just... off._

_Things were just off and no matter how off they felt, the off would, someday, go away.  Myka could feel that much already.  The off would wane and shrink and fall away and somehow, even with Liam there, even with Leena here, things could feel right again.  Their lives would move on.  Their lives would move forward together._

_Somehow, being with Leena made Myka’s want, her absolute need, for Helena just… grow._

_“I love you,” is what Myka had said next and she didn’t know why_ that _, why_ now _, but Helena had been speaking, she’d been saying…words?  Myka was sure of at least that.  And all Myka could think about, as that woman spoke, was Leena. All Myka could think about was Leena and how Leena was not Helena.  About how focused and sensitive and_ responsive _Leena had been in her arms, beneath her touch, and how very different from Helena,_ her _Helena, that made her._

_Leena was not Helena but being with Leena, being without Helena, enduring Helena’s absence and the distance and the sound of her voice on a phone from so many thousands of miles away, after being with Leena… caused Myka’s heart to swell with an intensity unlike anything she’d felt in the past few weeks._

_“Myka…”  Helena’s voice failed her before Myka ever had a chance to interrupt._

_“I love you, Helena,” and Myka’s voice was the next to go but she still managed a soft, almost inaudible, “chat with me?”_

_Helena’s only response to that had been an even more softly spoken, “Okay.”_

_Ten minutes later, they were face to face, or as close to face to face as they were currently going to get.  Their images mirrored one another, both laying down on their sides, faces half-buried into pillows.  If not for the glow of the laptop on Myka’s end, the obvious day light on Helena’s end, and if not for the lack of that other body, so very far away, Myka’s sure she’d be able to reach out and touch that other girl.  Actually touch her._

_They hadn’t said a word to one another, other than to say hello. They just laid there, quietly, staring at the other’s image, wiping away tears, thinking of words to say._

_Myka, at least, was still thinking of words to say._

_And then she was reaching, not physically but mentally, for that notepad she’d given up so long ago.  That she hadn’t needed in years.  Not since she was fifteen had she needed to really think about what she wanted to say to Helena before saying it.  Not since she was fifteen did she even think that maybe she_ should _think a little more about what she wanted to say… before saying it._

_She was reaching and then she was thinking, writing those words and when they came together, when they finally sounded right and when her lips finally moved and her throat opened up and her voice finally worked?_

_“I’m sorry.”_

_It was the first thing she could think to say.  Even if she didn’t really feel like she needed to be the first one saying it.  Even if she felt more hurt than guilt.  Even if she felt less at fault for any of this, for_ all _of this than Helena, she felt, even more strongly than any of those things, that it needed to be said._

_“I am so sorry, Helena.”_

_Helena didn’t say anything.  And if it was that she expected more from Myka, she was certainly going to get it.  But if it was that she just didn’t have the words to say, to respond to that apology… Myka would provide enough words for the both of them._

_“I’m not going to say that it doesn’t matter, how I feel. But even feeling this way… doesn’t excuse the way I handled this.  The way I’ve treated you.  The things I’ve said…”_

_“Myka--”_

_“I don’t want to share you, Helena,” Myka continued, shaking her head and sitting up onto her elbows, propping her cheek up against the palm of her hand.  Helena mirrored that new position, too.  “I don’t want to lose you either.  And if I thought I could avoid losing you by ignoring this thing altogether, I realize now that not talking about this, with you, is exactly how I am going to lose you. So,” Myka sighed and ran both of her hands through her hair, adjusting her position so that she was on her belly, facing her laptop head on, “let’s talk.”_

_“Don’t apologize to me,” is where Helena began. “I’m sorry, this is another one of my stupid ideas and I think… you felt pressured to agree to it. I think… that I knew you wouldn’t be okay with this and I selfishly tried to convince myself that you would be.”_

_“What I have wanted to know, Helena,” Myka slid a hand from out of her hair, down to palm her forehead, and closed her eyes for a moment, “is why you need this.  Why you need_ him _.  Why you need me, too.  Because I told you what I wanted for myself.  I told you what I wanted to give you.   We could have put everything on hold.  You could be with absolutely anyone you want to. I would put more effort into pretending not to care.  This could hurt so much less than it does, Georgie.  And right now, it hurts a lot.”_

_“You have been my friend… my_ best _friend for a long time, Myka.”  Helena fell quiet and Myka opened her eyes to find her sitting up, lifting her laptop into her lap and leaning closer to the screen of it.  “Breaking up for reasons of practicality… it does not feel like a separation of convenience.  It does not feel like a separation that is temporary. It does not just feel like a relationship that has run its course in time, that I can just… be over and move on from and…_ heal _.” Helena sighed and ran a hand through long hair, looking away from the screen to wipe tears from her face before looking back at Myka.  “It feels like losing you.  Forever. It feels like I’m giving up the one person in this world… who knows me better than anyone else. And I don’t think… I do not think that I could live without you, Myka.  I don’t think… that I even want to try to find out.”_

_If Myka had felt at all mixed in her emotions before that, before Helena had said those words acknowledging their connection, confirming to Myka where, exactly, she stood in Helena’s life if she stood anywhere at all anymore… If Myka had felt at all mixed in her emotions before_ then _, the way she’d felt after was an incomparable swarm of feelings that both made her eyes burn and her lips curl upward.  It both made her stomach turn and her heart swell._

_But no matter how good she felt and no matter how simultaneously bad she felt beneath all of that good, there was still that one question burning at the precipice of so many other questions she’d had yet to find the answers to._

_“Why Liam?”_

_Helena fell quiet again and this time Myka’s eyes were on hers, on that screen in front of her and Helena’s eyes were almost gazing back at her. Gazing at the screen where that image of Myka illuminated._

_Then, hesitantly, softly, with great trepidation, “I trust him.”_

***

Kelly is staring at Myka in a way that makes Myka brush a hand cautiously over her face to be sure she hasn’t indeed grown another eye or nose or, and this is the most likely of the three, shown up with a face full of breakfast potatoes. Eventually, Kelly arches a single brow and tilts her head to the side, her expression turning from suspicion to skepticism and soon after that into an expectant smile.

“That’s it?”

Myka arches her own brow, conjures up her own questioning stare.

“She trusts him? That’s it?”

“Well, no,” Myka says with a shake of her head.

“Oh, I see. You are just ending the story,” Kelly nods, catching on to that perplexed silence.  “Private conversation with your wife.”

Myka smiles and tilts her head to the side, too, “I would be _more_ than willing to finish this conversation,” and Myka rolls herself off of Pete’s bed, “perhaps over a pajama clad welcome home dinner,” Myka reaches back to slap Kelly, playfully, on her thigh, “with whoever is willing to come home with me?”

“Myka--”

“Kelly, I’m sorry. I mistreated you and I have no excuse.  I have nothing to explain that away other than to say I am,” Myka shrugs, lifting her arms into the air in utter defeat, “utterly hopeless when Helena is away.” She lets her hands fall and Kelly regards her for a while with more of that skepticism. 

“You two have always been like that,” Kelly sighs, sitting up, lowering her head to her hands to rub her eyes.  “When you are together,” she sighs, hands moving back into her laps, tilting her head back to eye Myka once more, “you are really good together.  But when you guys are apart…” Kelly’s voice trails off and she just shakes her head.

“Yeah,” Myka nods, “you’re right.  We suck at communicating.  As often as we do talk, we never talk about the right things. But last night? I think… we almost got it right.”

“Mm,” Kelly’s skeptical look turns even more so and she tilts her head to the side, “and in the words of my favorite singer, Brandy, whom I both love and adore,” Myka arches a brow in wait as Kelly lifts a solitary finger and wags it at her, “almost doesn’t count.”

This makes Myka smile.  A smile that grows into a grin, into soft laughter, and soon into much louder laughter than that.

“Did you really just throw a _Brandy_ lyric at me?”

“Brandy is _wise_ ,” Kelly insists.

“Oh, here we go,” Myka says, moving further away from the bed, from Kelly, and toward the door.

“I’m serious, Myka,” Kelly is on her knees atop of that bed now, “have you ever loved somebody so much it makes you cry?  Have you _ever, cabrona_?”

“I’m going to take your hurling of scripture from the church of divas at me as a sign that you forgive me and are blessing me with a welcome home dinner tonight,” Myka smirks, turning to Kelly only momentarily before she steps through Pete’s door, into the hallway, “and then I’m going to turn and walk away.”

Kelly is across that bed, throwing her feet to the floor quickly as Myka heads out of the door.

“You know, the whole point of a welcome home dinner,” Kelly says, fast on Myka’s heels as she exits Pete’s room, “is for the person doing the welcoming, and the _apologizing_ , to also do the cooking.  Not the other way around.”

Myka laughs, “Not if the person doing the homecoming wants an unburned home to return to.”

***

_“I can’t explain it,” Helena said softly._

_“Try,” Myka urged in response._

_  
Helena’s voice was low when she said “okay” and she moved the laptop again, she pulled it off of the bed and stood, moving toward her bathroom._

_This made Myka suddenly overwhelmed with the fact that she knew that room of Helena’s so well.  That she could picture Helena in her room, remember herself in Helena’s room, and know where everything was, almost exactly.  Down to Helena’s favorite bottle of perfume, centered on a silver decorative platter that sat on her vanity amidst so many other_ things _._

_It was that same perfume that drove all the boys crazy. Made them not know what to do with themselves.  Although, Myka suspects, those boys did eventually learn what to do with themselves._

_It was a lesson that Myka, too, had eventually,_ finally _learned.  And thinking about it now, allowing that particular thought to distract her at this of all times, makes Myka smile despite herself._

_When Helena settles into view again, Myka allows that smile to fall away._

_“He makes me feel closer to you,” Helena sighed, drawing her hands into her hair.  “When I’m with him.  Somehow, it just reminds me of how much I love you. How much I miss you. I know that sounds, at the very least, ridiculous--”_

_“It sounds_ incredibly _ridiculous.”_

_Even to Myka, who had known then, who knows even now, what that feels like… what it feels like to be drawn closer to someone through intimacy with another person… it sounds absolutely ridiculous._

_“But it is about you, Myka,” Helena says softly, “it has always been about you.”  Helena was then wiping tears from her cheeks, in the silence that fell between them, before adding, “I don’t know what else to say.”_

_“Tell me,” Myka sighed into another long moment of silence that fell between them, that widened that oceanic-sized gap that existed between her and Helena, and eventually asked, even if she didn’t really want to know, “everything.”_

***

“Thank the gods you’re back, Kelly.  I was genuinely worried about the future of Ophie’s diet.”

“My diet is just fine, Trace.  Thank you.”

“No H, no Kelly, no _Mom_?  Does she think I’m going to cook for her everyday? Ha!”

“No, instead she tried recruiting _me_ as your replacement.”

“Leena, you’re the only person who could both cook as well as, if not better than, Kelly--”

“ _Cabrona_ , no one cooks better than me.  Not even precious Leena over here.”

“I will give Raquel that.  Her chilaquiles are _magical_.”

“—and… _and_ give Ophie the levels of attention she requires in order to function as a normal, civilized, human being.”

“Civility was not in the terms of our agreement.”

“Girl, leave your sister alone.”

“ _You_ leave my sister alone.  My sister leave _you_ alone.”

“ _Trace_.”

“Yes, _Ophie_?”

“Tracy.”

“Yes, _Leena_?”

“ _Romeo_ …”

“Yes, Kelly?”

“ _Leena_?”

“Yes, Raquel?”

“Sorry, that one was meant for Myka.  Myka?”

“Kelly?”

“Can I see you… over _there_?”

“I’m kind of in the middle of watching this show… ow! Okay, okay!  I’m _coming_.”

There is a long pause and Myka’s eyes catch Leena’s just as they begin to roll.

Leena smiles and it is _relentless_.

Tracy rolls her eyes and smacks the leg of the smiling girl seated to her left.

Tracy glares at her sister seated to her right.

Myka’s cheeks must flush, judging by the expression on Tracy’s face.

Judging by the heat rising in her chest.

The look that Kelly gives Myka is suspicious, as usual, as she rises from the couch.

Myka stands and follows her into the hallway anyway.

Kelly pulls her into her bedroom.

***

“You had sex with Leena.”

“Kelly--”

“I _know_ you did.  I knew the second Leena and Tracy got home.  Leena gave you one glance, didn’t even say hello, and you almost choked on your dinner.  _Julieta_ was not joking when she said you couldn’t tell a lie to save your life.”

Myka is twisting her lips to the side and turning slightly away from her because Kelly is right, she cannot lie for anything in the world.  She could omit truths and bend realities and prolong revelations if she wanted to.  Revelations like the fact that she’d learned, just the night before, that her sister was not entirely her sister.  But she could not, in any way nor with any skill, _lie_. Especially not to her friends. To one of her closest friends.

But Kelly, Myka decides with a tiny boost of confidence, knows her far too well if she knows, just by looking at her, exactly how far she and Leena had gone.

“You, of course, came to this conclusion by mere observation alone,” Myka says adopting, quite well, her sister’s look of skepticism from earlier in the morning… despite bearing a more striking resemblance to her father compared to Tracy’s uncanny resemblance to their mother.

“Yes,” Kelly nods, resting one hand against her hip and shrugging.  Then says, much more quietly, far more quickly, “ _after_ Tracy told me.”

“And there we have it,” Myka smiles, throwing her hands up with a knowing disbelief before letting them fall to her sides again.  She heads for the door.

“Does _Julieta_ know?”

Myka pauses and throws her head back before turning back to Kelly and letting her head fall to the side and telling her, “She knows enough.”

“ _Romeo_ ,” Kelly is stepping back to her bed, falling back on that bed with a defeated sigh, in _absolute_ defeat and, Myka thinks, disappointment is there in that sigh, too, “you know that I really don’t give a shit what the two of you do or don’t do in your relationship as long as you’re both happy, as long as we are _all_ happy.”  Kelly sits up.  “I couldn’t care less what you two decide to work out. Open relationship, closed relationship, swinging parties?  You guys want to get married at a _pinche_ fuzzy convention?  I don’t give a fuck, do what you want but _this--_ ”

“Furries,” Myka interjects, throwing caution to the hurricane wind that is brewing before her.

“What?”

“You said fuzzies,” and this makes Myka puff out a soft laugh, “but they’re called _furries_.”

“Woman, whatever the fuck they’re called, you obviously know what I’m talking about!” Myka’s laughter only grows with Kelly’s frustrated outburst.  “But _this_ , like I had been saying before I was so rudely interrupted, _you guys_ not talking when it matters most?”  Kelly runs a hand through her hair in that way she definitely learned from being around Helena so much, “ _This_ is the kind of thing that always spirals out of control for you two. And when it spirals, it doesn’t just knock you two _locas_ on your asses. It gets everybody else, too.”

“Like I said, we talked.  She knows _enough_.  She knows more than I ever knew.”

“Right, okay. Well, the next time your _Julieta_ goes to visit her English teacher girlfriend back in Texas and doesn’t tell you, I will remind you of this conversation.”  That hurts in ways that Myka cannot even put into words, that makes that smile slip from her face and that previous amusement fall crashing, shattering to the ground. So she remains quiet and still and with her mouth kept shut.  “The next time your _Julieta_ gets kissed by a boy and doesn’t tell you, I will be reminding you of this conversation because the first thing you’re going to do, Myka, when she does something like that to _you_ , _again_ , is come running to me to tell me about it.  Pissed off and hurt and ready to call it quits.”

“I’m sorry, Kelly,” Myka sighs, “that I pulled you into this and put all of my bullshit on you and made you feel so uncomfortable that you needed to leave but I promise you,” and Myka is putting her hands on Kelly’s shoulders, sitting down beside her. “Helena and I have talked. It was all of the talking that we could handle for now but it was _good_.”

She can see that Kelly is still not convinced, still trying, for the most part, to mask her skepticism with an air playfulness.

Myka takes Kelly’s hand and pulls it into her lap.  “I just… didn’t want to turn it into something… if it’s nothing.”

“I’m sure Juliet thought the same thing with Liam.  I _know_ she did.”

“It was one night. Leena was just _there_ …”

Kelly furrows her brows and shakes her head, “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Don’t reduce Leena into _nothing_.  She’s Tracy’s best friend.  You have known each other for most of your lives. She has had a crush on you for half of hers.  Don’t _do_ that to her.”

Myka sighs, “You’re right, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to imply that she’s nothing.  I… I care about Leena I just don’t know that this… is going to turn into more than last night.  I just don’t know that what happened wasn’t a result of everything that’s _been_ happening.  With Helena… with my dad…” 

“I think that’s something worth figuring out,” Kelly nods, “because even if you and Juliet make this work _somehow_ … you still need to consider Leena and her feelings and her expectations.”

“Leena _knows_.”

“She’s seventeen. Does she _really_?”

Myka finds it difficult to argue with the idea that maybe this is a question she needs to know the answer to.  She finds it even more difficult to concede to Kelly’s wisdom.  However fraught it is at times, she is, in this very moment, more wise than Myka has ever given her credit for.  Making more sense than Myka could conjure up for herself in the past week or so of her life that she has spent pouting and fighting and succumbing to strange new desires.

She relents, eventually.  Because she is losing her grip.  In all of her effort to retain it, Myka has almost completely lost it and she is ready, more than ready, to retain that grip on her life again.

“You’re right,” Myka says with a brief sigh, slumping her shoulders, tightening her grasp on Kelly’s hand in her lap.  “I need to talk to Leena, too. Regardless.  I need to… I don’t know,” Myka shrugs and leans into Kelly, resting her forehead on Kelly’s shoulder, groaning her defeat loudly into it.

“Pull your shit together?” Kelly offers and it makes Myka laugh softly. Kelly laughs, too. And when Myka sits up, she comes face to face with the beautiful smile that has been vacant from her friend’s face for so long.  For way too long.

“Yes,” Myka nods, “I need to pull my shit together.  Does the goddess Brandy have a song for that?”

“Sittin’ up in my room,” Kelly answers without hesitation before singing,  “back here thinking about you.”

“I’m just a mess,” Myka sighs thoughtfully.

“Yes, Myka, you are,” Kelly nods, “now please, give me my hand back.” Kelly tugs her hand away from Myka’s grasp and gives her a _look_. “You know, sometimes I think you forget that I’m straight.”

Myka’s only response to that is one very big grin and wag of her eyebrow.

***

 _She’d been upset, Helena said, not about Myka forgetting to call her on her birthday or the day before or the day after.  It was easy to blame the time zones, to blame the fact that they’d always gotten their times mixed up.  Because they_ always _got their times mixed up.  At least once a month they did.  So, she wasn’t upset about the forgetting, about her birthday, about Myka forgetting about her birthday._

_Helena was upset because it had been a year.  One entire year since she last saw Myka. She couldn’t help that she was upset, she just was.  She tried not to be, she tried to ignore it.  She tried to reason with the upset part of her brain, she had even tried distraction. She had allowed herself room for a distraction, even if that upset still lingered just at the cusp of it._

_Hanging out with Liam,_ just _hanging out, was meant to be a distraction.  She was feeling awful, both about Myka and about the fact that he had asked her to go out for her birthday an entire week before and she had declined.  And it hadn’t been the first time she’d declined.  She had declined going out a week before that, too.  Three weeks before that.  Four nights before that._

_For all of the time they did spend together, there were so many times that they didn’t.  That Helena just couldn’t find the motivation, just couldn’t put forth the extra effort, to leave her house, to interact with people, to take her mind away from her work and away from the things that didn’t necessarily work at all. Things that didn’t work like long distances, like relationships, like distracting oneself from the reality that is both of those things tied together into the very maddening conclusion that was… is her life._ Their _life._

_So Helena felt awful, both about Myka being so far and about brushing off Liam but since she was there and Liam was there and Myka was not there, she could at least work on fixing the thing (or at least the appearance of the thing) that was most within her reach.  And maybe, at the very same time, the appearance of that thing would make for a great distraction from the other thing that was neither fixed nor making an appearance anytime soon.  Such as the  aforementioned long distance relationship._

_Liam, as a distraction, worked only for a little while._

_It worked through a friendly walk through the city to reach the restaurant where Liam had made actual reservations.  It worked so well that Helena didn’t even think about the fact that Liam had made actual reservations.  Only about the fact that the place was popular and busy and that they’d eaten there with his friends before.  With friends that were mostly his but could almost be her friends, too._

_It worked through dinner and cocktails and dessert and more cocktails and another cocktail even after that.  Helena hadn’t been paying much attention to Liam then either. Not until later when she thought back to the things they’d talked about.  To him bringing up the guy back home that he talked about regularly.  To the debates they would have over seemingly nothing.  To his frustration over that guy not really understanding or agreeing with the way Liam felt about relationships and monogamy and not wanting to settle down.  “My friend,” Liam would usually call him, even though Helena herself had caught on long ago to just how friendly this friend of Liam’s had truly been, “thinks I’m foolish.”_

_Helena told Myka that she could and mostly does laugh at this conversation now because she had been so busy trying to distract herself from other things that she hadn’t really allowed herself to hear what Liam was saying.  When he spoke of commitments and monogamy and settling down as though it would bring about the end of times, he wasn’t just talking aimlessly about those things._

_He was fishing for Helena to respond, to say anything at all about it.  About the way_ she _felt about those things._

_“Being tied to one person… just the thought of it…” he had said over dinner to Helena then.   “But it doesn’t make me incapable of loving someone I truly care about.”_

_Now Helena had fallen quiet and was looking elsewhere, away from Myka and away from the image of Myka on her laptop.  But Myka was looking straight at Helena, watching her as if trying to understand all of the complexities that made up this woman. Because Helena’s shoulders slumped and her hand was next in her hair and Helena was letting go of a heavy sigh. And finally, Helena turned back to look at Myka with red eyes, wet with unshed tears._

_“He walked me home,” Helena said softly and she went on to explain how Liam had walked her home and to her door and how not even this was unusual because he had done it many times before.  They’d studied there and he’d spent evenings there and they’d had friendly conversation without any hint to anything more but for some reason that night…_

_That night he just decided that he needed to know._

_They are quiet again and Myka is wiping away her own tears and she is thinking of something else to say.  Something other than what is currently sitting at the tip of her tongue.  But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that she wants to know more than this._

_“You slept with him,” she said and she didn’t realize, until she saw the horrified look that pulled into Helena’s face, that she had not even posed this as a question.  That she’d just said it as if it had happened.  She’d said it as if it was already the truth, already real enough for her to believe because she already believed it was real in her own mind and had believed it to be real for a lot longer than the past two weeks._

_But Helena was shaking her head and finally allowing those tears to fall and saying no, over and over and over.  She was saying no and Myka’s name was falling from her lips in the saddest way that Myka had ever heard Helena say her name._

_“I did not,” she cries, “Myka, I didn’t.  Please believe me.  I just trusted him… I_ trust _him still.”_

_“Trust him with what?  To make you happy?  Keep you satisfied?  To keep it a secret from your girlfriend?  And please remember that I have seen the captions on those photos he posted online, Helena.  From Valentine’s Day? I’ve seen the comments he’s left for you, too.”_

_“I trust him to not take advantage of me,” Helena said wiping at tears, “when I miss you the most.”_

_Helena said that after that kiss, and before Myka came to London, whenever she missed Myka the most, Liam was there.   Liam was there and it wasn’t sexual but it was emotional.  It was what she had with Claire in high school.  It was what she had with Jeannie Jr.  What she, at one point, had with Myka, too.  Because there are times when Helena can’t stand to miss Myka, to miss the warmth of Myka sleeping beside her, any more than she already does and Liam would be there to hold her and talk to her and nothing, absolutely nothing more._

_So she trusts him because she knows him and she knows he understands.  She made sure that he understood, after that first kiss. Even if it had been days later, even if the words had not come out as sure and as strong and as affronted as they should have, she made sure he understood after that first kiss that there would be no other kisses._

_Not without Myka knowing._

_And there weren’t.  Not then.  Not before London. Not before Myka tried to put things on hold.  Tried to keep this very thing that was happening from ever happening in the first place. But Liam had proven himself a formidable foe, as Myka now likes to think of him.  With all of his talk of openness, with all of his fear and disdain for settling down.  He had planted that seed in Helena’s mind and it had grown like a wildflower._

_Just like her Helena, that flower, was longing to be wild and free._

_“He is taking advantage of you, Helena,” Myka sighed. “Maybe not sexually. Maybe he isn’t forcing himself onto you but he’s taking advantage of your emotions if he had you convinced that this is the answer to all of our problems. If you turned right around and convinced me, too.”_

_“Our problem is one problem,” Helena told her, still through tears. “An ocean, that’s it. Without distance… if we take that distant feeling away--”_

_“Helena, this is not a fairy tale.  There is no easy fix to this.  You can’t just substitute…”  Myka stopped and she sighed and she ran her hands into her hair, allowing her eyes to close in frustration._

_Myka wanted to tell Helena that this, like the time she forced them to be apart, is one of the stupidest ideas she has ever had. That Liam has ever had on her behalf.  If she hadn’t thought that before, back in London when it first came up, she was surely thinking it now.  After trial and after error.  Because taking away that distant feeling, that is one thing on its own.  But replacing that distant feeling with other people and intimacy and now jealousy… that is another beast of problems entirely._

_“The distance,” Myka said, opening her eyes and calming her voice, “is not the problem.  The ocean is not the problem.  The problem, Helena, is the man who convinced you to convince your girlfriend to be in an open relationship knowing, very well, that he would benefit from it.”_

_Helena fell quiet.  Still wiping at tears as they cascaded down her cheeks but completely quiet._

_“This isn’t high school sleepovers with Jeannie Jr., it isn’t cuddling up to Claire,” Myka said with a shake of her head, palming her forehead, “and it definitely isn’t me and you and everything we have ever had together._ He _… is not me.  If he is anyone, he is Jules and you are barely fourteen and pregnant all over again.”_

_It wasn’t the right thing to say.  Myka realized this as soon as the tears begin to fall. It was probably the absolute worst thing she could have thought to say but it was entirely unmatched by the guilt that Helena must have felt in that moment because_ she _was the one who cried and_ she _was the one who apologized._

_All of the crying and apology and pleading came out in sob after sob after sob and Myka almost could not stand to sit here and watch Helena as she cried like this.  As she lay her head into her arms, just over her vanity, and cried more and more. She cried so much that her father eventually knocked on her door and came into her room. She told him to please just leave her alone and beyond that, more tears, more sobbing, more pleading._

_“I’m sorry,” Myka eventually said, when the crying had gone on too long.  When her heart could not take the sight of those tears anymore.  “I’m sorry and I wish I could just be okay with knowing but more importantly, I wish I didn’t feel like just… letting go.”_

_Myka feels like letting go.  Of all of this.  Drama and unnecessary heartache.  Of having to worry about Liam, about what Liam is doing to Helena. About having to worry about Leena and all of these feelings about Leena that she’s not entirely sure have anything to do with Leena._

_Myka needs to let go but not like this.  Not when she’s faced only with a laptop, a screen, the heartbreaking image of her girlfriend, thousands of miles away and crying until she can barely breathe._

_“I have one more question,” Myka said, “and then I don’t want to know anything else, Helena.  I don’t want to hear about you and him ever again.”_

_“Myka…”_

_“Is it just him?”  Myka asked, “Is he the only one?”_

_Helena’s nod was quick and confident.  She said softly, “It’s just him.”_

_Myka told her after a deep and thoughtful sigh, “I don’t know if… that makes me feel better or worse.”_

***

“It’s cute,” Leena’s voice is saying softly, whispering into Myka’s ear, while Leena’s hand is resting somewhere over her other ear and Leena’s fingers are twirling and twisting themselves in the loose curls of Myka’s hair.

Myka’s turning to look at that younger girl, at the soft smile that graces her lips and grows when Myka’s eyes catch hers, at the rise in those perfect brows that seem to be waiting with anticipation for Myka to say anything at all.

Finally, she asks Leena, “What is?”

“That Kelly calls Helena your wife.”

Myka smiles softly now, too, but she knows her expression is more curious than anything else. She knows it even more when Leena’s smile falls and Leena twists her lips to the side and looks elsewhere, away from Myka’s eyes, in a rare moment of Leena’s own suddenly self-conscious thoughts.

“I asked her to marry me once,” Myka says and this gets Leena’s attention again. Green eyes, drifting back to her own, slowly and with some amusement as Leena smiles once again, as those eyes smile right along with those lips.  “More than once, if you figure in the numerous times I asked when I was thirteen.”

This makes Leena’s smile grow and Myka doesn’t know why.  She doesn’t know why or how Leena can smile at these things she says about Helena, about her girlfriend, about the woman she loves. A woman who is most definitely not Leena but whose absence causes her so much less pain when Leena is present.

“She didn’t say yes,” Leena has observed, reaching for Myka’s left hand and pulling that hand between them, to examine her fingers.  To confirm that there exists no ring on that hand.

“Not now,” Myka sighs, touching fingers to Leena’s cheek with that hand she still holds. Leena arches a curious brow and Myka clarifies, “That’s what she said.  Two years ago.”  Myka’s finger finds Leena’s lips and she taps that lower lip gently. It has become a favorite thing of hers to do.  “She said we were too young.  I guess I see that more now than I did then.”

“And now? What do you think?”

“Now?”

Leena nods, “Still too young?  To get married?”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh and lowers her hand back against the bed between them, allowing the backs of her fingers to glide softly against the bare skin of Leena’s belly.

“Now,” Myka says, thoughtfully and shaking her head, “ _now_ I want to ask her to marry me everyday.  _Now_ I keep asking myself if I should have asked when I was in London.  Maybe it would have saved us from all of this.  Maybe with that sort of permanence, with that sort of commitment, she wouldn’t need _him_ … and _this_ would be easier.”

“No Liam,” Leena says softly, her eyes drift away from Myka’s again.  “No me, either.”

Myka brings her other hand to just below Leena’s chin and guides that girl’s attention back onto her until her green eyes, so different than Myka’s own, so much more beautiful, Myka’s sure of that, catch Myka’s. 

“I shouldn’t have dragged you into this… _again_.”

Leena’s smile grows wider and she rolls her eyes, reaching her hand to Myka’s just under her chin. The contact, simple and sweet and playful, so different from Helena’s, moves Myka in a way that is also so very different from the way Helena moves her. That still, somehow, reminds her of Helena.

“I’m a big girl,” Leena tells her.  “My mom would never approve of this anyway.”

“No?”

“Not in one million years,” Leena sighs.

“And your dad?”

“He doesn’t care,” Leena smiles softly.

“He _doesn’t_ care?  As in, he _knows_?  That you…”  All that Leena offers in response to this is a small nod.  “And still your mom wouldn’t approve?”

“My mom thinks this is a phase.  She thinks it’s tolerable. And she’ll tolerate it for as long as it takes for me to get over it,” Leena reaches a solitary finger to tap Myka’s nose just then and laughs softly, “but if she knew… if she _actually_ knew…”  Leena just shakes her head and sighs and it is that action that draws Myka to her again.  It’s that action that compels Myka to reach for her with palms on her cheeks, to tug her gently closer and into a small, imperfect kiss, to sigh into that kiss, to move hands to shoulders and push Leena back, further back, until she falls gently into pillows.  Until Myka falls gently over her, body pressed flush against hers.

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her, I guess?”  Myka smiles down on Leena, moving fingers to curls and tucking hair behind her ears.

Leena smirks and sighs, moving her own hands up and into Myka’s hair, fingers moving slowly through loose curls, grasping at dark brown locks with one hand, stroking long fingers against Myka’s cheek with the other.

“ _She’s_ not the one I’m worried about getting hurt.”

It had not just been a one night thing with Leena after all.

***

It is mid-June and it is a fragile time of year for everyone but most of all Claudia and second of all Helena because two or three or four years ago, Myka is beginning to lose count, a family had been lost and Helena had almost been lost right along with them.

Claudia asks Myka, “Are you and H.G. still fighting?”  This while eyeing, suspiciously, the ringing house phone that displays Helena’s name and phone number, as Myka is holding it out to her.

“No, Claud,” Myka says with a shake of her head, holding that phone further out to Claudia from where she is stretched out on her bed, where Claudia is sat with her legs crossed just beside Myka on that bed.  “She’s calling for you.”

Claudia flashes her another suspicious glare before taking the phone from her hand, pressing the call button to answer it, and immediately pressing the speaker button after that.

“Hello?” Helena’s voice is calling in a sing-song voice.

“Are you guys still fighting?” Claudia asks immediately, her glare turned accusing and still trained on Myka.

Myka’s mouth falls, affronted. She reaches a hand to push, gently, against Claudia’s knee and the young girl only arches her brows and nods in defiance.

“Not currently, no,” is Helena’s response. 

“I don’t believe you,” Claudia says with a quick shake of her head, reaching to push short red hair out of her face.

“My darling Claudia,” Helena sighs, “please take me off of speaker.”

Claudia hesitates and Myka arches a single questioning brow at her until finally Claudia, too, sighs and takes that phone off of its speaker, brings it to her ear. She is quiet still, her eyes finding Myka’s for only a moment before looking elsewhere.

Myka, only hearing Claudia’s end of the conversation now, tries her best not to listen but Claudia, she decides, is only so far away.  There is only so much that Myka can stop herself from overhearing.

“I understand,” Claudia tells Helena and nods slightly.  Then a shrug, another understanding nod, her eyes meet Myka’s again, “I’m okay.”  A long pause, “I will, I promise.”

Then tears.

Claudia begins crying and Myka, with furrowed brows trained on that small girl, tugs her closer, pulls her into her arms, guiding her to lie down beside her on the bed, phone still pressed tight against her ear.

“It’s not that,” Claudia eventually says, voice breaking, “it’s just that… I don’t think I can take another broken family.”

“Claudia?” Myka turns to that young girl and Claudia drapes her arm over her face and continues nodding.

“I know,” she cries once again and then, “here,” before handing the phone to Myka.

Myka takes that phone and Claudia is instantly off of that bed, hastily walking out of Myka’s room.  She hears the knock at Kelly’s door, the sound of Kelly’s door opening, Kelly’s voice soft and sweet and compassionate and welcoming, as it has always been for Claudia, and then that door closes again.

Silence falls over the hallway.

When Myka puts the phone to her ear, the first thing she hears is Helena asking, “Is she okay?”

“Rough day,” Myka sighs softly.

“I know,” Helena’s voice is soft in response, “it always is.  I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.  I’m sorry that I’m all the way over here.”

“What did you tell her,”  Myka asks, eventually, “to make her cry like that?”

The barely audible sound of Helena’s breath is all that takes up the space between them for several seconds more before Helena says, “That I love you.”  Myka wants to roll her eyes at this. At the very thought that this would make Claudia cry but Helena continues, “That I love you… and that you love me.  And even if you and I aren’t always together… or even if we aren’t always near one another… or aren’t always on the same page… we will always love each other _and_ her.  We will both always love her and she will always be our family.”

Myka didn’t think she could possibly cry anymore today.  Of all days.  She had certainly done her fair share at the cemetery.  At the annual sight of Claudia standing solemnly before her mother’s grave, staring wide and teary-eyed down at her father’s grave. Setting a single daisy atop her sister’s headstone.

“I think that’s the one thing this year,” Myka manages a small, amused laugh, wiping away tears, “that you and I actually agree on.”

***

It is nearly a week later that Helena calls Myka with something not unlike a proposition, though it feels forced and emotionless to Myka.  It feels like talking to your girlfriend through the phone without ever knowing if she truly cares to be talking to you in the first place.

But Helena says, “I should come home,” and pauses only long enough for Myka to take in a sharp breath, to then clamp her lips shut, “for Thanksgiving. I think I might be able to. Before my Winter semester abroad.”

Myka is indifferent because she doesn’t believe it will happen.  Even if she has no reason to believe that it won’t, she doesn’t believe that it will.

“You should,” is all that she says and Helena’s disappointment with her lack of any further reaction than this, is quite evident in her response.

“Unless… you don’t want me to come home,” Helena says, “unless it will get in the way of your plans.  If you have plans already… with someone else.”

Myka rolls her eyes at this new thing that Helena has been doing because Helena has figured out that Myka is seeing _someone_ but Helena has no idea who Myka is actually seeing.  Helena has tried numerous times to ask, to find out, to have even the slightest clue as to who Myka is seeing but her efforts, so far, have been fruitless.

“My plans are the same as always,” Myka smirks, thinking of how put out Helena must be, to not know.  To always be wondering. But Helena had told her once before that she did not want to know.  They had both agreed to never wanting to know what the other was doing or who they were doing that other thing with.

Helena _wants_ to know, Myka knows this much.  And if it were anybody else… if it were not Leena… Myka’s sure she would have told her by now. But something about it being Leena, something about Helena knowing Leena and adoring Leena and having known Leena for most of their lives…

Myka’s not embarrassed that it’s Leena, that isn’t quite the right feeling.  But sometimes she wonders if maybe she is ashamed. Not because she is ashamed of being with Leena in particular but ashamed of being with someone she has always known.  Someone she has always known as a child, as so much younger than her.  As her little sister’s friend and hardly anything more than that.

Not at least, until recently.

And now Myka often wonders if this is how Helena has always felt with her. If this is what Helena means whenever she brings up her guilt… that, for the longest time, she felt so guilty for wanting to be with Myka… for eventually being with Myka.

This sudden understanding, this revelation that has finally clicked in Myka’s brain, has only made the Leena issue _more_ of an issue in Myka’s mind.  It has only made the fact that Helena doesn’t know, the fact that Myka hasn’t told her _who_ , even more of a bother. Because the one person she could talk to about this thing and these feelings and this issue… is the one person she doesn’t really want to know.

The one person who probably wants to hear it more than anyone else that Myka currently knows.

“Okay,” Helena says this with some hesitancy and a hint of flippancy, “I’ll see what I can do. I have to head out, I’m meeting some people for dinner.”

“Just say you’re meeting him for dinner,” Myka says quietly.  “It’s fine.”

Myka finds herself rolling her eyes again.  Myka finds herself rolling her eyes often, when talking to Helena. Dealing with Helena’s need to mention him without mentioning him when she feels threatened by Myka’s own lack of mentioning people who they do not speak about.  When confronted with Helena’s jealous curiosity.

“You said you didn’t want to know.”

It isn’t ideal, where they stand now in their relationship. Somewhere between barely friends and barely lovers.  Somewhere between together, on the same page, and not, chapters apart.

“That was before I realized how often I would know without you ever telling me…”

It isn’t ideal at all.  But thousands of miles apart, with Liam and Leena and an ocean between them, they take what they can get.

“I have to head out,” Helena whispers, “I’m meeting some people, Liam included, for nothing more than dinner.  Though, I would much rather be meeting you instead.”

As long as they’re talking, even on days when Myka doesn’t feel like talking at all, she will take what she can get.

“Have fun.”

***

Tracy tells Myka one day in late June that Sam came into the bookstore looking for her.

“I didn’t know Sam had a little brother,” she also tells Myka.

Myka looks up from her textbook in thought because she hadn’t remembered Sam having a little brother either but she had remembered a baby being born into their family sometime after the meetings had stopped.

“I think that’s Kurt’s little brother, actually,” Myka says, “what did Sam want?”

“I didn’t ask?” Tracy says with a slight tilt of her head, “Because it’s none of my business?”

Myka throws her head back in laughter at that, “That’s really funny coming from you Trace.”

“He did ask if you’d ever gone through the dirty time machine box,” Tracy says this waving her hand in the air.  “You know the thing.”

“The time capsule?” Myka rolls her eyes and drops her gaze back down to her text book. “God no.  It’s just a bunch of old letters we wrote to our future selves when we were kids.  I don’t need to remember anything from back then.”

“The girl with the unfailing memory says, as if she had ever forgotten in the first place.”

“Some things I truly do not remember and do not _want_ to remember, Trace,” and with a slight shake of her head, “I also do not need ten year old me telling nineteen year old me what to do with my life.”

“It’s her life, too, Ophie.”

“It _was_ her life,” Myka sighs.  “She had her chance.”

“It’s your sad ass parade, Ophie.  You can do whatever you want with it,” Tracy tells her, gathering her things and preparing to head out of the apartment, “just don’t drag me through the streets, tied to the back of your self-loathing float.”

“Can you ever just leave _without_ being a smart ass?” Myka asks this while flashing an annoyed glance in her sister’s direction.

“No,” Tracy smirks, opening the door, “and maybe you _should_ read what ten year old you has to say.  She was way more put-together than nineteen year old you,” slight pause as she heads through the door, peeks back in, “she was a lot nicer, too.”

“Trace--”

The start of Myka’s rebuttal, if she had even had one, goes unheard beyond the sound of that front door slamming home.

“How are you even _half_ my sister?” Myka asks absolutely no one at all.

***

It is July. It is hot. It is a week before Claudia’s birthday.

Myka is asking Claudia, over dinner in the apartment with Kelly and Tracy, if she minds that Sam and his cousin and his cousin’s younger brother attend her birthday party.

Claudia, suddenly prideful in her old age of going-on-ten, has taken this burden of aging with great stride and comfort and the occasional request. Myka hesitates to call them demands, even if Claudia had, on more than one occasion, began such requests with, “I absolutely need...”

“Only if Leena is coming,” Claudia says before shoveling a spoonful of pasta into her mouth.

“Of course Leena is coming,” Myka says.

“Of _course_ ,” Tracy echoes with a roll of her eyes.

Myka gives her a gentle kick beneath the table to accompany the roll.

“And Abigail,” Claudia says quickly after swallowing the heap of pasta in her mouth, before taking another large bite.

“Why Abigail?” Myka asks, affronted.

“It’s not your party,” Kelly says in Myka’s direction, just beneath her breath.

“Yeah, Ophie,” and of course this makes Tracy grin, “it’s _Claudia’s_ party. She can invite your ex-girlfriend if she wants to.”

Myka waves both of them off and asks Claudia, once more, “Really? You want Abigail there?”

“Yes because Laila will be there and Leila will be there and even Kevin will be there,” Claudia explains. 

“What about Michael?  Abigail’s older brother.  He’s not invited?” Myka questions with an arched brow. A smile grows into her expression at the shape Claudia’s face takes on. Myka can only describe that look as bordering on disgust.

“He’s a _man_.”

“Michael _is_ a man,” Myka says as a matter of fact.

“ _Barely_ ,” Tracy whispers and laughs softly.

“Kevin’s a man, too,” Myka shrugs.

“No, he’s not.  He’s Tracy’s _boyfriend_. So he gets to come.”

“Should I laugh at or be offended by that?” Tracy’s question goes unanswered.

“Abigail isn’t my girlfriend anymore, so why does she get to come?”

“Leena isn’t your girlfriend but you want her to come.  You don’t want H.G. to come.”

“ _Preciosa_ ,” Kelly softly scolds Claudia.  It is the thing she often calls her.

“The sass is strong with this one,” Tracy murmurs into her cup between sips.

“H.G. cannot come and you know very well the reason why.  Also, I am _not_ talking to you about the nature of my relationships, Pip.”

“Then don’t ask my reasons because they have everything to do with the nature of relationships.”

“Little girl,” Myka warns.

“ _Claudia_ ,” Kelly warns, also.

“Sorry, Kelly.”

“What does it matter if Michael is a man or boy anyway?” Myka asks.

“He can’t come to the sleepover and I don’t want to raise his hopes by inviting him to the party.  Besides, he’s _old_ ,” Claudia says this with an intensity that makes Myka want to laugh but she covers her smile, presses on.  Because this very talkative, very argumentative nature of Claudia’s is new and still developing and reminds her so much of her mother and Jane.

“ _We’re_ old.  And Abigail is _not_ sleeping over here,” Myka says this pointedly and also points at Claudia as she’s saying it. “Just so that you know.”

“Is _Leena_ sleeping over?”

“Your tone, Claudia,” Kelly interjects.  “I know Myka is being a major brat right now,” Kelly says this while narrowing her glare on Myka before turning back to Claudia, “but she’s still an adult. She’s still your guardian.”

“It’s fine, Kelly,” Myka waves, “I understand Claudia’s point, I’m just trying to make sure _she_ understands her point.”

“Of course I understand my point. I made it in the first place!”

“Claudia,” Kelly is trying very hard not to laugh, despite her warning.  She swats at Myka, “Leave her alone.”

Myka doesn’t try hard at all, to not laugh.  “I’m sorry, Pip,” Myka is smiling wide and shaking her head, “I’m not trying to frustrate you but you should understand that sometimes, when two people break up, they don’t exactly get along afterward. They don’t exactly enjoy being around one another for extended periods of time.”

“I’ve seen you and Abigail talk before. You _get along_. That’s why I thought it wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” Claudia’s face falls into confusion and this makes Myka sink back in her seat, abandon her fork on her plate, reach for her glass of water.  “You don’t even have to be near each other.  It’s an Olympic-sized pool.”

This makes both Tracy and Kelly laugh out loud.  Myka shakes her head, brings her glass of water to her lips.

“We’ve talked in passing,” Myka says, sips from her water, “we get along. I don’t _hate_ her, it’s just--”

“So Abigail should know that she can be there, too.  Because you both are adults now, right?  You’ve moved past all of that, I’m sure you can manage to be within one mile of each other without ruining my birthday.”

Myka eyes Claudia with disbelief. She tells her, “You sound suspiciously like Jane.”

“This still surprises you,” Kelly says and Myka does not miss that she did not pose this as a question.

To Claudia, Myka says, with a soft smirk, “It’s your birthday, Pip.  And your party.  As Mom and Jane have made it clear, over and over again for the past two months, the little one gets what the little one wants.”

“Not just any party, Mykes. It’s my _tenth_ birthday,” Claudia glares now. “Double digits are kind of a big deal.”

“Oh,” Myka laughs softly, “well, excuse my ignorance.”

***

Later, when Claudia is getting ready for bed where she usually stays on Myka’s old trundle in Kelly’s room, she tells Myka, who is sitting atop that trundle reading a book, “It’s not just that.”

Myka looks up because there had been no context for these words.  Neither of them had been speaking and not because they weren’t speaking but simply because they’d both been caught up in their own tasks.  So she looks up and arches a brow at Claudia as the young girl walks to her and drops herself down onto that trundle bed beside Myka and turns tired eyes, struggling to be wide and awake, on Myka.

“I want Abigail to come to my party because she has always been really nice to me,” Claudia says softly.  “She has always told me that I can talk to her about anything at all when I’m upset and even when I don’t want to talk, she talks to me and it makes me feel better.”

Myka sets her book down beside her and nods, “Abigail is good at talking. She’s good at saying the right things, too.  Unlike,” Myka sighs, reaching a hand into her hair, “some of us.”

“And she’s not like her dad,” Claudia continues, “she doesn’t talk to me about God and angels and Heaven and spirits.  She says my parents loved me and my sister loved me, that they died loving me and that love will live on forever, that I should always remember how they loved me. No angels in heaven. Just lingering love and old memories.”  Claudia twists her lips to the side, shrugs and sighs heavily.  “I kinda like that.”

Myka nods and smiles softly,  “I kind of like that, too, Pip.”

“I just wish I had your memory sometimes because the older I get, the more birthdays that I have, the harder it is to remember those things.  And the harder it is to remember even their faces. Sometimes it makes me feel bad because I can’t remember without looking at pictures.”

“You know it’s okay, Claud,” Myka says this while wrapping an arm over Claudia’s shoulder and pulling her into her, leaning in closer to her, lowering her voice, “it’s okay that you need the photos.  That’s what the photos are there for.  To remind you.  Even I need photos to remember Claire, your mom and dad.  Hell, sometimes I need them just to remember Helena.”

This makes Claudia laugh softly, she reaches to wipe at her eyes and leans further into Myka’s grasp.

“I hope you don’t feel ashamed, looking at photos, Claud.  You should look at them whenever you need to.  Whenever you think about them.  Whenever you feel sad or even happy. You should look at those photos whenever you want to and remember what Abigail said… that love is still there, it surrounds you.  It is absolutely everywhere around you.”

“I know,” Claudia says sleepily, her voice muffled by Myka’s shirt as her body relaxes in her arms.  And then a yawn, and a soft whisper, “I can feel it.”

Myka presses her lips to Claudia’s forehead, smiles at the sound of her relaxed and steady breathing and adjusts Claudia’s now-sleeping form until she is stretched out across the bed, a pillow beneath her head.

Myka grabs her book and turns to leave only to be startled by Kelly, standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame of that door. 

“You scared me,” Myka says, gently back-handing Kelly’s arm as she slips past her but when the older girl doesn’t move or say anything in response to that, Myka stops, takes a step back, tilts her head.  “You okay?”

“Do you ever feel like, sometimes, we are just destined to be surrounded by loss?”

Myka arches a brow and takes another step back.

“No,” she puffs out a soft laugh then quiets and furrows her brows in thought. “I mean, I hope not.”

“Sometimes it feels like fate, you know?  Or like being happy is too good to be true.”

“Now you sound like Helena,” Myka laughs with a shake of her head.  “Helena says that all the time.”

“That’s probably why we’re friends.”  Kelly shrugs and adds, “My mom and my dad… Claudia’s family… Helena’s mom--”

“Helena’s mom isn’t dead,” Myka interrupts because it is a sore subject for Helena and has thus become a sore subject to Myka, “she abandoned her.”

“That’s almost worse, Myka,” Kelly says this, turning her once vacant gaze on Myka now. “It’s one thing to be left behind by your mother in a tragic accident.  It’s an entirely different thing to be left behind by your mother intentionally.”

Myka concedes that point because she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know what it’s like to lose your mother. 

What Myka knows is what it’s like to have a mother who is physically present but mentally and emotionally out of reach.

Myka knows what it’s like to have your mother look at you, as if she doesn’t see you. As if she sees right through you. And Myka knows what it’s like to hear your mother crying in a completely different room while your father _disciplines_ you. She knows what it’s like to feel as though she never had a mother to begin with.  She even knows what it’s like to hate your mother. To hate her lack of agency. To hate knowing that she may have never loved you or wanted you or cared enough about you to ever want to save you.

Or cared enough about you to think you need saving in the first place.

But Myka did not know loss.  She did not really know what it was like to lose ones mother because despite everything, her mother had been there.  Her mother stayed. Her mother survived. And _now_ … now they had come so far from where they had been, from the way things had been _then_ … that Myka felt as if she knew, more than anything else she had ever known, what it was like to have your mother return to you.  To come back to you. To love you and want you and care about you all over again.

This mother was not that mother, in Myka’s mind, but even if she had been the same person, Myka never would have mourned that other mother’s death.  Like Helena, she wouldn’t have mourned that other woman’s abandonment.  She would have been angry.  More angry than she tends to be, even now.

That is one thing she does know.

“We have a lot of life ahead of us,” Kelly is saying, breaking into Myka’s thoughts, pulling Myka’s attention away from thoughts of her own mother.  Of how her mother and Pete’s mother have become surrogate mothers to so many others.  How if someone had told Myka even five years ago that her mother would eventually take on this loving mother role with so many others who had lost their own, she would have laughed, truly laughed, in their face.

And now…

“We have so much life ahead of us and some days,” Kelly goes on and Myka knows exactly where this conversation is going, “I can’t help wondering… how many more people we’re going to lose.”

Myka has seen this look and she has heard this voice before.  She knows exactly what Kelly is thinking about.

Kelly’s thinking about her mother and maybe even her father, even if she didn’t know him that well.  She’s thinking of her grandmother, the woman who raised her, who passed away not all that long ago.  Not nearly long enough in her mind.  But mostly she’s thinking of the one person she has grown close to, who has grown so far out of her reach.

“Pete’s going to be okay, Kelly.”

Kelly heaves out a sigh and allows her lips to pull up and into a gentle smile. She nods slightly and steps further into her room.

“It’s funny that when you say it… I can almost believe it.  It makes me feel better.  It helps.”

“Because I know Pete,” Myka smirks, “I have known Pete all of my life and I know, Kelly, that I will continue to know Pete until we are old and gray.”  Myka’s smile grows and she rolls her eyes up to the ceiling as she adds, “I can already imagine him bugging the crap out of me, as I sit in my rocking chair, poking me with his cane from where he sits in his rocking chair.”

At this, Kelly laughs and nods and then shakes her head with some understanding.

“You’ll be somewhere in the kitchen, making Spanish rice,” Myka adds, much to Kelly’s amusement, though it earns her a playful sock in the arm.

“Thanks, Romeo. I needed that… to help me get to sleep.”

Myka nods, too, leaning in to press a kiss to Kelly’s cheek. 

“You’re welcome.”

***

Claudia is ten.

 _Finally_.

Claudia is ten and her tenth birthday has turned into a _thing_ because, and this is how Myka explains it to Helena over the phone at the beginning of the day, “Entering your double digits is apparently a sign of maturity.  And, of course, going into fifth grade means you are at the top of the primary school hierarchy for a whole entire year before middle school.”

To which Helena had told Myka, “Please do not pretend as though you do not remember entering your double digits, darling. If I remember you turning ten, surely you remember, too. Perhaps your parents do not, but I certainly do.”

Myka had willfully ignored any references by Helena to her tenth birthday because what she remembered about that birthday is that it hadn’t been much different than any of her others.  They had gone out to eat, her family and Pete’s family, and Pete had bought her some indoor miniature golf set, that was mostly for his enjoyment, and Tracy had given her some nail polish, which was mostly for Tracy’s enjoyment.

But Helena… she rarely spoke to Helena then but somehow found the energy or excitement or courage to tell Helena, repeatedly, about her turning ten and about what turning ten actually _meant_ in the United States because turning ten to any other nine year old, anywhere else in the world, was obviously of no significance.  Judging by Helena’s inability to see the appeal.

So Helena, who had not been in attendance at that dinner but had dropped a gift by earlier, had bought her a do-it-yourself model of the human anatomy for Myka for her tenth birthday and that had been it.  That had been the gift, Myka’s sure, that made her fall madly in love with Helena Wells.  More madly and madlier still in love, she’d joked in her own mind once and to Helena another time after that.

Myka was sure she loved Helena then.  In whatever way a ten-year-old could love anyone at all.  She was sure that she would do anything within her power to make sure Helena knew, one day, eventually, exactly how she felt.

She was sure, even then, that Helena would stop being her friend the moment she found out.

“So don’t tell me,” Helena says, after reminding her of all of these things because Myka had, eventually, told Helena all of these things… and Helena, maybe despite her better judgment at the time, Myka also thinks, had not stopped being her friend, “that you don’t remember the day you fell more madly and madlier still in love with me.”

And it is days like this that Myka tends to love more than anything else in her world. Talking to Helena on the phone like nothing had ever changed between them, like there had been absolutely no difference in their combined friendship and relationship, between then and now. Like there wasn’t Liam and Leena and an entire ocean full of doubt in-between them.

“Despite everything, Georgie,” Myka says, feeling oddly sentimental, even with her mother and Jane yelling at her from across their house to _get ready to go,_ “I fall madlier in love with you just about every single day.”

***

Seeing Leena after talking to Helena doesn’t make Myka feel guilty about Helena like Myka sometimes feels it should.  It doesn’t make her upset or hesitant or even question, remotely, the way she feels about her _arrangement_ with Helena.  It, in fact, makes Myka even more sentimental.

It makes her want to pull Leena into her and hold her and kiss her forehead and cradle her in her arms. It makes her want to do all of these things that she would otherwise be doing with Helena but cannot do because Helena is so far away. And that, in turn, makes her miss Helena even more.  Makes her fall in love with Helena even more.  Makes her fall in love with the happier memories of Helena that she has held on to… from London, from the summer before London…the Christmas before that.

Seeing Leena approach her at the public pool, dressed in short jean shorts and a bikini top, only compounds Myka’s want.  Only makes her think of Helena in that way… in those shorts, in that bikini top. It only reminds her of the times she and Helena had spent at the lake. The way Helena looked in a bikini. The way Helena would lay out on a towel in the sun for as long as it would take to make that too-pale just a little less pale without burning her entirely.

So seeing Leena after talking to Helena doesn’t make Myka feel guilty about being with Leena despite her relationship with Helena. But it does make her feel guilty about being with Leena. Because what Myka has with Leena is not a relationship at all but simply a reminder of the relationship she longs to have with her girlfriend.

***

“Hey, you okay?” Leena is asking this of Myka and Myka smiles and nods as Leena approaches and sets a tender touch to Myka’s forehead, pushing some of her curls out of her face. 

“I’m fine,” Myka’s smile widens and she leans in to Leena to set a kiss on her cheek, “how are you?”

Leena arches a curious brow and Myka knows exactly why.  Because they are at a public pool, they are in the club house of that public pool and Myka is setting up for Claudia’s party. Myka’s mother and Jane, Kelly and Tracy, some other parents, too, are helping to set up for Claudia’s party and this is the most public display of affection that Myka has ever shown to Leena.  That Leena has ever accepted without shaking her head and gently, playfully, pushing Myka away.

Usually what Leena says after that is, “Bad idea,” and Myka knows that is because of Leena’s mother, because of how Leena’s mother sees her and how Leena doesn’t want her mother to see Myka _and_ her together.

Today, Leena simply asks, “Do you need any help setting up?” to which Myka shakes her head, smiles, tells her in response, “I think we’re good here. Go and enjoy the sun before these two get a hold of you.”  Myka gestures to her mother and to Jane who have been bickering off and on for most of the weekend over the tiniest things in preparation for Claudia’s party because it is the first party she has actually wanted since her family passed away.

Leena eyes them for only a moment over Myka’s shoulder before she looks back to Myka, with a smile, and says, “I think you’re the one they want to get a hold of.”

Myka turns to where Jane and her mother are standing very near to one another, watching Myka and Leena and turning quickly away, in that moment, to pretend as if they _aren’t_ watching Myka and Leena at all.

“Oh boy,” Myka sighs.

“I’ll be outside.” Leena grasps Myka’s arm and squeezes for only a moment before letting go and heading outside.

***

“ _So_ ,” Jane is suddenly in Myka’s space, watching Leena go.

“No, don’t… do not even start.  I already know what you’re going to say.”

“I just came to see how those balloons were coming along.”

Myka turns around to face Jane, to turn a skeptical glare on her, to also shake her head. She turns back around to her current task, blowing up balloons, taping them to purple and white streamers that already line the walls.

“You and Pete are the same person,” Myka tells her.  “You do not excel at being inconspicuous.”

“And you don’t play nice,” Jane quips before walking away, leaving Myka to her task with a smile on her face.

***

Myka doesn’t truly know awkward until both Abigail and Sam show up for Claudia’s party. Abigail for the more obvious reasons of awkward and Sam for reasons that are less obvious.  Because even if Sam never actually says, out loud, how he feels about Myka, it is evident in the way he carries himself around her.

With his low voice and his red cheeks and that hand rubbing at his neck that Myka often imagines smacking just to get him to _stop doing whatever that is_.

“The only way this could possibly get any more awkward,” she tells Kelly, “is if Helena were here.”

“That sounds like a personal problem, _cabrona_ ,” Kelly tells her in response.  And later, after Myka has re-introduced Sam to Abigail, after Leena and Abigail have said their hellos, after Tracy arrives with Kevin and announces, aloud, that this is, “the world’s most awkward family reunion ever,” and after Myka has taken a much needed bathroom break from all of _this_ … Kelly also tells her, with a smile on her face, “The most hilarious thing about it… is that you all grew up together and have known each other almost your entire lives.”

It is there in that bathroom, in this moment, as Kelly is laughing her way out of the door and as Abigail is making her way into it, that Myka thinks she would be better off alone.  Or dead.

Whichever fate happens to bless her first.

Thankfully, for Myka, Abigail says very little to her beyond “hey” and “how are you” and “how’s Helena doing?”  Myka gives the easy responses of “hi” and “I’m good” and “she’s good, too.” She asks Abigail how her mother is, about school and not much else after that.

This, Myka isn’t saying aloud but knows because she knows Abigail well enough to know she is thinking it too, is what their friendship has been reduced to.

***

At some point between awkward introductions and cutting the cake, between hoards of children canon-balling into the pool and a narrowly drowned four-year-old, between making sure Claudia’s cake is present, in tact, not melting in the heat, and almost calling it quits on the entire day at the bitter end of her own mother’s stress levels… Myka just stops.

Myka stops because Leena catches her hand as she is walking by her.  Leena is stretched out on a pool lounge chair and she catches Myka’s hand and pulls her back from her rush to go wherever she was headed to at that time.  And the contact, much like the contact they’d made just an hour or two before, catches Myka, catches them _both,_ off guard.

Still Leena tugs Myka closer and she tells her, “Sit down before you fall down.” And Myka, curious but not questioning, sits down on the empty lounge beside her.  She just sits, at first, but when Leena doesn’t let go of her hand, Myka pulls the lounge closer to Leena’s and moves her bare feet up onto it, falls back ungracefully into it, and let’s go of a heavy sigh.

“Mom is driving me crazy,” Myka says after a bit of silence and Leena turns to look at her, from behind sunglasses, and smiles.

“I think that is their whole entire purpose,” she offers with a gentle squeeze of Myka’s hand, where their hands now fall, still clasped together, between their two chairs.

“I suppose that accounts for Jane driving me crazy, too,” Myka smiles with a roll of her eyes.

Leena nods and quietly turns to face the sun again.

Myka closes her eyes and drifts into a light sleep, not much longer than a few minutes she would guess, before Leena is tugging at her hand to wake her.  When Myka opens her eyes, turns to face Leena once more, that other girl is holding up her sunglasses, exposing smiling green eyes. She is smiling softly and with just a hint of mischief in her expression.

“You falling asleep out here, in the sun, is probably not the best idea,” Leena teases.

Myka laughs and rolls her eyes.  “Just one minute more,” Myka yawns, “I promise my skin can stand at least that long in the sun.” And she smiles back at Leena as that other girl lets her sunglasses fall back against her nose and rests her head back against the lounge.

Without another word, Myka moves her hand up and out of Leena’s grasp.  She reaches across to that chair and touches the tips of her fingers to a bare side, moves her hand further over that girl’s belly then moves her hand further south of that belly, to a waist, over a hip, to palm a thigh.

“Watch yourself,” Leena says, without ever turning away from the sun again.

“I think I would rather watch you instead,” Myka sighs, much to Leena’s amusement.

***

“She’s opening her presents right now...” Myka looks back to the crowd of kids that are seated and standing around Claudia who is, not at all surprisingly, waist deep in gifts.  Into her phone she says, “Hold on just a second.”

Pete, on the other end of the line, says, “Dude, don’t tell her it’s me though, okay? Just hand her the phone.”

Myka does just that and it is a sight to see.

She tells Claudia, “Call for you, Pip,” and when Jane and her mother give her that look and ask her, in sync, if it really can’t wait, Myka returns that look and tells them both, “No, it really cannot.”

Claudia already has the phone to her ear, Claudia is already saying hello, and before Jane can even throw her hands up into the air along with her mild annoyance, Claudia is yelling Pete’s name, grinning from ear to ear, jumping up from her chair.

He must tell her he misses her because she says, “I miss you, too! Are you coming back home yet?”  And Pete must remind her that he won’t be home until after her eleventh birthday because she pouts and drops her head and falls back into her seat with a soft, sad, “I know.”

She asks him, “Which one?” very excitedly and Myka’s mother, Jeannie, is already walking over the kids seated on the ground, to reach a present across to Claudia who accepts it with a smile returning to that face.  “You didn’t have to get me anything, Pete,” Claudia is telling him, “especially if it’s an envelope filled with glitter and confetti.”

Pete thought that, along with almost every video game he owned, had been the perfect birthday surprise for an eight-going-on-nine year old last year.  But the only thing less surprising than that gift was that they were still finding glitter and confetti in that area of the Lattimer home to this very day.

Claudia opens that gift and whatever it is, Claudia is clearly not disappointed. Whatever it is earns Pete several rounds of “I love you” and “I miss you” and “you’re the best big brother ever” and at Claudia’s mention of brothers, Myka is suddenly struck with the realization that Joshua is not here.

***

Myka had not been the only one to notice Joshua’s absence because later that evening Leena asks Myka, “Where was Claudia’s brother?”  Jane and Jeannie had had a similar discussion while cleaning up the club house.  Even Jeannie Jr. and Jules had been in attendance and, at some point after that, had wondered the same thing.

Now they are in the car, Myka and Leena with Claudia, Sam, and his little cousin Todd in the back seat, and Myka is asking Claudia, “Where was your brother?”

Claudia shrugs and Myka knows, already by this alone, that she is indifferent about the whole thing.  That she could not care any less, at this point, where her brother was.  Where he was, more than likely, with that wife of his.

She decides she will make a call anyway but when she does, there is of course no answer.

***

It is the day after Claudia’s party when proverbial shit begins hitting proverbial fans in a way that Myka had not anticipated when she and Tracy arrive at the Lattimer home, the Bering-Lattimer home now she supposes, to drop off one pint-sized Donovan.

“How was the sleep over?” is how her mother greets her, and Jane is close on her heels, scooping up Claudia into her arms.  Jane is pretending to strain herself lifting that not-so-little girl, even if that not-so-little girl’s feet never actually leave the ground.

“Yes, how is our ten year old?”  Jane asks her.

Claudia is giggling in a way that she definitely doesn’t do in front of her friends anymore. Myka had made that discovery last night. She had, in fact, discovered far too many things about ten year olds nowadays that Myka never knew about ten year olds back when she was one herself.

Like how much ten year olds care about the relationships they are involved in when these relationships hardly qualified as such a thing to begin with. 

“What happened to cooties? Shouldn’t you guys be worried about cooties?” Myka had made the mistake of interjecting into the conversation once, only to be stared at by six very silent and very silently _accusing_ ten year olds who, not a single one of them, could be bothered to actually respond to that question with anything other than mild annoyance.

“We’re not in third grade, Mykes.”

“Cooties are for babies.”

“You know those aren’t actually real, right?”

“Very funny, Mrs. Bering.”

“Cooties is just a nice way of saying head lice.”

“Ma always says cooties are what adults get when they don’t practice safe sex.”

That last slice of knowledge had been provided by Laila Cho.

“Did you just call me Mrs. Bering?”

“That’s not my mom,” Claudia told the mistaken child with a roll of her eyes.

“I know she’s not your mom but she’s like your step-mom or your new mom.”

“Oh boy,” Claudia groaned and rolled her eyes before falling back into a couch cushion.

“She’s more like her sister,” Leila corrected.  “Mrs. Bering is _her_ mom.”

“Thank you for understanding the complexities for my family, Leila,” Claudia sighed.

Meanwhile, at the dining table…

“Are these kids serious with themselves?”  Kelly couldn’t help but to laugh.

“Tracy was like that when she was ten,” Myka divulged.

“Tracy is _still_ like that,” Kevin added immediately after, proving to Myka that there really was something far too likable about the entire Cho family.  _Most_ of the Cho family.

“Cooties,” Tracy had started then and everyone, absolutely everyone at that table had turned their attention to her in wait, “is just a nice way of saying crabs.”

There had been a lot of laughter around that table to follow.  A lot of silent (and silently accusing) stares from six curious ten year olds in the living room, as well.

And that had set the mood for the rest of the night.

“It isn’t the only thing that set the mood for the rest of the night,” Tracy says this not even under her breath, though the _way_ in which she says it leads Myka to believe that it probably should have been. And Myka’s eyes are on Tracy as she moves, not ever looking back to Myka, most likely _avoiding_ looking at Myka, away from them and into the kitchen.

“Don’t be a smart ass,” Myka says.

“Language, Myka” Claudia scolds.

“Little girl,” Myka warns in response, also raising a warning finger to point in her direction.

“You’re asking your sister to not be herself?”  Jeannie smirks with an arched brow.  “I can tell you with great certainty that after seventeen years of trying to straighten this one out, it is one battle you will not win.”

“Tracy isn’t the only one in the family you failed to straighten out,” Jane teases and the grin she flashes at Myka’s mother is wide and accomplished and more like her son than ever.  Myka’s mother shakes her head but smiles in return, kissing that grin quickly before turning her attention back to her daughters.

Myka catches that joke but she wants to say, because she’s sure it hasn’t been seventeen years of trying to straighten Tracy out but more like seventeen years of catering to Tracy’s every want and need, that she seriously doubts her mother ever tried.  But instead, she follows Tracy into the kitchen, Jane and Jeannie and not-so-little Claudia follow, too.

“Mom’s right,” Tracy shrugs, opening the pantry door and stepping into it, “you will not win this battle.”

Myka rolls her eyes and leans back against a far counter as Jeannie returns to cooking whatever she had been in a pot upon the stove and Jane returns to drinking whatever she had been in a wine glass upon the table.  Claudia, too, seats herself beside Jane at the table and this is when everything begins to roll downhill.

***

Myka decides to challenge Tracy because being challenged is a thing that Tracy knows so little about, that she has had such little experience with.  Tracy has always had great luck and she has always had a bold personality and she has always had the confidence to back that personality up.  Tracy has always been such a force of nature, such a whirlwind of a thing.  She has always been the type to be taken and accepted and embraced, by everyone around her, exactly as she is because the consequences of not doing so, no matter how conjured up those consequences were, seemed not worth the risk.

So Myka challenges her.  In part because Tracy has never or rarely (or quite infrequently at the least) been challenged before but also because Myka is thinking and has been thinking, too much and too long about how very different things would be if her father only knew. If he had known the truth about Myka all along.  The absolute truth about Tracy.

If her father had known that Myka was his… had known that Tracy was not… how very different would her life have been?  How much like Tracy, if she could be anything like Tracy at all?  How much more confident?

Myka has dedicated a lot of thought to asking herself how her father could ever think Tracy, of the two of them, was the one most likely to be his when Myka, of the two of them, was the most like him.  That aforementioned confidence which Tracy possesses, at the very least, had not been a product of their father.  It certainly had not been a product of their mother.  And until now, until this year and those few months ago when Myka first came to know and first began to truly think about it, that confidence of Tracy’s had solely been a product of Tracy being Tracy.

Now Myka thinks that confidence has come from someone else entirely.  And whoever had had the grace to bestow it upon her, whoever her mother had allowed to give her this child, her sister with whom she shares only a mother… whatever force had blessed Tracy with who she is and how she is and how far she has come?  Myka can’t help wondering if they must have hated her… if they must _hate_ her just as much as her father does.

***

Myka tells Tracy, “Just because you always get what you want, does not mean you deserve to _have_ everything that you want, Trace.”  It isn’t said with malice.  It is casual and teasing and Myka waves a hand in the air as she says this thing because that’s just how flippantly she views this situation.  Even if it had grated on her nerves for the past ever, she’d always just been so flippant about Tracy’s status in this family over hers.

“And just because you don’t have everything I have, does not mean you have to pout and whine and stir the pot until you get it, _Ophie_.”

Tracy’s response is not quite as light-hearted and not quite as playful.  It is just a little bit biting and Myka understands that she hit a nerve.  She understands that what she says is provoking Tracy and she understands, even more than this that she doesn’t particularly care.

Jane interjects cautiously with a very low, very steady, “ _Girls_ ,” because even Myka knows, despite the teasing and the pleasantries and the fact that they are both smiling, that this is not playful banter. This is not a conversation that will end in niceties.

“What, of yours, could I possibly want?”  Myka questions, crossing her arms in front of her, arching a brow as Tracy’s mouth falls open in what Myka can only guess is some sort of disbelief, some display of incredulity.

“Oh, let’s see,” and Tracy shrugs a single shoulder, rolls her eyes up to the ceiling, “my best friend… a secure and stable relationship that is as healthy as the one I have with Kevin?  Oh, I know… my best friend, with you, in a very poor attempt at a healthy relationship.”

“I knew it,” Jeannie says then.

“Mom, do _not_.” Myka is already holding up a hand toward her mother, standing straight and stepping toward Tracy where Tracy steps toward her in the center of the kitchen.  “Being with the same kid since grade school doesn’t make your relationship healthy or secure or stable.  It just proves that you refuse to let go of childish things. It makes you _immature_.”

Tracy laughs, it is sarcastic and loud and too much in Myka’s face,  so much in her face that she wants to, tries very hard to not to, slap that smug smile right off of her.  “ _You_ , Ophie, are calling me out for holding onto childish things? You, who has had a crush on your girlfriend, who is hardly even your girlfriend, since preschool?”

“Do not bring Helena into this.  This is not about Helena,” Myka warns.

“I didn’t bring her into this, you did.  You did by trying to call out my relationship, by trying to call me immature. Who is the one picking fights? Who is the one stepping all over the other’s best friend?  Who, Ophelia?”

“You girls need to calm down or you need to take this back to your own house,” Jane speaks up finally, standing and stepping to where Tracy and Myka move apart now. “You obviously have a lot that you need to discuss.  Perhaps you can do that… _not_ in front of tiny ears.”

“Tiny ears is going into her room to listen to music,” Claudia says standing, unamused, and heading out of the kitchen.

“I think that’s a really good idea,” Jeannie nods, crossing her arms in front of her and turning an expectant gaze on Myka and Tracy.  “I think Jane’s idea is a pretty good one, too.”

“Whatever, I’m walking to Kevin’s,” Tracy says waving a hand in the air, also heading out of the kitchen, “or is my choice to walk to my boyfriend’s house also too juvenile for the one adult in this room who has a stick up her ass?”

“Goodbye, Tracy,” Myka says with a roll of her eyes.

“Walk safe, Tray,” Jane calls after Tracy as she goes.

“You don’t have to worry about me talking to strangers,” Tracy’s voice says, drifting in from the living room.  “Despite my childish immaturity, I think I can manage to not get myself kidnapped.”

The front door opens, the front door slams home and Myka is left standing in the kitchen with two very concerned and almost hopeful expressions drifting in her direction.

“She’s spoiled,” Myka says.

“You’re dating her best friend,” Myka’s mother responds.  She is leaning back against the kitchen table, Jane returns to her seat in a chair just behind Jeannie and reaches a supportive arm around her hip.  The reach of that arm is almost protective in its grasp, in the way she tugs her just a little bit closer.  Jane and Jeannie exchange glances in that moment, just before returning identical gazes back on Myka.  “Did you think that wouldn’t bother her?”

“Did I think she’d be bothered?” Myka puffs out a disbelieving laugh, “No, Mom. _Nothing_ bothers that girl.  I didn’t think she would care about anything I do… I especially didn’t think she’d care that it was Leena.  She’s my friend, too.”

“I don’t understand why you and Helena even have this silly arrangement to begin with,” Jeannie is shaking her head, moving an arm behind Jane, resting her hand on Jane’s shoulder.  “And now it isn’t enough that you’ve dated all of your friends, you have to start in with Tracy’s friends, too?”

Myka’s mouth falls and her brows furrow and something deep inside of her, or not that deep at all really, burns. And it burns just below the surface of her skin, somewhere within her chest cavity, close to her heart and falling low and then lower and lower, into the pit of her stomach.  It burns there, too, entirely down her esophagus and into her abdomen and then within her very gut.  Making her nauseous, making her angry, making her lose the steadiness of her breath and her breathing, which she has held onto and kept in check and had complete control over for so very long.

“ _This_ is the you that I hate,” Myka says softly and she is already annoyed and hurt but now she is angry because the words that she wants to say and the way she wants to say them do not come out exactly as she had liked.  They do not come out loud and confident, they do not come out as though she is sure of herself and the words that she is saying.  She is not even saying exactly what she means to say. 

Because what Myka wants to say is “fuck you” and “fuck this” and “fuck that” and remind everyone, absolutely everyone, that things have only _just_ gotten to this point where her biggest worry in life is her relationship… relationships in general.  No matter how twisted and entwined and jumbled they may be. She wants to remind them that her past, _their_ past, had not been all that long ago, a shit storm of anger and pain, fear and abuse.  

Not enough time has gone by… not nearly enough for her to forget the way things used to be and this, her mother siding with her sister, insulting her life choices, not backing her up, not taking her side, not respecting the idea that Myka knows what she is doing, even if Myka doesn’t really know at all what the fuck she is doing… this is exactly how things used to be.  It is exactly how it used to be when Myka hated, without ever knowing how much she’d hated, her life.

“This,” Myka tells her mother and her mother is standing straighter, pulling her arm away from Jane, stepping toward Myka with a look on her face that now, _just now_ wants to be concerned and guilty and just a little bit disappointed in herself, “is what I never want to go back to. Tracy is not some fragile little thing that cannot take care of herself.  Tracy is strong and she has always been that way and I…” Myka shakes her head and wipes at tears, “I’m the one, Mom, that you should be supporting. _Me_.”

“I’m not taking sides on where you two stand in your relationships, Myka,” Jeannie says softly, cautiously, carefully.  “This isn’t a matter of Tracy versus you.  My main concern in all of this is your well-being. It is my job, as your mother, to be concerned about _that_. And if _that_ which I’m concerned about happens to include the nature of your relationship which, to me and from my vantage point, appears _destructive_?  Well, that is my concern and my concern, Myka, is exactly how you know that I _do_ support you.”

“I don’t need you to police my relationship with Helena, Mom,” Myka takes in a deep breath, “I don’t need you to criticize the choices I make with anyone who isn’t Helena, either.  Not with Abigail, not with Leena, either.”

“Well someone needs to say something, Myka, because you may not have noticed these past couple of months but we have noticed,” Myka’s mother moves closer to her, leans in against the counter just beside her, “you are not happy, Myka. You may feel happy when you’re with someone, for the short time you’re with them, but you are not happy. You are angry and moody and if you think I’m wrong, if you think I’m taking sides and playing favorites between you and your sister, then ask yourself why Kelly moved out of your apartment and into our home for two weeks.  Ask yourself why Tracy is never home anymore.  Why Claudia doesn’t spend as much time at your place as she used to.  Myka…”

Myka has stiffened herself in defiance, from head to toe, she is looking at her mother in a way that she knows reminds her mother of her father because Myka can feel the anger and she can see her expression, even if she can’t see herself. She can see that her neck is stretched high to make herself taller, that her lips are clamped shut as if she is bursting at the seam with unspoken insults.  Her arms are crossed tight in front of her, she is turned slightly away from her mother, she is two foot stomps away from throwing what could easily be called a tantrum and her mother,  who tries and has tried and continues to try so very hard, is absolutely frightened of what she may very well be capable of doing.

“Myka, honey,” Jeannie begins and then, confirming all of her thoughts, “you are more like your father than you will ever know.”

“ _Jeannie_.”

“Well, thank you for that.  For telling me how you truly feel about me,” Myka sighs and it is something like relief and Myka doesn’t know why at first she is so relieved to hear her mother say these things but then she realizes… it is the opening she has been waiting for. And it has been months and months, as her mother has so graciously pointed out to her, that Myka has felt this way, been in this mood. 

It may very well be the thing with Helena that they now choose not to speak on often or occasionally or ever at all.  But it’s this thing about Tracy’s father, too, that has been eating at Myka since just after her birthday, since her father had handed those paternity tests over to Rebecca St. Clair, to hand to her, just to hide away in the back of a locked desk drawer behind another locked door in the bookstore…

“At least I have had the pleasure of knowing exactly _who_ my father is… which is far more than I can say for Tracy. Far more than you can say for her, too, actually.”  Her mother takes a step back and the look that settles into her face is knowing.

Myka smiles at the silent confirmation.  Then she laughs and that laugh is annoyance and disbelief and relief, all wrapped into one puff of laughter that escapes her and falls, right along with the expression on her mother’s face, flat on the ground between where she stands and where her mother stands just across from her.  Just an arm’s reach away.

“How--”

“I guess _that_ , along with all of my destructive relationships, makes me more like you than you will _ever_ bother admitting.  To me, to yourself,” Myka turns and gestures to the other woman in the room, “to Jane, too?”

Myka isn’t sure how to interpret the look that takes over her mother’s face, so she turns away from it altogether.  She turns away and she pulls her arms much tighter around her.  And her mother is quiet and still, for the longest time, until she is no longer quiet, no longer still.

She tells Myka, “I’m done,” and that is all she says.  She reaches for the burners on the stove and turns them off. She looks back to Myka for only a moment before shaking her head in what Myka now recognizes as disappointment.  And then she goes.

Myka’s mother turns and walks away.  Past Jane, who reaches one concerned hand out to grasp at hers before squeezing and letting go again, and out of the kitchen.

It is when her mother is gone that Myka breathes again and there is more of that relief, just a hint of relief to finally tell someone, somehow, that she knows… about her father, about Tracy, about nothing at all of Tracy’s father.  But that relief is clouded, too.  It is in a haze of guilt and sadness and regret for her words, for this day, for everything about this year and the last. From the point Helena admitted to letting someone that wasn’t Myka kiss her.

“Go home, Myka.”

Myka’s eyes lift only to find Jane standing, shaking her head, looking at her with such grave disappointment.

“Go home and cool down and when your mother is ready, we will have this conversation that you seem rather desperate to have.”

Myka scoffs, “Of course you know.”

“Of _course_ I do.  Your mother is my best friend, Myka.  _More_ than that, even. We have known each other for decades and even when we weren’t really talking, we _still_ talked.  We’re _close_.  This used to be a concept that you understood well.  Once upon a time, your father understood it, too.”

Myka rolls her eyes, “She hasn’t been ready to have this conversation in seventeen years. What makes you think she’ll be ready to have it now?  And why is this _my_ misunderstanding? You’re talking about Helena, right?  _She_ is the one who set the rules.  _She_ is the one who wanted it this way.  I’m just adapting to what my _girlfriend_ wants.  I’m just going along with what _she_ asked of _me_.”

“Myka, you are a smart girl and I have loved watching you grow up, despite everything. I have loved being a part of your life and especially now, in these last few years, that we have grown so close… that we have become a family but lately…” Jane reaches her hand into her hair, rubs at her forehead before continuing, “lately you haven’t been yourself. Things haven’t been the same. _Our_ Myka?  She used to spend most of her time reading.  She dedicated her weekends to Claudia, she made sacrifice after sacrifice for her little sister.  And, most importantly, she was _happy_ doing all of these things.”

“You don’t know that I was happy,” Myka says softly.

Myka brings her hands to cover her face before running those hands up, over her forehead, and into curls at the top of her head.  And when she looks up again, Jane is there… right there in front of her with her disappointment and her furrowed brows and all of these things she has to say that are slowly, so very slowly, breaking through Myka’s exterior. Through whatever this wall is that she had built up and around herself, even higher than the one she’d had throughout her childhood.

“You’re right. I don’t know if you were truly happy but you seemed happy and everyone was happy to be around you.”

“And now--”

“You are less happy.”

Myka allows her shoulders to slump. She allows tears to fall.  But her stance is still defensive. With her arms crossed and her lips tight and her body turned slightly away from Jane. This wall she’s built around herself is still standing.

“I know that you don’t see it, Myka, how you have changed.  How angry you are… how unhappy you seem,” Jane nods, “but we see it.   Every single day.”

“I’m not angry,” Myka says with a quick shake of her head, “I’m not sad.”

“Well, you may not feel that way,” Jane sighs, stepping away from her again and back to the archway which leads into the living room, “but anyone at all who has spent time around you this year certainly does.”

Proverbial shit meets proverbial fan.


	22. 19 & 23/24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More drama! Time capsule! Tracy's dad! Myka sasses Helena! Sam! More Tracy! More sass! Leena! 
> 
> I don't know how to write summaries anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is one more section (of the original 70K chapter) that's about 20,000 words already written. I need to finish that up and post and it will probably be the last one before the whirlwind that is DragonCon. (During which, this story will be turning one year old!) Thanks for sticking it out guys! :D Still so much more story to go... but at least Myka is finally almost 21....

Myka is home alone.

Myka is sat in her room in an empty apartment with a scuffed up wooden box in her lap, the lid of which reads “time capsole” in Sam’s handwriting, with a thick line of marker through that, and Myka’s handwriting of “Time Capsule” over it. Their names are written in their own handwriting just below that.

She hasn’t opened the box since Sam gave it to her.  She had taken the thing into her room, set it on the floor by her bed and it had, eventually and over time, found its way under it. Discarded, forgotten. Rarely thought of by Myka much after that until Tracy had mentioned it a few weeks back.  Until Sam had brought it up again at Claudia’s party.

Now her hands are on it and lifting the lid and reaching for several envelopes which are buried beneath so many things that Myka had _actually_ forgotten about:

Bubble Tape that she’s sure Pete would eat even now.  A slap-wrist bracelet that she and Sam had re-decorated with permanent ink pens.  A plastic cartridge filled with pogs and some of what Sam had called the best slammers in existence, the likes of which Myka has not seen nor heard about in ages. A flip-book Sam had drawn and stapled together and dubbed as evidence of his past creativity, to show his future self how much he would suck if he wasn’t still drawing.

Something tells Myka that Sam had not been too satisfied at remembering that message, since the last time she’d asked about his drawing, he’d laughed the question off entirely.

There is so much other crap in the box, so rightfully named because that is exactly what it is.  Crap they’d collected from their time spent together.  Spider rings, a yo-yo, cassette tapes with their favorite songs tactfully recorded from the radio, magazine clippings of future homes and cars and wives and, in Myka’s case, a husband that she never ever actually wanted.

“Smarty,” Myka laughs, shaking her head, holding up the magazine clipping of the woman that Sam had designated his future wife.  Jodie Foster, of all people, and Myka remembers quite clearly Sam saying, “Who doesn’t love a woman in a suit?” And, at the time, Myka had said, “Me, obviously,” to which Sam only shrugged and declared, “Your loss.”

There are photos, too.  Each of them had a school photo in that box but below that there is a photo of Sam and Myka just sat side-by-side.  Sam is smiling and his smile is large and cheesy.  Myka’s smile is forced, she remembers forcing that smile for Sam’s mom, but it passes.  It’s happy enough.

And then there are the envelopes.

Myka’s are the only envelopes left in the box.  Untouched and sealed tight for nine going on ten years. She pulls them out one by one and each has a different name on them, an envelope for every person she thought to write a letter to.

Her letter to herself had been at the very top of the pile. 

That one, she opens.

***

_To: Future Myka_

_From: Past Myka_

_This was all Sam’s idea. He thinks the adults spend too much time, in their meetings, talking about things that make them cry. So we should spend that same amount of time talking to ourselves about things that make us smile._

_So, hi future me.  This is my attempt at making you smile. Something tells me you’ll probably really need it._

_The first thing that you should know about me – about your past self – is that I have a difficult time imaging us being older.  I can’t picture it, I can’t even fathom what that would be like. To know how to drive, to have a job, to live on my own, to be an adult. I guess I have a hard time thinking of what life would be like outside of what life is already like. I have a hard time believing that the way life is now won’t always be this way, and I know you’ll remember exactly how it is now (unless you’ve had another bottle-over-the-head incident)._

_Think happy thoughts, Myka. I guess that is the point of this letter and all that I want for my future, for our future. To think happy thoughts. So, instead of putting a bunch of adult-like expectations on you, I’m going to list all of the things that make me, that make us, happy.  Just as a reminder for when you’re old and probably miserable, if you’re even alive at all…_

_Things that make you happy:_

_Your mother makes you happy. Not always, not even close to all of the time.  But when she cooks and your dad isn’t home or your dad is downstairs in the bookstore, I catch mom humming and sometimes even smiling, like she really loves what she’s doing. She loves to cook and I love to watch her cook.  And sometimes, while she’s cooking, if I’m sitting nearby, she’ll turn around and hum to me or smile at me and it makes me feel like she actually has love for me._

_Sometimes she even asks me to taste what she’s making and she’ll hold the spoon to my mouth, laugh if it makes a mess, even wipe that mess from my chin or my shirt or wherever it lands. And this is what makes me and what makes us happiest most of all.  It makes me so happy that I’ll purposely bump that spoon just to see her smile sometimes.  Just to hear her laugh.  Just to be reminded that she actually does care now and then._

_Your sister makes you happy. A little less than not even close to all the time.  Tracy is a brat and she takes things out of my room even though she teases me about the things that I have. But sometimes, especially the times when your dad has been drinking too much, especially after your dad has hit me or grabbed me or knocked me down again, sometimes Tracy just throws her arms around me and hugs me and cries with me and refuses to let go._

_She tells me she’s sorry it’s me, that it isn’t her.  She tells me she doesn’t understand why and that I should just run away.  That she’ll come with me.  She tells me she looks up to me and she wants to be just like me and one day she’s going to make it stop, when she’s older and bigger and stronger.  She’s so tiny, I don’t think she’ll ever be big enough or strong enough to stand up to your dad but I just hug her back and tell her thank you._

_Tracy being nice like that lasts for a day tops, if that long, but it has been happening so much lately, now that it’s summer, that it’s almost like she looks up to me all of the time.  I want to be a good big sister to her more often than I am.  I’m trying really hard to be, even when she bugs the heck out of me.  But it’s hard to want to protect her, to want to be there for her, to not always be so gosh darn mad at her, when your dad obviously loves her a lot and doesn’t love me at all.  Still, Tracy makes me happy because she is my little sister and sometimes I remember that we are in this sorry excuse for a family together and she is the only other person in the world who knows what it’s like to grow up in this house._

_Pete makes you happy.  How could Pete not make you happy?  He is my best friend.  He is the brother I never had, the son that your dad has always wanted.  Pete makes me happy in so many ways that I don’t even know where to begin.  His stupid jokes, his even stupider pranks. His love of video games, his love of food, his love for Jeannie and Tracy and me.  Pete takes care of everybody and everything, even when you tell him over and over and over again to stay out of it. I don’t think he can help himself. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes Pete says things that need to be said on my behalf.  Sometimes he says things that I need to hear._

_Other times he needs to stuff a dinner roll (five to be precise) into his mouth and leave well enough alone._

_Pete protects me and supports me. Pete pushed your dad down a flight of stairs to save me from him.  He hasn’t been allowed to come to the apartment since then but he tells me all the time that it was worth it.  That watching your dad fall down those stairs and clutch at his heart and lie helpless at the bottom while I was passed out at the top, would have been worth a whole lot more than what happened in the end._

_Pete makes me happy but just promise me one thing.  Promise me you will never ever try to kiss him again.  Because Pete does not make me that happy and I am praying to a god that I’m not even sure is real that he doesn’t make you that happy either. Besides… Pete is really into Helena… really_ really _into Helena._

_And speaking of Helena… she makes you happy, too.  I know it’s silly to include her here because she’s just my babysitter.  Well, our dads have known each other for a long time, I guess, but I see her a lot when Dad goes into the city to teach his seminars. When Mom goes with him. She comes over and stays with me and with Tracy but it isn’t just that she’s my babysitter. She’s kind of my friend, too. And I don’t think I’ll ever forget her and she does make me very happy… so I think she’s worth mentioning. I think she’s worth the reminder._

_Helena makes you so very happy. She is English and she has this accent that tugs at your attention, demands it really.  Her accent makes me happy.  And she’s the nicest person in the world because she smiles at me and she messes with my hair and she teases me but not in a cruel way, in a nice way.  She actually likes me, or she seems to like me.  Maybe she’s just being nice to me because she knows not everybody usually is but that, in itself, makes her one of the nicest people I have ever known._

_And she’s pretty.  She is so very pretty.  I think I can say that, honestly, because she is and she’s a friend and she’s older and really it’s just paying a compliment, right? If a girl thinks that another girl is pretty, she must be really pretty. But it isn’t just that she’s pretty that makes me happy.  And it isn’t just the accent, either.  It’s that she knows me and she understands me.  She doesn’t get frustrated when I can’t find anything to say to her and that is all the time.  She doesn’t get frustrated or mean or annoyed or exasperated.  Once she told me, “You’re still thinking of something to say, I can practically see the gears moving behind those pretty green eyes,” and that made me the happiest of all._

_Most importantly, Helena looks out for me and she worries about me and she always tells me that I can talk to her, when I find the words to say.  That she will always be around and she will always be ready and willing to listen._

_So, Helena makes me happy and I don’t think Helena will ever stop making me happy.  I don’t think that will ever go away.  And maybe Helena makes me too happy.  Maybe the kind of happy that Helena makes me isn’t okay. But if I’m happy… it has to be a good thing, right? If Helena is happy, too, it must be a good thing. I would never want to make her unhappy. I would never want to be the person who makes Helena Wells sad. So as long as she is happy, you will be happy.  Just trust me on this one, okay?_

_Baby Claudia makes you happy. One year ago, almost to the day, Mrs. Donovan gave birth to a baby girl and shortly after that, she brought her to Pete’s house so everyone could meet her.  Tracy and Pete and Jeannie got to hold her but she was fussing so much by the time it was my turn that Mrs. Donovan didn’t know if I would be comfortable enough to.  Mom told her to let me because I always had a way with Tracy when she was a baby. That whenever she would lay me down next to Tracy when she was fussing, Tracy would go right to sleep. So Mrs. Donovan let me hold Baby Claudia and Mom showed me how to rock her just a little bit, how to hold her head so that it didn’t move so much.  And I rocked her and held her and she fell right to sleep._

_Mrs. Donovan called me a Baby Whisperer. That baby is a year old and Mrs. Donovan still calls me the Baby Whisperer.  Baby Claudia still falls asleep when I rock her in my arms.  Mrs. Donovan always says she hopes I’m still this blessed when I have my own children… which, by the way, is another thing that makes you happy._

_No children makes you happy. Tracy is all the children I will ever want and need.  It’s okay if you change your mind, I’m just here to remind you that even as a child, you do not want children.  Why risk them being raised the same way we were?_

_Besides, I’m sure Pete will have enough of them for the both of us._

_Reading makes you happy.  Don’t ever stop reading.  Don’t ever forget the time you swore on your own grave that you would read every book in the bookstore.  Even the boring books.  Even the books about things you have no interest in or desire to learn._

_Not drinking makes you happy. I don’t think I will ever want to taste a single sip of alcohol.  I can barely stand the smell of it from your dad and all I remember of that night with the bottle is waking up in the hospital smelling just like him. Pete has vowed to never drink because of what happened to his dad… because of how it happened. I think I can do that, too._

_School makes you happy.  Pete thinks I’m weird because I like school and that’s okay with me.  I tell Pete he likes school, too, he just likes it for different reasons.  He likes sports and hanging out with friends and I think he really likes avoiding doing his own homework too, because he’s practically a professional at that._

_But I like the homework and I like my teachers and I like having some place to go to every day, to get away from Mom and your dad, to almost get away from Tracy.  (This year I’ll be in middle school and further away from Tracy than I have been.) More than that, I like that it’s something Dad cannot take away from me.  It’s something Dad doesn’t even try to take away from me. He thinks he’s forcing me to go, when he tells me to go to school, but I would go whether or not he made me and it just makes him look like even more of a fool that he thinks he’s making me go.  School makes us happy, Myka.  Don’t drop out. If you have to work at McDonald’s to go to college, you should be the first one in line for an application._

_Twizzlers make you happy.  I don’t care if you live in a shack or if you live in a mansion.  You better have either a cardboard box or a pull-out drawer full of Twizzlers, young lady._

_I was going to end this now but Sam is insisting that I add him to the list, even if he isn’t really making me happy right in this very moment by breathing over my shoulder while I write._

_Sam doesn’t really make you happy but you tolerate his presence.  I tolerate Sam because our moms started going to Al-Anon meetings together because both of our dads are raging alcoholics.  We attended the same preschool but Sam attended private school for a while and now he is back in public school where he doesn’t talk to me anyway._

_Once a week our moms attend these meetings and once a week we are thrown into a room with a bunch of other kids, all Tracy’s age or younger.  And there is this creepy old lady who barely talks above a whisper but is always smiling and laughing and telling the kids about the imminent return of Jesus Christ._

_The first time that happened, Sam said something really funny to me that I can’t remember but ever since then, he has been pretty okay company.  Now our moms are kind of friends and get together and we see more of each other than I would like because then he makes me do really stupid stuff like write a letter to myself and everyone I know in ten years, telling them… telling you… what I think about all of you._

_It’s really stupid.. but I did it anyway just to keep him from crying about it.  (If you haven’t figured it out by now, he is reading over my shoulder again.)_

_Cry baby._

_That’s all I’ve got for you, me. I hope you’re still smart and going to school and friends with Pete (not Sam)  and Helena.  I hope your dad is in jail for everything he’s done to us.  I hope your mom is still cooking and smiling and humming, too.  I hope Tracy still has a sister to look up to and Pete a sister to protect.  I even really hope that Baby Claudia is still an adorable and compliant little baby that falls asleep instantly when you rock her in your arms.  Even if it is impossible, even if all of these things seem impossible… I still hope they are true because that’s really all that I’m asking of you.  It isn’t much to ask but I think it’s enough to keep you happy._

_Oh and this was actually really fun. Even if it was all Sam’s idea. You should think about writing a letter to our 30-year-old self.  If you do, please tell her I said hello._

_Sincerely,_

***

Myka says aloud, to no one at all, “Books make you happy.” 

She says this and she sighs and she falls back into the pillows at the head of her bed and holds those letters up above her.  Letters which are addressed to the most important people in her life, those she loves, those who love her, one she tolerates, and one she doesn’t care for at all.

They are addressed to her mother, her father, her sister.  One to Pete, another for Helena.  The remaining two are for Sam and Baby Claudia.

Myka has no idea what they say.  It is another way in which her memory fails her.  In which her ability to remember proves itself not at all air tight but also compromised, as she sometimes says, by that bottle-over-the-head incident.

Sometimes Myka wonders if that incident had compromised her emotions, too. Her ability to cope, as Helena would say.  Her ability to care.

***

Myka is thinking about her mother, thinking about the conversation they’d had, the way she had obviously hurt her feelings.  She is thinking about all of these things while on the phone with Helena who is asking her what she’d even fought with her mother about to get the sort of reaction she did.  To actually get her mother to walk away from her and not answer her phone calls for as long as it’s been.

And now, at the end of that week of silent treatment, Jane is insisting they talk it out.  She is insisting they come over and sit down and, no matter how much neither of them wants to, _talk_ to each other.

That is Myka’s plan for the evening.  While Kelly is visiting a cousin in the city and Tracy is gone away with Kevin and the Chos for the weekend, Myka is waiting for Jane and her mother to arrive to have a discussion about something Myka isn’t sure she’s ready to know anything about.

It is a new trend in Myka’s life.  Avoiding the truth as though it were a plague. 

It so often becomes one.

“Myka, I know that you don’t think so but you are quite a force.  You are… incredibly perceptive, when it comes to knowing exactly,” Helena pauses, seems to collect her thoughts, “when it comes to knowing exactly which buttons to push.”

“Is this the beginning of a compliment or a complaint?”

Helena’s laugh in response to that is soft.  She goes on to say, “I mean to say that what makes you a great friend is the same thing that makes you a difficult person to be at odds with. You have this… _ability_ to see into a person’s soul, almost as if you can feel their heart and know their mind so well that you know them entirely, inside and out.  So, on the one hand, you have this knowledge that allows you to love them so completely. But on the other hand,” Helena falls quiet for a second and Myka sighs now, turning over and onto her belly as she stretches across her bed, reaches toward her nightstand and the still-sealed envelopes that sit atop it.  “On the other hand, you have this insight that can knock a person down with a single blow.”

Myka pulls those envelopes from the night stand and into her hands then sets them on the bed, fans them across her comforter.  She picks up the envelope for her mother and sets it aside.

“You just know… all of the wrong things to say,” Helena’s voice wavers, sounding hesitant and cautious, “all the right times to say those things.”

Myka reaches for Helena’s letter now and holds it up, closes her eyes to the sound of Helena’s soft breathing through the phone against her ear.

“Some days you sound like the Dalai Lama,” Myka says softly, absent-mindedly staring at that letter with Helena’s name on it, written by Myka’s ten-year-old self, “and other days you sound like Confucius.”

Helena sighs, “You just proved my point.”

“I’m just saying that I’m surprised you had one,” Myka smiles.  “I’m sorry, that was me purposely being a brat.”

“It’s nothing I’m not used to,” Helena whispers.

“I don’t feel like myself,” she says softly.  “I haven’t for a long time.  I think something is wrong with me.”

“Who do you feel like?”

Myka shakes her head, even though Helena cannot see.  “I don’t know.  Just… not me.”  Myka hears now that Helena is moving in some way on her end of the line.  “What are you doing?”

“Going to shower soon,” Helena says and Myka can hear her voice echoing in her bathroom.  “I don’t suppose you’d want to join me.”

Myka shakes her head but says playfully, just a bit flirtatiously, “I’ll be there in twelve hours.”

“I’ll wait,” is Helena’s response, not at all hesitant and just above a whisper.

The intimacy in that whisper alone, the silence to follow, makes Myka smile more. Because sometimes it feels like they shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near each other but sometimes they could just be so perfect in every single way. 

Almost too perfect to be real, Myka thinks.

“Mom and Jane will be here soon,” Myka sighs, changing the subject.  “I thought you were going out tonight. You and--”

“I canceled.”

“Oh,” and curiously, “why?”

“I wanted to talk to you, Myka,” and this makes Myka laugh again, “is that okay?”

“Yeah, I mean… I guess.  You’re missing out on an entire night of fun just to listen to me whine about my personal life for half an hour--”

“I’d much rather talk to you,” Helena says in another whisper, this one less flirtatious but no less intimate.  No less wanting.  In a way that reminds Myka of how they used to talk before Liam and Leena and the Christening of far too wide-open relationships.  Not nearly wide-open enough.  “And you still haven’t told me.”

“Told you?”  Myka questions, still thrown by this voice.  This soft and distantly familiar tone in her ear.

“This big secret that your mother has kept from you.  That you’ve been keeping from Tracy?”

As if on cue, the front door to the apartment opens, followed by the sound of Jane’s voice, at first calling out to her and then speaking much more softly to Jeannie.

“It’s nothing, Helena.  I have to go, Mom and Jane are here,” but Helena is immediately protesting.

“Oh no,” Helena says, raising her voice slightly, abandoning that whisper, “you, young lady, are not going to leave me sitting here wondering why you are so upset about something that actually has nothing to do with _us_ ,” Myka rolls her eyes but she smiles even despite that, “so beans.  Spill them. _Now_.”

Myka tells Helena, quickly, “I have a half sister,” and Helena gasps, she says appalled, “What?” and Myka adds soon after that, just as quickly, “ _Tracy_ is my half sister.”

“Wait, what?” Helena, quite clearly more appalled then before, asks, “ _What_? How?”

“That is exactly what I am about to find out,” Myka says.  “This is exactly why I didn’t want to tell you right now.”

“You call me back. _Tonight_.”

“Helena, I don’t want to wake you up--”

“ _Tonight_ , Ophelia.”

In the quiet to follow, Myka is rolling her eyes. She is shaking her head and bringing a hand to her forehead, touching the tips of those fingers to her forehead and closing her eyes in some exaggerated display of annoyance.

“Has anyone ever told you,” and Myka is saying this with a smile on her face, a smile she hopes Helena can hear in the sound of her voice, “that you are kind of bossy?”

***

Myka’s mother has not looked her in the eye since she entered the living room.  Since she came to stand hesitantly across from where they are sat together.  But the look that is on her mother’s face is not angry or upset, like Myka had expected.  It is more sad, a lot guilty. 

Jeannie is sat on the couch beside Jane, with the tips of her fingers pressing into her lips, with Jane’s arm wrapped around her back, and Jane’s hand grasping her waist with a display of love and care and protection that actually makes Myka’s heart ache.  It makes her think of how _this_ all started, her mother and Jane.  It makes her think of how much time has passed _since_ this started.  It had not been a long time at all, officially, but it still somehow felt like an eternity. It feels as though _this_ has been a thing forever. 

For her mother and Jane, it likely has been forever.

Myka is glancing at that protective hand of Jane’s, wrapped around her mother’s waist, and her thoughts are suddenly shifting to Helena, of how she used to hold Helena in that very same way.  Of how she used to feel just as protective over Helena and how long it has been since they’ve had anything close to this level of closeness.  Physically, emotionally. 

How long it has been since they’ve had anything remotely close to this level of love.

When Myka steps to them, she does not sit on the love seat or the reclining chair adjacent to them.  She makes her way to the wooden coffee table, just in front of them, and she sits there.  It is as close as she can get without sitting directly beside them.  Their knees almost touching hers.  She sits there quietly with an envelope, with two folded pieces of paper, and she lowers her head for a second, for several seconds more, before looking up at Jane and then slowly training her gaze on her mother.

Myka holds out those two pieces of paper like a sacrificial offering.

“I’m sorry,” she tells her mother and Jeannie looks at her now. She looks and she has tears in her eyes and she is already shaking her head and sighing with some relief but clearly trying to keep these emotions from showing in her expression.

Clearly failing quite miserably at doing so. 

Jeannie takes those folded up letters from Myka and she opens them. First the one with Myka’s name on it and she rolls her eyes up to the ceiling.  She sighs heavily and Myka knows that sigh is for her father. For how very ridiculous her father can be all of the time.  She opens the letter with Tracy’s name on it next and her body tenses and straightens and that grip that Jane has upon her waist pulls them closer together.

“He finally knows,” barely escapes Myka’s mother’s mouth as she turns to Jane and holds up those letters but she sighs and that sigh is something like relief.  It is the freeing sigh of someone letting go of something that is weighed them down for far too long.

Myka knows what that weightlessness feels like. She’d felt it once, what seems like forever ago.  She was twelve, almost thirteen, and she’d just told Pete, in so few words, just how she felt about Helena.

How very long ago that had been. 

“He’s always known, Jean.  In some small way,” Jane reminds her before pressing a comforting kiss to her temple.  “You knew that.  _I_ knew that.”

“I’m sorry,” Myka says again and both of their eyes are on her now, “because I should have asked you about this ages ago, instead of holding onto it.  And you’re right. It’s all him.  When I’m upset?  All I can think about is him and everything he’s done and how very much I don’t want to be like him.  How very much like him I can sometimes be.  And that just makes me even more upset.  It makes me even more angry.  Especially _now_. Especially knowing that I’m not even the one he should have been mad at.  And then I get mad at Tracy and she doesn’t deserve any of this. She doesn’t deserve my anger--”

“You are not your father,” Jeannie interrupts and Myka falls instantly quiet.  Jeannie nods and she leans forward, setting those letters in her lap.  She leans and she reaches her hands to the back of Myka’s hands and says, “I should have clarified and I’m sorry because when I said that, I didn’t mean to imply that you are the version of your father that you know.  I meant to say that you are so much like how your father used to be, when we were in school. Before we were married, before we had you.  Not the way he is now.”

It’s a roller coaster.  It’s a double edged sword.  Because Myka has always heard about how her father was a different person back then, _before_ her.  About how he was stubborn and willful and determined and dedicated in ways that seemed selfish and arrogant but he had not been angry or mean then, not really.  He had not been full of regret, or alcohol for that matter. 

He had not yet been a father.  He had not yet had two daughters.

It hadn’t been until after Myka was born, until after Tracy came along and there had been two of them.  Until there had been what Myka guesses was… _is_ a noticeable difference between both of his daughters. Between the elder and the younger. It wasn’t until then that things changed.  That is what Myka has heard for most of her life. 

The change had been a gradual descent into suspicion, into insecurity and upset that fueled drinking and anger.  Drinking and anger that often bubbled up into rage but not often enough, as Myka had soon come to understand that the less often the anger turned to rage, the more intense the rage became.  The longer the rage lasted.  The more the rage hurt.

And all this, all of _that_ , because he thought Myka had not been his child.  Because he thought that Myka’s mother had not been faithful so early on in their marriage.

He was, at least, half right.

“Your father was a smart man, Myka,” Jeannie says this with a nod, “he was smart and talented.  He was an amazing writer.  He was kind and he was understanding, full of love and happiness.  Not all of the time but as much as anyone would be.

“Please believe me when I say that I wouldn’t have married him had he not been, I would not have married him to begin with.  And my biggest regret in life is staying but at the time, after everything that happened, I didn’t think I had a choice. Especially not after Tracy.”

Her voice seems to fail her in this moment and she wraps her hands around Myka’s wrist and grips firmly.  It is with this touch, simultaneously pleading and desperate, that Myka’s eyes begin to burn and her own tears begin to fall. Tears of frustration and upset, tears of confusion and anger.

She takes in a deep breath, exhales that breath slowly.

“Mom,” she manages, before her voice fails her, too. She adjusts her hand, still held by her mother’s, to grasp her mother’s wrist.  She clears her throat and continues,  “I feel worthless.”  These words have an obvious impact on her mother because there are so many tears. Her mother turns away for only a second and when she looks back at Myka, there are so many more tears.  “I feel… like everything I’ve been through was for nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

Her mother nods but she’s not quite sure her mother truly understands. She hardly understands herself, so she’s almost sure her mother does not.  She’s sure she needs to elaborate.  Even if not for her mother but for herself, for her own attempt at grounding herself, she needs to explore this feeling and put it into words.  To get it out of her before it bursts inside of her.  Before she drowns below the weight of its contents. 

“I could tolerate all of this if he had been right. Or even if he had been one hundred percent wrong about either one of us.  If Tracy had been his or if I hadn’t been?  I could almost tolerate the fact that I’ve spent my entire life being terrorized by this man but _now_ …”

Myka shakes her head, her mother is still nodding before her. Her mother is nodding and crying relentlessly and tugging at her arm, pulling her forward, urging her forward where Myka, in this moment, refuses to go. 

“No,” Myka cries, “I can’t _deal_ with this anymore.  On top of everything else, this thing is too much. This thing, I cannot hold onto,” Myka sighs and pulls her hands from her mother’s reach, brings the palm of those hands to her face. “This is not a secret that I can keep because now when we fight, Tracy and I, all I want to do is throw this thing in her face and pray that she feels even an ounce of the sadness that I feel right now, knowing that my childhood was miserable because my dad made an assumption… because my mom kept this thing a secret?

“I can’t--”

“Myka--”

“Why haven’t you told her?”  Myka continues.  “Why even keep this a secret?  Why let her grow up thinking that we share the same awful father when she could have a less awful father of her own?  She could have had her own life.  She could have been happier knowing it wasn’t _her_ dad beating up on her sister.  _I_ could have been happier.”

Myka’s mother is in full on tears when she says, “Because it wasn’t… it _isn’t_ possible.” She breaks out into a full on sob and Jane is pulling her closer, into her arms, hushing her, trying to calm her, when she says, “She couldn’t have known him, Myka, and I had no other options. I promise you that if I had, if I’d known what to do… but I had no other option.”

Myka sighs and sits straight, wiping away more tears, licking her lips, focusing her attention on her mother, trying to pull herself together. By even the slightest bit. It takes a while, several minutes at least, for both of them to calm down, for Jeannie to sit up and whisper another apology to Myka, to tell her, “There is nothing that I can do that will make up for everything your father put you through.”

And Myka, with an almost dismissive shake of her head, tells her mother, “Us, Mom.  He put us through it.”  Myka reaches for her mother’s hands again and pulls herself up from that coffee table, drops herself down on the couch beside her mother, opposite of where Jane sits, and leans into her mother’s hold.  “Sometimes I forget that,” she says softly, burying her face into her mother’s shoulder.

They are quiet for a long time, just sitting and holding onto one another, wiping tears, steadying their breathing.  They are quiet for so long that Myka dozes off for several seconds, still pressed against her mother’s side, comforted by this new and unfamiliar contact, this sense of warmth and comfort that she has never really had with her mother before.  Not that she can truly remember.

Jane breaks that silence first when she stands and announces that she’s going to make them some lunch and let them talk.  She presses a kiss to Jeannie’s cheek, another to Myka’s forehead, then heads into the kitchen.

“Why is it impossible?”  Myka eventually asks, voice muffled by her mother’s arm, where her mouth rests pressed against her shirt sleeve.  She sits up slightly, to ask more clearly, “For Tracy to know her father. Is he like Dad?”

Jeannie sighs and tightens her grasp around Myka. Her nod is slight but noticeable. The way she sighs, as though she is preparing for something else is noticeable too.

“He was at one point,” Jeannie says softly, “a lot like your father but that changed.  He found out that I was pregnant and he knew there was a possibility.  He knew it was possible that she could be his and when he _saw_ her...” Jeannie falls quiet for several long seconds.  “He just knew. He cleaned himself up because he wanted to be a part of Tracy’s life.  And around the same time, your father completely lost control.  He became...” Jeannie allows her voice to trail off.

“An asshole?”  Myka offers and she hears the soft laugh that escapes her mother, feels movement in her chest that accompanies the softness of that laughter.  It makes Myka smile for only a second before that smile fades and she is thinking too many thoughts all over again. “Who is he?”

This question causes her mother to tense up again, causes her to sit a little straighter, to close her eyes for just a little longer.

“Please tell me it’s not Uncle Charles…”

“What?”

“…because I’ve allowed that thought to creep into my mind on occasion and I have to be honest with you, Mother.  The idea that…”

“Myka stop,” Jeannie is sitting up and making Myka sit up and moving slightly away from her, to give her a very accusing stare, to arch her brow and roll her eyes.  “Do you really think I would have let you and Helena carry on the way you do, if you had a sister in common?”

“Well, I don’t know, _Mother_. I’ve been questioning a lot of things about this family dynamic lately.”

“It’s not Helena’s father,” Jeannie scoffs, still shaking her head. “How could you even begin to think--”

“Then who?  Does he still live here?  Do I know him? Mom, does _Tracy_ know him?  And were you ever going to tell her so that she could meet him? You just said he wanted to be a part of Tracy’s life so… why isn’t he?  Or _is_ he?”  Myka gasps, “It’s someone we know isn’t it?”

Myka’s mother’s mouth is moving up and down, opening and closing, but there are no words coming out.  She is quiet, speechless, overwhelmed, perhaps.  By the questions or the situation or the knowledge that this secret that she has kept for so long, that Jane has known about for probably just as long, can no longer remain an unspoken thing.  Can no longer be kept.  And if Myka has this many questions, she can’t even begin to imagine how many Tracy would have.  _Will_ have.

“Mom?”  Myka urges. “Say _something_?”

She eventually does.  When she clamps her mouth shut and takes in a deep breath, as if to reset her voice.  As if to restore its power.

And then, “He died.  In the fire.”

***

Before Myka could even ask her mother “what fire”… she knew.

She knew exactly which fire her mother meant because there had only been one, throughout the last decade Myka’s life, that required no explanation. It had been _the_ fire.  The fire that changed the lives of so many people in this town but especially Jane’s and Jeannie Jr.’s, especially Pete’s.  And now, apparently, Myka’s and Tracy’s lives, too.

“Jack Secord,” her mother had said his name and Myka could tell, just by the way she was saying his name, that she had not said that name in the longest of times.  Then, “Jack Anthony Secord.”

Myka just shook her head because it was all that she could do.

“I haven’t said his name,” her mother began, confirming Myka’s own assumptions, “in _years_.” Myka’s mother was reaching for those folded up pieces of paper still in her lap and she opened the one with Tracy’s name on it and read it.  When she lowered that paper again, she looked to Myka and smiled, reached a hand to just over Myka’s hand.  “Please, don’t tell your sister.  I will tell her.  I have always planned to, I Just… needed her to be older.  I needed the right time.”

“Mom, even if I had to… I couldn’t tell Tracy this.”

“She was only three when he died.  She doesn’t remember the fire.  Not like you do.”

“He was the drunk,” Myka said softly, with furrowed brows and narrowing her eyes on her mother.  “Just like my dad, he was a drunk.  He’s the reason Pete…” Myka doesn’t finish that thought.  Her mind already refocusing on Pete inevitably finding out.

“He was sober,” her mother corrected.  “He had been since Tracy was born but that night...” and her voice faded away as she shook her head again.  Shook away those words, the thoughts, probably the image of his face, too.  “Things didn’t go the way they were supposed to.”

Myka knew the name.  She knew exactly how rare that name had been spoken by Pete, by Jeannie Jr. and Pete’s mother.  But she also knew exactly how often she’d heard that name, Jack, from her father’s mouth.

“A lot happened that night,” was the only explanation Myka’s mother had been willing to give her then.  And another plea, “Please don’t tell your sister.”

“Mom, even if I had to…”

They soon sat down for lunch and over that lunch, Myka’s mother, with Jane’s help, had divulged much more about Tracy’s father, who he was, how they met, the affair, the pregnancy, how Myka’s mother hid all of these things from her father.  But there were still so many questions.  So many things they could not answer.  Why the affair.  Why she never left Myka’s father.  Why, after almost eighteen years, Myka’s mother had not told Tracy.

It was a conversation that could end only in tears but at the end of the day, Myka’s mother was talking to her again, she was talking to her mother again, and the burden of carrying that weight of information, of not knowing what to do with that information, was no longer entirely on Myka’s shoulders.

With that one burden lifted, even if just remotely, Myka had focused all of her attention to that letter she’d written to her mother for the time capsule.  She had no idea what it said anymore and she’d pondered for days about giving the letters to their intended recipients.  Especially when it came to her mother and father.  To Tracy and Helena.

In the end, Myka slipped the envelope into her mother’s purse. Just after lunch. Just before they headed out the door.

Three hours later, her mother is on the phone and in tears again. She is telling Myka how very much she loves her. How much she has loved and wanted her since they day she was born. Since long before that day ever arrived.

***

“You should come home… for Thanksgiving.”

  
“Does that mean you _want_ me home? For Thanksgiving?”

“I want you home for a lot longer than just that,” Myka sighs, “but I think Thanksgiving will have to do.”

“And I think it’s a really good thing that you want this,” Helena is a beauty with a sly smirk on a computer screen, five million miles away, as she shrugs a single shoulder and pushes a hand through the longest black hair that Myka has ever seen on her, “since I already bought my plane ticket.”

Myka smiles and nods, her smile turns to a grin but all she manages to say is a soft, “Okay.”

“Okay?”  Helena questions with a tiny bit of attitude, smirk still in place on too far away lips. “ _Just_ okay?”

“Yes,” Myka gives her a single nod, “okay.”

Helena glares, turns away, shakes her head.  When she turns back to Myka, she is smiling fully, pushing that hand back into her hair and leaning her forehead into her palm.

“You’re so lucky I miss that crooked smile of yours,” Helena laughs softly.

“Don’t sweet talk me,” Myka warns playfully, glancing at her watch. “Don’t you have dinner plans?”

Helena is shaking her head and rolling her eyes and when she says, “I’m not going,” it is with some hint of annoyance that does not go unnoticed by Myka.

“Are you and Liam fighting?”  Myka teases.

Helena shrugs, “I don’t know,” then bites down on her lip for a second before asking, “Are you and Leena?”

Myka sighs and bites back her own completely defeated smile, nodding as Helena’s face turns somewhat guilty but more than anything, she looks pleased with herself.  For finally figuring out this mystery that has no doubt been grating at her nerves for the past several months.

What Myka can’t tell is whether she’s just found out who Myka is seeing or if she’s known for a while and just now mentioning it.

“You should see your face,” Myka tells her.

“I’m a little jealous,” Helena says softly, twisting her lips to the side.  “Do you love her?”

“ _That’s_ a really stupid question.”

“How is this a stupid question?”  Helena asks.

“Do you love Liam?”

“No, I don’t love Liam,” Helena scoffs, “and _that_ is a stupid question.”

“How is it stupid when I ask it about Liam but not when you ask it about Leena?”  Myka laughs. “Double standard much there, George?”

“Because you care about people differently than I do, Myka,” Helena says and this makes Myka laugh.

Myka laughs and she eyes the image of that beautiful woman, illuminated on her laptop screen, and asks, “Because I actually _care_ about people, Helena?”

Helena is pouting, that accomplished smile has disappeared so quickly from her face that Myka almost feels bad about what she’s said. Myka is on the verge of apologizing and asking Helena to elaborate, to give her a chance to explain her point, when she continues on anyway.

“I guess I just didn’t think… you would need anyone else,” and this point is no better in Myka’s mind.  It is no less frustrating or insulting.

“Because you’re enough?” Myka asks taking over that accomplished smile, claiming this win for herself in the presence of Helena’s defeat. “I’m not enough for you, Helena, but you clearly ought to be enough for me--”

“Myka, that’s not… what I meant by that.  You are… you’re more than enough…” Helena’s face falls into more guilt, more defeat.   She is running her hands through her hair and closing her eyes. Sighing out her own frustration, moving those hands to her forehead.  “I just don’t deserve… to have even this much of you.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Myka says, getting Helena’s attention again, giving a light shrug.  “But for some reason, I can’t seem to stop giving you everything.  You wanted this and I am giving it to you,” Myka takes in a deep breath, Helena remains silent in that pause.  “I don’t _need_ anyone, Helena. You don’t need anyone, not even me. We could be solely together or we could be absolutely free to live our lives apart on completely opposite ends of the world but since you have insisted that this is what you want? I have Leena.  I like Leena.  I _trust_ Leena. She’s sweet and calm and _fun_ ,” Myka nods, “she’s my friend.  She _understands_ this… _force_ that is our apparent need to be together.

“But do I love her?”

Myka pauses and takes that silent moment to push her thoughts to Leena.  To pull, from her mind her latest memory of Leena. 

It was the night before and Leena had come by for dinner, she had stayed to watch a movie. Tracy was there and still a little mad at Myka, even if they had made up after their latest fight two weeks earlier. Even after Myka had confronted her mother about Tracy’s father, one week prior.  Tracy was there, so Myka and Leena didn’t touch. Myka at one end of a love seat, Leena at the other, occasionally exchanging side-long glances.

Never touching.

But at the end of that movie, Tracy had apparently had enough of whatever it was Myka and Leena _hadn’t_ been doing and announced her leave.  She had scooped up her keys and said goodnight and left the apartment without another word.

Leena, tiny and spry, beautiful and as happy as she usually is, had practically pounced onto Myka’s lap the second Tracy had gone. Her lips were on Myka’s not much longer after that.

Myka laughs now, thinking of last night.  Thinking of how them together on that couch reminded her so much of her and Helena on a couch in Helena’s home the night before Christmas.  The night Helena’s father had stumbled, intoxicated… thankfully… into the house before either Myka or Helena could finish what they’d started or really hide that thing they’d yet to finish.

Leena had asked her, “What’s so funny?” then and Myka had been completely honest with her because at some point over the summer, she’d realized that she could be that way with Leena.  One hundred percent honest.  Myka told Leena, “Helena and I almost getting caught… doing this very thing… this very same way.” It made Leena smile, that confession of Myka’s.  It made Leena grin when Myka also said, “You would think I’d learn my lesson.”

Leena replied, directly in her ear, “Now that is the difference between me and Helena…”

Just turned eighteen, Myka thinks while waiting for her to go on, through steady and heavy breathing, through the so slow and easy motions of her hips pressed up against Myka’s abdomen.

“…if someone comes through that door?  We are not stopping.”

Thankfully for Myka, for the state they were in at the time, for the sake of Myka’s sanity, too, no one came walking through that door. They had the entire apartment to themselves. 

They took great advantage of that fact.

Myka is biting back a soft laugh near the end of these thoughts when she hears Helena sighing loudly and Myka moves her eyes back to that computer screen, back to the look of absolute loss that is in Helena Wells’ expression.

Helena says, with some reluctance, “Your smile… looks like the answer is yes.”

“One happy thought,” Myka says, smile fading into a soft and knowing smirk, and she gives another gentle shake of her head, “that’s all that smile means.  And you of all people should know that being in love and being happy are not always the same thing. Sometimes, like us Helena, those things reside on completely opposite ends of the world. 

“So no,” Myka brush her hand through her hair and offers a sympathetic smile to the woman whose tears are falling steadily before her, “I don’t love her, Helena.”  Myka sighs, resting her chin against her palm and looking anywhere else entirely, away from those tears, “I almost wish I could.”

***

“Here.”

Myka throws Sam’s envelope down on the counter as he approaches with a too-big smile on his face and several books in his arms which he has pulled from various shelves throughout the bookstore. 

“I was wondering,” he breathes out heavily, dropping that pile of books onto the counter beside that envelope, “when you were going to give me this.” Myka presses her lips together tight and rolls her eyes, not at all surprised that Sam had spent any time at all waiting for just that.

“Don’t get too excited,” Myka says, turning her attention to the stack of books now in front of her as Sam snatches up that envelope, “I mostly remember it being a very short letter.”

“I still got one,” Sam says with a teasing tone, holding that letter up as evidence alongside a very victorious, very boyish smile. Myka’s response is to roll her eyes again as she begins ringing his books up.  As he begins to meticulously open up that envelope.

“What are you doing?”  she asks suddenly, wide-eyed and shaking her head.  “Don’t open that here.  Can’t you at least wait until you get home.”

“What? Why?” a mischievous smile appears on Sam’s smug face, “You’re afraid you actually said something nice to me?”

“I say nice things to you _all the time_ , Sam,” Myka insists.  The look Sam gives her is hilariously unamused.  It makes Myka puff out a very soft but very amused laugh.

“Like what?”

“I don’t kick you out of the store anymore, _that’s_ nice!”

“That’s not saying nice things, Bering,” Sam laughs, leaning into the counter, “that’s refraining from saying and doing _not nice_ things.”

“Half of one, a dozen of the other,”  Myka brushes his retort away with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“And now you’re just saying things that I say,” Sam grins and with his eyes on Myka’s annoyed expression, he tears open the remainder of that envelope. Pulls out the paper folded up within it.

The folded paper is thick and there are so many layers to that folded piece of paper that Myka truly does begin to worry that she said anything at all of significance to Sam as her ten-year-old self.  But thinking back to the letter she had written herself, to the absolutely disdainful, even if a bit playful, verbiage she’d used when speaking of Sam… she’s fairly certain nothing too worthy of future blackmail exists on that paper.

Sam begins unfolding that paper and the more he unfolds, the larger the paper gets, the louder Myka begins to laugh.  Because the larger that paper gets, the stronger her memory of what is written on that paper becomes and by the time Sam has that paper completely unfolded, Myka remembers, quite clearly, the day she’d asked Jeannie Jr. for that large piece of paper. 

It came from a giant pad of paper that she probably had for a one-time project.  She’d probably kept that pad of paper for no other reason than to have something really cool that Pete really wanted but couldn’t have.

Myka also remembers, quite clearly, what she wrote to Sam in very large print on that giant piece of paper.

“NO” takes up the full length and width of that paper, and beneath that in parenthesis, “And stop calling me Bunny!”  Sam reads these words out loud and Myka, still laughing, continues ringing his books up.  “No?  What are you even saying no to?”

“You,” Myka clarifies and then points, “doing _this_.  Probably.”

“C’mon Bering.  I’m not even doing anything.”

Myka lifts up one of the books from his stack in display, “Been perusing the self-help section a lot today,” and she holds up another book, “and romance for that matter.  You don’t have to buy books that you’re not going to read just to hang out, Sam. You could just come hang out. Emphasis on _not a date_.”

“You didn’t even say not-a-date,” Sam says furrowing his brows.

“Not a date,” Myka says.

“Are you saying I don’t need self-help or to brush up on my romance?”

“You probably _do_ need help,” Myka teases, setting both of those books into a brown paper bag with the others he’s found, “but you should really consider paying a professional instead of trying to help yourself.  Same goes for the romance.”

“That’s not saying nice things,” Sam reminds her.

“Well, maybe I’m just not a nice person,” Myka suggests with a quick shrug.

“Or maybe that’s just what you want people to believe,” Sam says, reaching for that brown paper bag and pulling it into his grasp. “Thanks, Bering.”

“ _Goodbye_ , Sam,” she calls after him, as he turns to leave without his letter, which Myka snatches up from the counter.  “Oh, wait. You forgot this!” Sam turns as she walks out from behind the counter and crosses over to him, folding up every crease in that large piece of paper as she goes.

“Keep it,” he says.

“No way,” Myka smiles and she’s sure it is wide and delightful and typically crooked because Sam’s most immediate response is wide, suspicious eyes.  “I wrote it for you. Cherish it, frame it, hang it on your wall.”

Myka tosses that now folded up paper into the top of Sam’s bag and winks. 

“Thanks,” he says, none to enthusiastically.  Then with a sly smile he adds, “ _Bunny_.”

“I will murder you in your sleep, Samuel Christopher.”

“Ooh, she remembers my middle name,” Sam teases, heading through the door, just barely making it out of that store before a pad of Post-It notes is flying at his head.

***

It is early August when Myka answers Jane’s phone call and Jane says, before anything else, “Tracy found the letters.”

It’s a warning that requires no context.  Myka knows exactly what it means.  She hears her mother sobbing in the background. She hears her talking to Tracy in a way that makes it apparent that she isn’t actually talking _to_ Tracy but to Tracy’s voicemail. 

Jane goes on to say, “She found them before your mother could talk to her about them.  They just got into it in a really bad way, Myka.  She’s extremely upset and I’m pretty sure she’s heading your direction. So just… be on the look out, okay?”

Myka doesn’t have to look out for very long after she hangs up with Jane.  She hears Helena’s car pulling up in front of the store. She hears the bookstore door open and slam closed.  Even Tracy’s steps, usually small and undetectable, resonate her fury. 

Myka unlocks and opens the door before Tracy even makes it to the top. She has her hands up in some poor attempt at calming Tracy. She steps back only slightly as Tracy makes her way to the door and she manages to say only her sister’s name.

“Tracy--”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Tracy is pushing her way past Myka and keeps walking on, straight into her room with Myka on her tail.

“Tracy,” Myka tries, “please calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” Tracy is yelling from inside her closet when Myka appears in her doorway.  “I just found out,” Tracy says this, tossing things over her shoulder and out of the closet, “that my fuck up of a father,” another item comes flying out of that closet and against a far wall, “is not even _my_ father.”  Tracy exits the closet with her cheer team duffle bag in hand, she walks to her bed and throws the thing down on top of it, turning slightly back to Myka, “I just found out that my _real_ father is an even bigger fuck up than even _him_.” Tracy is shaking her head, walking to her dresser.  “Mom really knows how to pick ’em, right?”

“Give Mom a break, Trace.  You know she’s been through more than she’s ever been willing to tell us,” Myka sighs, leaning into Tracy’s door frame, pressing her forehead to that frame and closing her eyes.  “She didn’t have a choice.”

Tracy turns, angry and disbelieving, back to Myka and it is her silence that brings Myka to open her eyes, to find her sister standing suddenly quiet and stunned and trying to say words that she still has not managed to conjure up.  Until finally she finds those words.

“Don’t do that.  Don’t act like this doesn’t kill you, Myka,” and Tracy points to the wall, at nothing in particular, “that woman let Dad treat you like shit our entire lives and she knew _exactly_ why. She _knew_ it was because he thought you weren’t his daughter.  He praised everything I did, treated me like a fucking princess.  Rarely ever lifted a hand to me… don’t act like that doesn’t piss you off.”

“It doesn’t,” Myka sighs, standing straight, “not anymore.”

“Fucking _liar_ ,” Tracy scoffs, rolling her eyes and turning back to her dresser, pulling out handfuls of clothes.  “Just like your mother.  I won’t be shocked when the next thing she has to say is that we’re both adopted.”

Myka shakes her head and smiles incredulously at the thought. “There’s no way,” she says this aloud even if a bit softly, a bit underneath her breath, because Tracy could not deny their mother.  Their mother could not deny Tracy.  With no age gap between them, they could have been mistaken for twins.  If Tracy had any bit of her father in her at all, it had faded away in her early childhood, right along with him.

In that same thought, Myka deflates thinking about her father. About the similarities between her and her father.  About how she could not deny him.  How he could never deny her, even if he had tried for fifteen years of her life or more.

“I can’t be here right now,” Tracy says, stuffing more of her clothes into that duffle, “in this house,” she’s grabbing a hair brush, hair products, “being lied to for another seventeen years.  And you, sister, how you haven’t killed him by now is beyond me.”

“This is new to you,” Myka says, moving so that her back is now leaning against the door frame, watching Tracy continue to stuff her duffle bag. “Being frustrated, being lied to, being told you aren’t who you always thought you were or made to believe you aren’t worthy of even this life.  You’re angry and I get it because it’s new to you, Trace,” Myka sighs, “but it’s not new to me.”

Tracy stills beside the bed, her hands on her bag, her head tilted slightly in Myka’s direction.  She is quiet and Myka realizes that she is listening.

“I’m tired, Trace,” Myka says, standing straight and stepping further into Tracy’s room, slowly and cautiously over and around all of the clutter. “There is very little left in me that wants to put up a fight. I have too little energy left in me… to dedicate any of it to expelling revenge or anger when it isn’t going to change anything.  Him being out of this house and out of my life is enough.”

“Is it?”

Tracy turns to Myka suddenly, narrowing her eyes on her and shaking her head in what Myka thinks resembles too-closely disgust.

“You _should_ be angry, Myka,” Tracy tells her.  “If I were you, I would be.”

“Well, you’re not me, Trace,” Myka shrugs.

“You’re right,” Tracy nods, turning back to her duffle bag and zipping it up.  She throws the thing over her shoulder and turns back toward Myka, “because if I had been, I wouldn’t have kept this thing, which you obviously knew about, a secret from my own little sister.”  Tracy moves swiftly past Myka, glaring up at her as she goes, almost knocking Myka off balance with that duffle bag as she passes by.

“Tracy,” Myka is growing gradually less patient with her sister’s attitude but is nonetheless following her to the hallway bathroom now. “It isn’t my responsibility. It isn’t my story to tell.”

“ _Story_?” Tracy laughs, unzipping that duffle again and throwing her toothbrush, tooth paste, makeup bag, and more hair products, into it.  “My life, who I am, is not just some story.  The truth about where I came from, the fact that my dad is not actually my dad, this is not just some stupid story.  It’s not a _fairytale_. I’m halfway there with one dead parent but this would at least require a _happy_ ending.”

“You’re seventeen,” Myka sighs, “you’re too young to be thinking about any endings. Fairytale or otherwise.”

“Don’t worry, Sis,” Tracy is rolling her eyes, “I’m not your girlfriend.  I can at least find happiness outside of this place.”  She is out of the bathroom now, pushing past Myka in the hallway, collecting her keys, retrieving the keys to Helena’s car.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere else, somewhere not _here_.”

“You aren’t taking Helena’s car.”

Tracy sighs, defeated.  Throws the car keys back onto a side table near the front door.

“Fine, I’ll walk,” Tracy says, throwing her hands in the air, “ _again_.”

“You shouldn’t be mad at Mom,” Myka says raising her voice just a little, “she was just trying to protect you, Tracy.  Imagine if Dad knew…”

“And what’s your excuse for not opening your mouth about it?”

Myka shrugs and shakes her head at this, Tracy’s words, her accusations, her expectations and Myka answers truthfully when she tells her, “I don’t know, Tracy.  What would I say?”

“How long have you known, exactly?”  Tracy asks, letting her bag fall to the ground beside her feet, where she still stands in front of the front door. “Would you have ever told me?”

“Look, you’re the one who lured me to Dad’s house. You’re the one who said he had a gift for me, for my birthday--”

“Lured you?” Tracy is laughing. “I told you, I did not lure you. You went on your own. I didn’t drag you there--”

“Do you want to know what that gift was?”  Tracy is quiet, crossing her arms in front of her. “This!” Myka says, holding her arms out.  “Him finally knowing that I was his daughter, that you were not.”

“Dad didn’t say anything to me about that being your gift. He said he wanted to apologize and be honest with you.  He wanted to give you something to help--” 

“Apologize?  For _everything_?  _How_? By telling me something I have always known my entire life?  That I am his daughter?”  Myka is raising her voice to match Tracy’s, to speak over her little sister.

“I don’t know, Ophie,” Tracy’s voice rises steadily too. “He said he’d been writing something like a letter to you, he didn’t say anything about--”

“It took a DNA test for him to get to a place where he felt even an inkling of remorse for how he’s treated me, and do you want to know what my question for you is?”  Myka pauses, taking a step closer to her little sister, now quiet, listening again, waiting, “How in the hell did he get my DNA in the first place?”

“You think I--”  Tracy is pointing at herself, stepping closer to Myka with anger in her eyes, with tears slowly forming there, too.  “I told you, Myka, that I was on your side.  I am on _your_ side. I will _always_ be on your side.  I would never… I would never go around your back just so that Dad could prove something so asinine, so self-serving… and this isn’t about you, anyway, Myka. You know who your dad is. You know who you are. You have _always_ known!”

“And you don’t know anything, Tracy, if you think that’s what I know.  If you think that I feel even the slightest bit sorry for you.  If you think I wouldn’t change places with you in a heartbeat.”

“So that’s it?  Once again, you just want what I have?  My pain, all yours?  My dead father, all yours?  You know what you _can_ have?  You can have your drunk, abusive father and you can have your lying bitch of a mother,” Tracy bends and picks up her duffle bag, “and you can keep fucking my best friend because you don’t know how to maintain your own relationship.  You can have all of that, you can have this apartment, this worthless bookstore, and all of your stupid little secrets, too.”

“How was I supposed to tell you exactly, Tracy? _What_ was I supposed to say?”

“Anything at all, Myka, to let me know that you actually give a shit about me.  Anything at all to say that we are in this fucked up family together.  Me and you, Myka.  Because if I had known, you are the _first_ person I would have gone to.  I would have gone _straight_ to you.”

“And you can’t give Mom any credit for these last couple of years? For what she’s done for us? For you specifically? Would you even be going to college next year, if not for what Mom and Jane have done for you?  Why can’t you give her credit for that? Hasn’t she made up for it enough?”

“Not after this,” Tracy says wiping tears from her cheeks and turns to go.  “What she did to you all of our lives is bullshit enough but _this_ is beyond my fucking scope.”

“You know what, little sister? Fine. If all you want to be is mad and if all you want to do is throw a fit and move out? _Fine_. You’re seventeen and I’m not catering to your arrogance anymore.”

“My arrogance?” Tracy swings back around, “ _My_ arrogance, Ophelia? _She_ who has spent the entire summer moping and whining and crying and being an absolute _prick_ toward _everyone_ because she can’t get her fucking _whore_ of a girlfriend to stop sucking off the entire English countryside--”

Tracy’s words are cut off abruptly when Myka’s open palm connects swiftly and without warning, without any coherent thought on Myka’s end, with Tracy’s cheek. 

And Myka practically growls when she says, “Don’t you _dare_ talk about Helena that way!” She doesn’t know where it comes from.  She hadn’t thought to say it.  It just comes out, after the slap that just happens, before a gasp that cannot be contained. Her first instinct is to hurt her sister in exactly the way her sister’s words have hurt her. In the only way she really knows how to make it stick.  So it just happens.  These words, that slap. They just come out and Myka has no idea where from.

Tracy’s duffle bag falls to the floor again.  Her hands are immediately on her face, covering that now-red and probably very sore spot, mouth wide, eyes shut tight. Breath heavy and quickened. A delayed cry just barely escaping her.

At first there are tears, so many tears and Tracy asks her, “Why did you--” but the sentence goes unfinished and Tracy is pulling herself together, standing straight once more, narrowing angry and wet eyes on Myka. She is pissed and glaring, hand balled into a fist with white knuckles and an ever tightening grip.

It’s the fleeting look of hurt and sadness that gives way to anger which makes Myka’s heart drop into the pit of her stomach.  That makes Myka catch her breath and pull her offending hand away.  But that hurt and sadness, the look of absolute betrayal is so fleeting.  It takes Tracy no time at all to recover from it, to prepare her retort.  To do as she has always been capable of doing, and hurt Myka with her words in such a way that Myka has never been able to get through to Tracy.

“I guess,” Tracy breathes through her anger, _tries_ to catch her breath, “getting _angry_ isn’t your problem.”  Tracy bends down, her eyes never leaving Myka’s, to reach for the handles of her duffle bag with one hand, the other hand still cradling her cheek, “as much as it is being angry at the people you _should_ be angry at.”  Tracy’s hand is moving from her cheek to the front door, pulling it open wide, “I guess it was only a matter of time before you started turning into an abusive asshole just like Dad,” she puffs out a soft disbelieving laugh that sounds too much like a sob, and corrects, “sorry, just like _your_ dad.”

“Get out, Tracy.”

“You know this back and forth self-loathing bullshit that you and Helena do makes so much more sense now,” Tracy still manages to sound enraged, even through cascading tears.  She still manages to know all of the absolutely worst things to say. Myka thinks about how Helena would say they are so alike in this way.  Despite their differences, despite everything.   They are exactly alike in this way. Tracy… just happens to be so much better at it.  “Leave her, Myka. Before you start slapping her around, too.”

“Get the fuck _out_.”

“You are definitely not my sister.”

Tracy is gone and when the door slams home, Myka let’s out a scream of frustration, louder than anything she has ever vocalized before.

***

“What the hell is going on?”  Kelly is asking as she pushes through the front door, closes and locks it behind her.  “Why did Tracy just go running out of here with her overnight bag and a face full of tears? And did I just hear you scream?”

Myka can only sigh and shake her head before turning back toward the hallway.  She has no explanation.  Nothing she can possibly say about what has just happened.

“Why are you crying?  Hey,” Kelly yells, stepping over to Myka, grabbing her arm and spinning her around to face her, “why are _you_ crying? What the hell happened?”

“It’s nothing,” Myka says straightening her face, wiping away her tears, “she’ll get over it.”

“That,” Kelly points behind her, “doesn’t look like something she’ll be getting over anytime soon.  And this,” Kelly points at Myka, letting her hand fall away from her grasp on Myka’s arm, “this doesn’t look like something you’ll be getting over either. Is this another Helena thing? Because I told you, Myka--”

“We’re half sisters,” Myka interrupts and Kelly tilts her head as those words settle in.

“Come again?”

“Mom has been keeping it a secret from us and Tracy just found out,” Myka sniffles before pushing the heels of her palms into her eyes, pressing tightly against the burn of fresh tears, “our dad is not her dad,” Myka sighs, letting her hands fall again, “and her dad died in the fire that killed Pete’s dad when she was three,” now Myka is shrugging, dropping her gaze to the ground.  “Her dad is the reason Pete’s dad died.”

“Fuck,” is all Kelly can manage.

“She said something… really awful about Helena and I shouldn’t have, I know that I shouldn’t have but I didn’t know how else to make it clear to her… that she can’t talk about Helena that way.  Helena has done so much for her, she is so goddamn ungrateful.”

“Well, what happened?  Talk!”

“I slapped her,” Myka cries, covering her face again. “I’m sorry. This anger, I let it get to me and I slapped her and you should have seen her face. You would have thought she was looking at my father.  That hurt…”

“That’s all?” 

When Myka lowers her hands to her side, the look Kelly is giving her is accusing and also skeptical but not in the way Myka expects.

“That’s all,” Myka says, slumping her shoulders, “I understand if you want to leave again, Kelly.  I’m sorry, she just pissed me off--”

“Do you know how many black eyes my sister and I gave each other in high school?  I thought Tracy’s boyfriend _died_ the way she ran out of here crying!”

Myka furrows her brows and shakes her head and watches in her own curiosity as a smile pulls into Kelly’s lips and the older girl puffs out a soft laugh.

“Look, I know you and Tracy are precious little butterflies who get along because you feel guilty about her being in the hospital or whatever and she feels guilty about the way your dad treated you… but sisters fight.”

“Not like that,” Myka says softly.  “Not us anyway.  Not just because of guilt, we’ve just… always only had each other. In some small way.”

“You,” Kelly says, poking a finger into Myka’s shoulder, “have always had _yourself_. Until recently. You have told me that, _cabrona_.  You have always said that Tracy needs to be slapped in the face with reality and now you’re upset because you actually slapped her in the face?  Because you actually hurt her feelings?”  Kelly shakes her head, throwing her hands in the air and walking into the kitchen. “I don’t know what I was thinking moving in with two white girls.”

“ _Kelly_!”

“Get over here,” Kelly says, pulling two glasses out of the cabinet and setting those glasses down on the counter.  And without questioning, Myka slowly steps to her side. As Kelly reaches into a lower cabinet and moves several pots and pans out of the way and pulls out, to Myka’s surprise, a bottle of tequila. 

Kelly turns back to Myka, from where she is still knelt by that cabinet, and displays the bottle for her, smiles as she says, “Your dad had really good hiding spots but mine are slightly better.”

“I’m not drinking that,” Myka says, already in disgust.

“Yes, you are,” Kelly’s response is firm and she’s on her feet, already pouring that clear potent liquid into those two glasses. “I can’t drink with Pete because he’s sober and I respect why, I also respect the irony that your sister’s new father is the reason behind that.  And I can’t drink with your wife because her ass is in London acting like she really wants to actually fucking be there.  So, it’s you, Romeo, even if _Julieta_ kills me for it,” Kelly says, capping that tequila, picking up that glass and holding it out for Myka, “it’s you or I go to Jane’s place because that woman can throw back a tequila shot like no one’s business.  I learned that during my stay.  So, what’s it going to be because I really think you fucking need this shit.”

Kelly holds the glass up higher, closer to Myka and Myka, despite herself, despite her father and her sister and her mother and Pete and everything within her that tells her, screams at her _no_ … Myka takes that glass.  She takes it and holds it and Kelly pushes her glass against it. Kelly grins at the sound of those glasses clinking together.

“On three, _Romeo_ , and don’t you fucking spit it out.  This is the expensive shit,” Kelly warns.

“You didn’t even pay for it, you just found it,” Myka accuses.

“Cleaning this kitchen from top to bottom, I found it,” Kelly clarifies. “I _earned_ it.”

“And why are you hiding it behind the pots and pans?” Myka asks randomly.

“Because I know you and your sister’s soup burning asses are never going to use a _pinche_ pot or pan as long as I’m in the house, okay?  As clearly indicated by the fact I’ve been hiding this bottle for months and neither of you ever knew it was there,” Kelly is absolutely beaming with pride. “Now, on three, _cabrona_.”

Myka rolls her eyes and shakes her head and sighs the deepest, most exasperated sigh she can possibly muster, to let Kelly know that this is not something she wants to be doing or something she thinks will yield any sort of promising results.  Still, she lifts her glass as Kelly lifts her glass and counts, “One… two… three…”

***

**_How are you feeling this morning?_ **

Myka wakes up to this text message from Helena Wells at nine o’clock the next morning with a surging headache and a spinning bedroom to go right along with it.  To no surprise, especially not her own, Kelly is curled up right beside her with the hot heat of too strong breath blowing right against her cheek.

“Raquel,” Myka groans, pushing that other girl off of her and onto her other side.  Kelly barely stirs and Myka turns her attention back to her phone. Attempts to turn her thoughts to the night before with very little success.

She reaches for her glasses on the side table and puts them on for five seconds only to take them off again.  Today, she has already decided, will be a blind one because those spins are far too in-focus with her glasses on and her need to vomit is far too strong.

Myka dials Helena’s phone, pulls her phone to her ear, shuts her eyes tight.

“You’re alive,” Helena says softly and her voice sounds as unenthusiastic as it had the last time they’d talked and Myka had said far too many things without ever thinking about what she was saying before she said it.  “How are you feeling?”

“Like I could run a marathon,” Myka jokes, though her voice threatens to give out before it ever even begins to speak.  She clears her throat and swallows back more of that feeling of nausea. “I’m guessing by your text that we spoke at some point last night…”

“Oh, we did not just speak.  There was a whole entire… _display,_ I think that’s what we’ll call it, over video chat,” Helena manages to laugh softly.  “I’m guessing by your statement that you don’t remember any bit of it.”

“If I were in less cognitive pain, I might pull myself together long enough to not give you this much fire power to use against me in the future,” Myka is slowly moving her head from side to side.  It is the safest way for her to shake her head, to test exactly how off-balance she might be if she had to sprint to the bathroom, without knocking her brain around her skull.  That is exactly what this feeling feels like.  “But I just don’t care right now.”

“You?”  Helena asks with a some sarcasm, “Not caring?”

“Helena--”  Myka begins to protest because she knows exactly what Helena is doing. She knows exactly what Helena is making reference to.

“You’re hungover,” Helena informs.

“I gathered as much,” Myka snaps back.

“Okay,” Helena says, “call me back when you _aren’t_ hungover or picking fights for no reason. Although, judging by this morning and last night, this entire week, in fact, I’m concerned that day may never actually come.”

“No, Helena,” Myka sighs, pulling a hand over her forehead, “I’m sorry, I’m just… sorry.  I guess you know about Tracy then?”

“I do, thanks to yours and Kelly’s quite entertaining re-enactment of the entire argument.  But it’s fine, Myka.  I have to go anyway.  I have dinner plans.”

“Oh, okay.  With Liam?” Myka questions, opening her eyes as she rolls onto her side, the room rolling onto its side right along with her.

“My father, actually.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Helena laughs softly.  “Seltzer water, vitamins, plenty of sleep, Myka, you’ll be fine.”

“Thanks.  Do you also have a remedy for me destroying every friendship and relationship I’ve ever had?”

“Yeah,” Helena says and Myka imagines her, by the sound of her voice alone, smiling, nodding, pushing that hand of hers through long black hair, “four nights, mostly alone with me, over Thanksgiving weekend.”

“I need this, Helena,” Myka manages to nod without inducing too much pain, “I need us to be together again.”

It is more true than even Myka knows and for more reasons than she could ever admit to Helena. To even herself.  Because this way they’d been carrying on apart, the way it has made Myka feel, it can only take them so far.  It can only last for so long. 

So Myka needs this, to see Helena again.  To be with Helena again.  To know that when they are together, they are still the same.  They are still them.

Perfectly fitting puzzle pieces.  Unrestrained by time.

“Do you understand?”

She imagines Helena nodding, she imagines brown eyes closing thoughtfully.  A hand pushing through hair, she hears the sigh that comes along after that.

“You know that I love you,” Helena says softly, “right? Even when I don’t tell you… even when I say and do all of the wrong things.  I still love you.”

That makes Myka smile.  It makes her really smile because she _knows_ , even when she pretends not to know that it’s true.  She could say those exact words to Helena but she knows Helena knows that exact thing to be true.

So Myka tells her another truth instead.  One she perhaps doesn’t know.

“Loving each other has never been our problem.”

And Helena concedes to that knowledge.  “You are not wrong,” she tells Myka, “I have always loved you, in some way.  Even before it grew into what it is now… I have always loved you.  And I know you love me, too.  I just... it’s nice to hear it.  Every now and then.”

Myka’s smile grows, and she’s rubbing the palm of her hand against the ache in her head but she turns her lips further into the phone and whispers, “I love you, Helena,” and she hears the sigh, the pure relief in Helena’s voice when she says, “I love you, too.”

***

Mrs. Cho calls to tell Myka that Tracy has been at her house overnight, that she doesn’t seem to want to go home and won’t tell them why but she figures it is a family issue.  Mrs. Cho has always been perceptive like that.  She has always been receptive, and without prejudice, like this, too.

“In case you or your mom were concerned,” Mrs. Cho tells her, “I couldn’t find an updated number for your mother but I know Tracy lives with you.  She’s more than welcome to stay here, so don’t worry about her.  Better here than nowhere, right Just-A-Friend?  I hope you don’t mind that I still call you that… it still makes me laugh.”

“I don’t mind.  Thank you, Mrs. Cho.  I appreciate it. I will let my mother know.”

At some point over the next week, Myka’s mother will attempt to reach out to Tracy on several occasions.  Myka, too, will attempt to reach out to Tracy but only after five days passes.  Only after it becomes very apparent to Myka that Tracy has no plans on returning home anytime soon. And only after Leena blames herself as part of the reason Tracy and Myka are fighting in the first place.

***

Myka and Tracy not talking is the absolute line for Leena. Everything, she says, stops right now. She breaks it off.

“It can’t be a break up if we were never together,” is just one of the many lines Leena had told Myka.  “I talked to Tracy.  Whenever she left home she came straight to the diner and she pulled me away from my work to tell me what happened.  Myka, there's... so much that you both have to deal with and _this_ is part of the problem.”

“I’m sorry, Leena.  I apologize if you feel caught in the middle and if the way I have acted toward my sister has made you feel uncomfortable but Tracy needs to learn how to cope,” Myka told Leena, “Tracy needs to learn that she doesn’t own and control everything.  She doesn’t own or control anyone.”

“I think that’s a lesson you could benefit from,” Leena had nodded then and her expression wasn’t anger or malice or even frustration. Her expression had been filled entirely with concern.  Filled to the absolute brim.  “I think this is one of those things that you and Tracy share as sisters. Something you need to work on as sisters because you’re right, I’m not Tracy’s.  She may be my best friend but she does not own me. I am a grown woman, I can make my own decisions.  When it comes to relationships, to who I want to be involved with and how much I want to be involved with that person?  I am not hers. But I am not yours either, Myka. And I refuse to continue coming between two sisters over something that means so little to both of us. It was fine as long as Helena wasn't being hurt over it, as long as Tracy wasn’t being hurt.  But now…”

“Leena--”

“This was never real,” but the tears that burn in Myka’s eyes, the way her heart feels and her stomach turns and her breath escapes her with each new word that escapes Leena’s mouth, makes it seem so very real. So much more real than Myka had ever imagined it to be.  “This was never real and it was never going to last.  I told you before that I’m leaving next summer anyway, and that hasn’t changed.  I’m going to California and that’s just one more long distance relationship that you won’t be able to handle on top of what you and Helena already put yourselves through.”

Myka is defeated.  She is defeated all over again and it is just one more thing about this year that she absolutely hates.  It is one more relationship, friendship and otherwise, that has fallen completely apart this year.

“I appreciate you apologizing,” Leena nods and reaches a hand across to Myka, from where they stand in the parking lot just behind the diner. Leena squeezes her grasp on Myka’s arm and says, “But there’s nothing to forgive.  I’m sorry that this was part of the problem and I’m just moving on before any of this can escalate into something worse than this.”

“No, Leena, I,” Myka nods, “I completely understand. I’m sorry, again.  I’m just…” Myka sighs out a laugh and shrugs, “you have always been too good a friend. To my sister, to me as well. And I’m sorry.”

Leena smiles and leans in, stretches her neck, stands at the very tip of her toes, to press a soft kiss to Myka’s lips.  When they part, when she steps back, she is licking her lower lip, biting gently down onto it.

“Promise me that you will not let your sister stay mad at you please, Myka.”  Leena smiles softly, tilting her head to the side.  Reaching and tugging on Myka’s arm again as Myka nods.

“I won’t,” Myka smiles, lowering her head only momentarily when she adds, more honestly, “I’ll try not to.”

“And you… promise me you will not stay mad at yourself either, okay?”

Myka sighs, “Yeah,” and she is looking into concerned green eyes again, smiling wider, falling further into this place of shifting friendships and broken relationships and losing her grip on her life, “I will do my best not to.”

That promise, Myka thinks, might be a lot more difficult to keep.

***

August, September, and most of October are a blur of school work, an uneventful and Liam-free twenty-fourth birthday for Helena, and working the bookstore alone.  And in all of that time, Tracy still has not returned home.  Not while Myka is there.  Kelly has told Myka that Tracy will come at odd times.  She will come in and get things from her room and she will leave again with no real word on why or for how long.

It is always when Myka is at school.  Always when Kelly is on her way to work.

Myka knows only from Kelly that Tracy, even in these past few months, seems so much older than she had before.  Myka knows only from Kelly that Tracy had confronted their father eventually, about the testing, and that it hadn’t gone over well. It wasn’t the knowing because her dad had always known there was someone else – it was finding out who that someone else was.

But even knowing now what he does, he still did not treat Tracy any differently.  He was not mean to her, he did not stop calling her his daughter.  He did not stop inviting her over and taking her out to dinner and treating her like a human being. 

Any and all of his anger that could possibly be expressed about who Tracy’s father was, about who Myka’s mother had spent those handful of nights with, had been directed right at her mother.  There were phone calls, first to Myka’s house, left on what was now Myka’s answering machine.  Then to Jane’s house, to what was now Jane’s and Jean’s place. There had been a letter, there had even been an appearance at the elementary school where both Myka’s mother and Jane worked. 

The threat of another restraining order was the only thing that stopped him.  And only when Myka was the one making that specific threat.

***

Myka asks her mother once in late October, “Did dad set the fire? Because I wouldn’t put it past him,” and to this her mother says almost nothing at all. 

That silence is concerning, even if Myka doesn’t truly believe her father capable. Because Myka had always figured her father for an abusive asshole and she had always known him to be a loose cannon. But there was hardly a bone in her body, even after he’d strangled her nearly to death, that thought he might intentionally kill someone.

Maybe that makes her naïve. She had known her father to be a coward.  She had known him to assert his anger over women, over small children.  Over people he knew were too scared, too incapable of standing up to his rage.  But Myka had never known her father to ever confront another man.   Myka’s not entirely sure that her father ever would, even if he could.

“The fire was caused by a lit cigarette,” Jane eventually clarifies for Myka and that is all she clarifies before Jane makes it very clear that this isn’t a story that either of them are willing to tell.  She does tell Myka that it’s clear to them now, from the way her father has reacted to finding out, that he never knew Jack was Tracy’s father to begin with.  But even after Myka insists that their having left out the fact that two men they loved died on the same night and in the same fire, is a _really big hole_ in a _very important story_ , they are perfectly resilient.

They have been holding on to this secret for so long, they have kept it from so many people, that not telling it and completely ignoring that this era of their lives had ever even existed… it is no strange feat. It is not even remotely difficult for them to do. 

“It isn’t up for discussion,” Myka’s mother eventually tells her, sounding too much like Jane when Jane, for once, doesn’t have the words to respond to Myka’s endless questioning, “Not right now.”

***

Later, much later, in early November, Jane tells Myka, “Pete knows what happened in that fire from top to bottom.  He asked every fire fighter his dad ever worked with. He bugged the investigator for years after it happened.  He hasn’t talked about it much since then but you’re his best friend, Myka. I’m sure he’ll tell you.”

Myka will ask Pete whenever they have the time to talk about it.  She just doesn’t think that’s going to happen anytime at all before he returns home.

***

It is late November, it is the night before Thanksgiving, and Myka is staring up at a screen in the airport with various flight statuses displayed upon it.  Next to Helena’s flight, in bright yellow font, reads “on time” and these words, simple, practical, and almost meaningless to most, fill her with _so much_ excitement.

She is simultaneously filled with so much dread.


	23. Nineteen & Twenty-Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helena comes home for Thanksgiving.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the last bit until after DragonCon. Hope you enjoy!

“Strange.”

Helena is stepping slowly forward and into Myka’s space, allowing her carry-on to rest on its wheels just beside her.  She reaches a hand, at first hesitant but then very certain of her actions, to Myka’s button-up, and with a gentle smile pulling into her lips, she slips her finger between two of those buttons, just behind the fabric of that shirt, and tugs.  She tugs lightly at first but then with just a bit more strength, until Myka moves toward her. Until Myka can do nothing more than take a steadying step in Helena’s direction to regain her balance.

“Strange?”  Myka finally questions and her hands are still somehow by her side.  Unmoving.  Not reaching.  Not daring to touch. As if she has never, before now, dared to touch this woman.

“You _look_ a lot like my Myka,” Helena says softly, smile growing.  She leans in closer, moving her other arm over Myka’s shoulder, resting her hand at the base of Myka’s neck, fingers in her hair, tugging at her curls.  “You _feel_ like my Myka,” and Helena inhales deeply and sighs, allowing brown eyes roll and eyelids to close for only a moment before opening to Myka’s again, “You even _smell_ like my Myka.”

“But?”  Myka asks, her own smile finally falling into place on her lips.

“Almost a full minute has passed and you are neither touching nor kissing--”

Myka cuts off whatever else that girl has intended to say with the very kiss she is waiting for.  A kiss that is at first gentle and growing gradually more needy. Helena’s grip around Myka’s shoulder tightens and Helena’s other hand finds its way around Myka’s neck.   Myka’s hands, which had been idle by her sides, now move first to Helena’s hips then around to her back, to encircle that waist, to pull that woman closer. 

She holds Helena tight and tighter still against her.

When they part and they are near breathless and nearly a breath away, Myka asks, “Better?” and she is met with a quiet, curious gaze. With Helena’s unspoken question masked in the look of concern that now takes over her expression.

“I know it’s been a bad year,” Helena says softly, reaching a hand to Myka’s cheek and biting down on her own lip.  “I promise you, Myka, we will fix this. _This_ is the glue that keeps us together.”

At that, Myka lets go of a soft laugh and looks up, looks away from Helena with a shake of her head.  “You’ve been gone for a very long time, George,” Myka nods, turning her gaze back to Helena, “but I won’t stop you from trying.”

“Hmm,” Helena hums, twisting her lips to the side before lifting herself into another gentle kiss against Myka’s lips.  “Why don’t we start… with you taking me home?”

“I want nothing more than to do just that.”

***

Claudia has been waiting for an eternity, if you ask her, for Myka to bring Helena home so that she can say hello before Kelly takes her back to the city.  Back to her brother’s place for Thanksgiving.

“Why is your bag so big?  Are you staying for longer?”  Claudia asks with very wide eyes and a great deal of hope.

“I wish, Claudia, but I’m actually flying straight to Brazil from here. For a study abroad program,” and she turns to Myka with an excited and broad smile, she says enthusiastically, “adventures in engineering.” 

That smile makes Myka smile.  That smile makes everything seem so normal again.

“Oh,” Claudia deflates for only a second before her eyes and smile are wide again.  “Well, I’ll be back Friday morning,” Claudia beams, moving in for another hug and squeezing all of the life out of Helena.  “Myka said we can hang out then.”

“Then we shall, my love,” Helena says softly, hugging that not-so-tiny girl, planting a kiss on a not-so-tiny cheek.  When Claudia relinquishes her hold, Helena moves to hug Kelly next, “Please drive safely, Raquel.”

“ _Always_. And I’ll be back for dinner tomorrow so you guys have the place to yourselves tonight,” Kelly says this while wagging her brows like the shadow of Pete that she sometimes becomes. She pulls Claudia toward her by the sleeve of her shirt and places her hands over not-so-tiny ears. She whispers, to Helena and Myka, “ _Fuck. Rainbow_.”

“ _Kelly_ ,” Myka starts but Kelly is already throwing her hands in the air, already being glared at by a very suspicious Claudia below her.

“I’m _going_!” Kelly insists, pulling Helena into another hug, “I have missed you, _commadre_.  Please be good.”  Kelly pulls away, still holding onto Helena but throwing a suggestive glance in Myka’s direction, “Take care of this one.”

“ _Bye_ Raquel,” Helena says with a rise in her voice, ushering Kelly out of the door with Claudia following closely behind them.  Helena is peeling off the cardigan she wears as they go, she is shooing them out of the door and saying, “ _Go_. I love you.  _Goodbye_!”

“Well at least wait until we’re out the building before you start ripping your clothes off,” Kelly teases, pulling Claudia through the door with her and shutting that door quickly shutting it behind them.

Myka reaches for the lock on the door knob and turns it as Helena simultaneously reaches for the top latch on that door and turns it, too. Then quiet.  Stillness. 

There is just the sound of their tandem sighs, the sound of their steady breathing, and the two of them looking at one another for several more silent moments before Helena’s drops her cardigan on the floor between their feet.

“I’m exhausted.”

That accent.  _This_ _close_. It still does her in.

“I know,” Myka nods, agreeably.

“But I have waited an entire year for this,” Helena adds, “for _you_.”

Myka smiles and, with her arm moving around Helena’s back, she pulls that older woman close to her, close enough that her lips are brushing against the skin of Helena’s ear when she whispers, “Welcome home.”

Helena’s knees nearly give way beneath her.

***

They move fast.  Too fast.  So fast that by the time they make it into Myka’s room, they are shirt less and pants less and almost, but not quite, bra less. 

Myka pushes Helena down on her bed and she climbs over that woman, straddles her legs before stretching herself out along Helena’s body and lying almost on top of her.  They are kissing, and it is hot and beautiful and Myka has missed this. She has missed Helena’s touch and Helena’s lips on hers and Helena’s body beneath hers and Helena’s skin at the tips of her fingers.  But then Myka hesitates and she takes in a deep breath and she holds that in for the longest time before letting it go slowly and moving a hand, one very careful hand, to Helena’s hair where it rests over her forehead.

She moves that hair away from Helena’s forehead with a gentle push of her fingers, away from Helena’s face, with a gentle glide of those fingers across soft and sensitive skin.  Then she moves those fingers down the side of Helena’s face, across a cheek, to the top of her ear, to caress the skin there, to cup Helena’s cheek.

“Myka,”  Helena is moving her hands to Myka’s cheeks and moving thumbs across those cheeks, to wipe away tears that fall over her, “what is it?”

“I can’t…” Myka says softly before swallowing and pulling her bottom lip in between her teeth, chewing softly on that lip, eventually continuing, “I can’t stop picturing him… touching you.  Only, I don’t see his face.  I see Jules.”  Myka laughs softly at how ridiculous she feels. She laughs to mask how very nervous she feels.  How suddenly panicked she’s become.  She rolls her eyes, up and away from Helena.  From the concentrated gaze that Helena has on her.  “The really stupid part,” Myka continues, “is how _unreal_ this all feels.  I can hardly believe you’re here… right in front of me. _Below_ me,” she corrects before letting go of another steady breath and returning her gaze to Helena’s.

“I can’t believe that after all of this time, I can still make you blush. Make you nervous,” Helena smiles as if she’s trying very hard not to.  “Close your eyes.”

Myka arches a curious brow at Helena and tells her, “You know I’m not into that blindfold stuff,” and it makes Helena laugh softly beneath her.

“Close your eyes,” Helena insists and Myka does, the second time around. 

She closes her eyes and focuses on the feel of Helena’s hands against her cheeks until they are no longer against her cheeks. Instead, she feels Helena moving closer, propping herself up on her elbows so that their lips are a breath away.  Myka is propped up on one elbow, her other hand, the only thing allowing her to see in this moment, slides down the length of Helena’s body, to rest over her hip.

Helena is slowly removing Myka’s glasses.  “Be careful with those,” Myka tells her, “they’re--”

“Special,” Helena finishes for her, “I know.  I was with you when you insisted on keeping those old frames.  Replacing the lenses. They’re safe… on the night stand.”

“Thank you,” Myka sighs.

“Nice décor by the way,” Helena whispers returning to that space that is almost against Myka’s lips.  “Mid-century? Danish?”

“More like two centuries and thrift store-ish,” Myka corrects and this makes Helena laugh.  “Actually, Mom had it in storage.  It used to belong to my grandparents, Mom saved it for me.”

“That’s lovely,” Helena says brushing her lips against Myka’s, “and simultaneously awkward.  The mattress?”

“Newer,” Myka laughs into a tiny kiss, much to Helena’s relief. Judging by her sigh.

“Good to know,” Helena says and presses another kiss to Myka’s lips.  “So, this thing with Tracy…”

Myka shakes her head, eyes still shut tight and closing tighter, “The last thing I want to talk about--”

“It’s been months,” Helena continues, a hand finding it’s way into Myka’s hair, gently tucking curls behind her ear, “and I know you’re worried about her.”

“Mrs. Cho gives mom progress reports,” Myka nods, “she’s going to school like she’s supposed to.  She’s even working.  Somewhere at the mall.”  This makes Helena laugh softly against Myka’s lips.  She says “of course she does” even more softly and Myka continues, “She and Kevin are saving up for a place… for when they’re eighteen, I guess.”

Helena kisses Myka again and says, “You care about her.”

“I guess if I cared that much, I wouldn’t have slapped her,” Myka sighs, rolling off of Helena finally and falling onto the bed just beside her. Eyes still closed, hand still touching Helena’s side.  In only seconds, Helena is leaning over her, body pressed to Myka’s, lips pressing soft kisses into her cheeks, over her forehead, against the bridge of her nose.

“You never told me what she said,” and now Helena stills but Myka can feel the heat of Helena’s breath just over her lips.  She lifts herself up just slightly, until their lips connect again, before wrapping her arms around Helena’s torso and pulling that girl back down to the bed with her.

When their kiss slows, Myka turns to press her forehead to the bridge of Helena’s nose, “Are you really here?  In my bed… in my arms?”  Myka kisses Helena’s smiling lips.  She can feel her smiling into that kiss.

“Don’t change the subject,” Helena whispers.

“It doesn’t matter what she said.”

“I just… would love to know what it takes to make you slap someone,” Helena says this and Myka is immediately on guard with that statement because her first thought, however asinine, is that Helena is worried Myka might one day slap her, too.  As though Helena needs to know exactly where that line is drawn. As though Helena needs to worry about ever crossing that line in the first place.

“Why?”  Myka asks this with furrowed brows, with her eyes still closed, “So you don’t provoke me? Do you think that you could?” Myka opens her eyes now and the expression on Helena’s face is disbelief and mild annoyance. “Do you think that I would hit you?”

“No,” Helena speaks, softly and simply.  “I don’t.  It’s not something I worry about.  Even remotely.  But you,” Helena touches the tip of her finger to Myka’s bottom lip, just before kissing that bottom lip softly and tilting her head to gaze down at Myka, thoughtfully, “I worry about you… all of the time.”

Myka sighs heavily and smiles, turning away from Helena and toward the ceiling. 

“Now _I’m_ exhausted,” she declares. 

“Yeah,” Helena laughs, wrapping her arms around Myka’s neck and rolling onto her side and then her back, bringing Myka back along with her, “but tell me, Myka, who you can’t stop picturing me with now?”

“Me,” Myka smirks, kissing that girl and trailing fingers down her belly, to the black and silk and lace panties now pressed up against her thigh.  “Only me.”

***

Thanksgiving is awful.

Thanksgiving is awful and it is the worst Thanksgiving on record, Myka will eventually say, because there are only two Berings, one Lattimer, a Wells and a Hernandez.  And Myka’s mother is already sad that Tracy has decided not to join them in anything for the past three months, so she is especially sad when Tracy decides not to join them for Thanksgiving. 

Myka’s mother had been mourning her relationship with her youngest daughter for the past three months but today, on Thanksgiving of all days, it sets in.

It sets in because they have always been together on Thanksgiving and it has always been a big day, a _normal_ day. A day for everyone to come together from wherever they were or had been in the world, to spend time as a family.  Even if the rest of the year had been fraught with drama, separation, and tragedy, Thanksgiving always brought them back together again.

 _Almost_ always.

So Myka’s mother is sad because Tracy would rather have dinner with the Chos. Would rather live with the Chos altogether.  And has been quite happy to do so for the past three months.

Jane is sad because Jeannie Jr. promised to have Thanksgiving dinner with Jules’ family this year.  They are out-of-state, somewhere in Florida, and he doesn’t see them quite as often as they would like to be seen.  

Jane’s sad because Pete is on the other side of the world and all they had seen of him in the past several months were occasional too-short video chat calls in-between his missions.  Missions that Jane grows gradually less tolerant of hearing about. Missions that include Pete’s uncanny ability to both locate and then defuse and destroy explosive devices hidden in the surrounding desert terrain. 

Of course he blows things up for a living, that had been Myka’s first thought.  It is probably the closest thing to video games that he can do in the field. It is also the closest he has ever come to loving chemistry.  His affinity for this field, just as uncanny.

Jane is also sad (and Myka’s mother, too) because Claudia is gone this Thanksgiving. 

Claudia is gone because Ingrid had insisted on having Claudia with them for the holiday and neither Jane nor Jeannie want to muddy the waters with that one.  Ingrid has been insistent about this sort of thing since summer and the only explanation that Claudia, even at ten years old, could possibly offer is, “It makes her look better at church when I’m there because everyone always wants to pray for me. _Especially_ around Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

Myka had asked Claudia once, around Halloween, “Because of what happened to your family?”  And Claudia had actually giggled at that, in the same way she never giggled around any of her friends, and said, “ _No_ , Mykes, because I live with a lot of lesbians.”

That, for any number of reasons, had made Myka laugh, too.

Kelly is sad for the same reason Jane is sad. 

Pete is gone.  Pete is a world away.  Pete’s job is to traverse the desert, ahead of the pack, and blow up things you can barely see so that they don’t detonate _before_ you see them.  Kelly is sad despite Pete having told her once, “It’s perfectly okay, babe. You see, I’m really good at my job.  I happen to know _a lot_ about incendiary devices. I am in love with one, after all.”

It’s the sweetest thing Myka has ever heard come out of Pete’s mouth and she has yet to let him live it down.  But saying that sweetest of things in the first place is probably why Kelly is so very sad this Thanksgiving weekend.

Myka isn’t sad.  Myka just feels off.

She feels off for all of the same reasons that everybody else feels sad.  Because of Tracy and Pete and Claudia and Jeannie Jr. and the simple fact that Jules’ name had even been brought up this evening at all.  But that is unavoidable, considering he is about to be what is practically her brother in-law. 

Myka also feels off because of Leena and Abigail, and her apparent inability to just end a relationship, or even a non-relationship, on a good note.  Without ever hurting someone first, even when she knew that hurt was coming. 

She also feels off because Helena is here and she’s not entirely sure why _that_ makes her feel off. She loves Helena. She loves Helena with all of her heart. But she guesses, and this guess becomes more of an intuition after several glasses of Thanksgiving wine, that it has something to do with the aforementioned thoughts about ending relationships.  Ending relationships on good notes. And ending relationships without ever _really_ hurting someone first.

For once, in a very long time, Helena seems to be the only person who isn’t sad at all.

But Myka is certain that will change.  She is certain that they will fight or she will hurt Helena or things will come bubbling to the surface.  Truly.  Eventually. And to this potential fight that is currently non-existent but looming and predictable and, for Myka, one hundred percent _inevitable_? She raises her glass.

She takes several large sips of that Thanksgiving wine.

***

Wine is a popular theme this Thanksgiving and once everyone except Jane, because Jane doesn’t drink wine when she’s sad, has had their fair share (or in Myka’s case, a bit more than that), Jane proposes everyone share what they are most thankful for.

Myka knows this is mostly an attempt for Jane to cheer herself up, she’s just not convinced it will work very well.

Jeannie says, “I’m thankful for the one daughter I have that doesn’t run away,” and Myka’s eyes move immediately to her mother, her mother’s eyes are already on her, “I’m thankful, more than not, that she doesn’t know how. That she was never taught to run, even when faced with her father.  _Especially_ then. I’m thankful that she has learned, over time, to fight back, to push for answers, to question the validity of those answers.  To question who is giving those answers.

“Because… family is complex.  _Our_ family is complex and our history, even more so.  Our futures?  Well,” Jeannie laughs softly and only then does she look away from Myka, to everyone else at the table, “I suppose that remains to be seen.”

Jane says after a long moment of quiet, “ _Okay_.  Who wants to be the follow-up act to Jean’s five star rock concert over here?”

There is laughter.  There is not as much laughter as has existed during past Thanksgiving dinners but there is enough to fill the room.  To feel this moment and, in this moment, be emotionally recharged by an overwhelming sense of love and happiness.

Myka jokingly says to her mother, “You _are_ talking about me, right?” before getting more choked up than she had ever intended to be. 

“Of course, Ophelia,” her mother says with a disbelieving shake of her head.  It makes Myka smile and she is on her feet, walking over to her mother.  “Who else would I be talking about? Certainly not your--” is all her mother manages before Myka wraps her up in her arms, practically knocking the wind out of her. 

She hugs her tight, plants a kiss upon her forehead and says to her, “Tracy will come around,” and when she moves away, “ _eventually_.” 

Her mother can only nod and wipe at unshed tears as Myka returns to her seat at Helena’s side.  And Helena reaches for her hand, squeezes it tightly.  Flashes her the smile that is actually reassuring.

Kelly says, “I’ll go next because I want to say how thankful I am for this family and I don’t think I’ve ever truly said that out loud. I’m thankful that this one over here,” she points at Helena, “also did not runaway when faced with _me_ , way back at the club. I didn’t want to talk to this girl at all because why would I want to be friends with some stuck up English chick, right?  But I’m thankful she’s as persistent as she is,” Helena is rolling her eyes, “that we eventually became friends and that we grew so close…  because sometimes it seemed like we only had each other. Some days I felt like all I had was her… and then I couldn’t imagine where I would be without her. My pesky little English friend.”

“Helena,” Jane starts in, “if you roll your eyes any harder than that, you’re going to be staring at your brain.”

There is laughter, there already had been.  Myka notices Jane’s statement only exacerbates Helena’s eye roll. Though she now has the sense to had her face behind her hand as she does it.

Kelly smiles and reaches over to Helena, playfully pushes against that hand behind which her face is hidden.

“I’m even more thankful that she introduced me to _basically_ the gayest group of people I have ever met in my life.  Holy Mother, thank you that the hot son was not also gay,” Kelly does the cross over her heart and concludes with, “Amen.”

They are all in tears with laughter.  Even Helena unhides her face, unrolls those eyes. There is not much to be done about the redness in her cheeks nor the tears that fall down them. She leans in to hug Kelly and when she recovers, Myka leans in to hug Helena, to wipe away tears, to kiss warm red cheeks.   She doesn’t let go and Helena leans back into Myka’s hold.

Jane recovers first, from the laughter and the tears. She says, “I guess I’ll go,” and clears her throat.  “I am thankful for what family we do have present this year, just as I’m thankful for my children who could not be here.  For Jeannie Jr. who has grown into her own and met an okay guy to whom she is engaged,” and this earns Myka a quiet and side-long gaze from Helena. Silently curious and questioning, as if she is hearing this information for the first time, “and for Pete who is doing something I never, in one million years, imagined he would be doing.

“Pete once told me that he wanted to be Stretch Armstrong when he was older and I swear he was probably already fifteen at the time,” more laughter fills the dining room and, as it slowly dies off, Jane sighs and continues.  “Now he is… at war.  Saving lives. Doing exactly what his father did. Making us both proud.” Jane looks to Myka’s mother and reaches out for Jeannie’s hand, “Making all of us proud…

“And I’m thankful For Claudia, the smallest member of our family. That little one is growing more intelligent, more sassy, and more clever by the day.  Jean and I cannot keep up with her, I don’t even know how Joshua and Ingrid even think that they can.  I am so thankful for that little girl and the youthfulness she adds to this household, now that all of our children have grown up, and moved on and out…”

When Jane can say no more through her tears, Jeannie squeezes her hand and pulls her close and tells Myka, Helena, and Kelly, “Jane is trying to get full custody of Claudia.  But Ingrid... if it had only been Joshua, Claudia would be ours. But that wife of his… she is making it difficult, to say the least.”

Kelly says, “We know.  We’re sorry, Jane.  Anything we can do to help.  Anything at all, you let us know.  I have some cousins I can call in Mexico.  They’re really good at making people disappear.”

Jane smiles and sighs out, “Thank you, Kelly.  Maybe have them on standby for the future.”

Kelly says, “Sure but this conversation never happened and you don’t know me.”

“Kelly who?”  Jane teases.

“ _Exactamente_ ,” and Kelly is beaming with pride.

Helena asks, “Shall I go next?”

Jeannie says, “Yes, honey, go because we are all so thankful that you could join us this weekend.  You don’t know how very thankful we are to have you here.  It’s like we hardly saw you the summer you _were_ here, since someone kept you all to herself.”

Myka says, “She’s my girlfriend and I happen to like her a lot.”

Jane laughs and says, “We _know_.”

Jeannie scoffs, “We happen to like her, too.”

Myka replies, “Not as much as I do.  Trust me.  Not nearly as much, Mom.”

Jane says, “You got us there.  Go ahead, Helena.”

“Righty-ho,” Helena says taking in a deep breath. “I’m extremely thankful…” and then she pauses.

Helena pauses and she looks up at Myka, still leaning in Myka’s arms, and when Myka looks back at her, she can already see the tears forming in those eyes.  She reaches her free hand to Helena’s and she laces their fingers together. 

Myka gives that hand a gentle squeeze. She tells that girl, whispering into her ear, “You don’t have to say anything at all,” and Helena nods and pulls Myka’s hand to her lips.  She kisses the back of it softly before dropping their hands back into her lap.

Helena says, “I’m thankful to have two mothers here, to have had two mothers here, where I would have otherwise had none,” and she turns a teary gaze on Jeannie and on Jane who smile wide and also teary-eyed right back at Helena.  “I’m thankful to have had a father, even if… even if he was never truly there all the time, at least he did try to come when it mattered the most.  At least the very least he has always accepted me, all of my numerous flaws and all.”

Myka says, “You are not flawed.  _At all_ ,” and it earns her a gentle smile from Helena.  A smile that is not really all there.  Not fully formed and not truly convincing. 

Helena continues, “I am thankful for my friends,” and she turns that unconvincing smile on Kelly.  Only then does it grow into something more real.  “Even those who aren’t present today. But most of all,” Helena pauses and lowers her head to cast her eyes back down on her hand, still holding tight onto Myka’s, and then up to Myka’s eyes, “I am thankful for you, Myka. That I’m here with you. That I _have_ you.  That you put up with me and all of those previously mentioned flaws. I’m thankful to have known you for as long as we have.  To have, as you always say, grown up with you. 

“I’m thankful for the opportunity to continue growing up with you and to have so many shared memories with you.  From our past.  From our childhood.  I hope to share… so many more.  I hope you allow me… to share so many more memories with you.  But I wouldn’t fault you for not wanting the same.”

Tears are streaming down Helena’s face and and Myka is moving closer to her, leaning her forehead in to Helena’s, bringing her hands to Helena’s cheeks and pulling that girl into a gentle kiss, wiping away tears, kissing her again.

Helena says, “I’m sorry,” and shakes her head, “I’m sorry that I ever thought I needed anyone but you.  I’m sorry that I put you through all of this because I know it’s my fault. Your upset, your feelings of anger. All of the fighting. I know that’s my fault. And I’m sorry because you and Tracy? I think I caused that. And Leena?  That, too.”

Myka smiles and it is sympathetic and understanding. She smiles and she tells Helena, “That was not you at all.  Maybe I have been a little off-kilter this year but that isn’t you, Helena. Tracy isn’t mad at _you_ and she isn’t mad because of anything you did. Her entire perception of her life has been altered and ripped from beneath her and she’s _Tracy_ , she’s always been perfect, she doesn’t know how to deal with imperfection.”  Myka sighs and kisses Helena again, pressing her lips further against those that are too-perfect and so often too far away. She kisses Helena again and again and brushes her lips against Helena’s lips and tells Helena, again, “It’s not you.”

When Jane says, “Well,” and Myka looks up and lets her hands fall into Helena’s lap, it is to find Jane sandwiched between Myka’s crying mother and Myka’s crying roommate.  Both of them are leaning into Jane’s hold.  Both of them are quickly wiping away evidence of their tears.

“I told you,” Kelly sighs, “so much fucking better when you’re actually together.”

“No swearing on Thanksgiving,” Jane tells her.

Myka says, “You guys are ridiculous.”

Kelly says, “ _You two_ are ridiculous!”

Jeannie and Jane simply nod quietly.

Kelly also says, “Well, it’s your turn, Romeo.”

“Pass,” Myka says, shaking her head and waving a hand in the air.

“ _Cabrona_ , it’s Thanksgiving,” Kelly argues, “you cannot _pass_.”

“No swearing in Spanish either,” Jane interjects.

“I’m passing,” Myka insists.  “Sorry.  I already said what I needed to say to Helena.  I’m passing on expressing any sort of thanks toward anything that has happened this year.  It has been the absolute worst year of my life.”

“ _Really_?” Jane asks this with a hint of sarcasm and a soft laugh to follow.  “Your father tried to _kill_ you four years ago and _this_ is the worst year of your life?”

“Thank you, Jane, for the constant reminder,” Myka says with a roll of her eyes.

“Myka,” her mother begins to scold, “everyone has had a _shit_ year,” and Myka almost wants to laugh at her mother saying the word ‘shit’ but she cannot find the energy or the will.  She cannot conjure up enough actual amusement to do so, “and everyone has shared, regardless. C’mon, honey, just… find your spirit.”

Helena begins to say, “It’s okay, if Myka doesn’t want to share--” and she is the only one who begins to even think to say this because she is the only one close enough to Myka to see that Myka is becoming frustrated. Angry.  She is so very close to _done_.

When Myka cuts Helena off, it is to say, “I have no spirit. That is the problem. I have no spirit because my spirit has been sucked entirely out of me.  I’d be lucky to have absolutely any spirit left in me at all, to get me through the rest of this absolutely shit year.  But let me tell you what I will be thankful for, if I actually live to see the day.”

No one says a word.

“I’ll be thankful if my girlfriend, for one reason or another, actually still loves me.  Despite spending her entire year, more than that even, with a really great looking guy who could probably give her the whole entire world if he really wanted to. If he knew, if he had even the slightest idea, how good he had it.  How lucky he was to be so goddamn close to this one? Well, I’ll be thankful if he doesn’t figure that out the second he sees her face again.

“I’ll be thankful if my sister ever talks to me again. The only person in this world who has ever looked up to me, who has always been on my side, and I ruined everything about our relationship.  And you know as much as Kelly is always talking about death and our vulnerability to it, our inability to do anything about it, I’ll be thankful if I ever see my best friend again.”

Myka’s mother practically shouts her name, “ _Myka_!”  It is loud and scolding, it is nearly at the end of her wits.

Kelly says, “ _Cabrona_ , talking about death doesn’t mean death is coming for you.  If anything, it keeps death away.”

Jane says with a dramatic roll of her eyes and a dramatic sigh to match, “Okay, we’re done drinking wine.”

“ _No_!” Myka yells standing, snatching up her near-empty glass up from the table.  Leaning precariously, entirely off-balance, over that table. “You think this is the wine? It’s _not_ the wine.  It’s all me.   All the wine does is make everything easier to see. It makes everything easier to say.”

“The wine has everything to do with this,” Jane says, standing cautiously.  “Because absolutely none of this needs to be said.  And your thoughts on whether my son does or does not return from the desert are one hundred percent unwelcome in this house.”

“Well, that’s,” Myka laughs and even to her inebriated brain, she sounds absolutely _done_. She _sounds_ intoxicated.  But all this knowledge does is fuel her motivation to appear even less so, “that’s fitting actually, _other_ _Mother_.  Because that’s yet another thing I hope to be thankful for by this year’s end. I’ll be thankful if anyone at all, and especially this one,” Myka points down to Helena, sat quietly in a chair just beside her, “actually cares about one goddamn word that I have to say.

“Because, you know, sometimes I’m right.  Sometimes I actually _know_ what I’m talking about.  Sometimes this giant fucking brain and this high as fuck I.Q. can actually pull itself together long enough to know what’s going on.  Sometimes bad ideas are just really bad fucking ideas and if I tell you that I know this,” Myka turns her gaze, vision blurred by tears, on Helena, and continues, “if I tell you everything you will ever need to know, to know exactly how to makes this work?  You should just _listen_.”

“That’s enough,” Jane says, taking large and quick steps across the dining room toward Myka.  She reaches across the table to the half-empty bottle of wine, sat next to two empty bottles of wine, then reaches for the glass that is in Myka’s hand but Myka jerks her hand quickly away. 

She pulls her hand, gripping that wine glass, back so hard and without so much of a thought as to what she’s doing, that it catches the edge of the dining table and the bowl of that wine glass shatters, sending wine and glass flying across the table.  Myka’s hand, still clutching the stem of that wine glass with it’s now shattered bowl and sharp exposed edges, continues it’s backward momentum.

Continues it’s backward momentum right in Helena’s direction.

The minutes to follow, for Myka, are a blur of red wine and broken glass, of a soft gasp and an almost silent cry.  Of dripping blood and teary eyes.  Myka’s name on two angry mothers’ voices.  Kelly rushing, by one of their commands, to find a towel.

“Fuck, fuck,” Myka hears Helena crying.

“Helena, honey, you need to open your hand.  Let me see it,” Jane says.

“Myka, I’m okay,” Helena cries. 

She must her hand because Jane says, “It isn’t too deep, I don’t think you’ll need stitches.”

“Helena, honey, watch your feet, there’s glass everywhere,” Myka’s mother is warning.

“Myka, I’m okay,” Helena’s voice is saying with slightly more control.

“Kelly? Where’s that towel?” Jane is calling.

“No more wine,” Myka’s mother finally echoes, moving those bottles off the table.  Onto the nearby buffet.

Kelly returns, “Here’s a towel.  I brought the peroxide, too.”

“Myka, _look_ at me,” Helena’s voice, this time, catches Myka’s full attention.  Myka’s eyes find Helena’s and she forces a smile, brows raised and tilting her head forward to maintain that eye contact. “I’m _okay_.”

But the blood and those tears, Helena clutching her right hand, covered in blood, in her left hand.  Myka still clutching on to the stem of a now-shattered wine glass, the sharp ends of which are also covered in blood.

It is too much.

“I’ll take that now,” Jane says with both caution and disappointment, carefully taking that broken glass out of Myka’s hands. “Please,” Jane sighs, her accusing eyes on Myka, “take yourself somewhere.  Preferably out of my line of sight. Even more preferably, out of this house for a while.”

“I--”

“Myka, I know that look,” Helena cries and turns to Jane with frustration plaguing her face, “I’m okay, Jane.  It was just an accident.”

“She doesn’t look good,” Kelly says with a bit of hesitancy.

“I’m fine!”  Helena snaps.

“Girl, I know you’re fine,” Kelly snaps back, “I’m talking about this one.”

Their eyes all fall on Myka.  Worry from Helena, curiosity and alarm from Kelly, frustration and stares of accusation from Jane. 

Guilt from her mother.

Jane says, “Kelly, take her outside for some fresh air.”

The only other thing Myka hears after that is Helena’s voice calling out to her.  At first that voice is just behind her but in what seems like only seconds, that voice is a block away.  It is two blocks away and then three.  There are miles and miles between them and Myka cannot run nearly fast enough.

Myka is running and fast and far before she ever realizes she is running.  She feels _off_ and awful, foolish and guilty. For being this intoxicated, for ruining an already fragile Thanksgiving, for arguing with Jane, for hurting Helena. But the thing she feels the most guilty about in this moment, is taking away the one thing her mother had to be thankful for this year.

Because Myka, the child who always stays and takes it and fights through the bad, is finally running, fast and far and desperately away.

***

It is already so dark out.  It is absolutely freezing cold.

Myka hears a car pulling into the lot.  She hears two doors closing.  She hears the faint sound of voices in the distance and one is heading her way. 

Her mothers come to scold her, she suspects.  She awaits her fate.  Still a bit _off_ , still a bit intoxicated but what hadn’t filtered through her system in the past hour, she mostly assumes had burned off during her non-stop run from the Lattimer home to the high school softball field.

She didn’t think she’d had that in her anymore. Be it the wine or the cold or the tears that had clouded her vision, she was blind to both the exhaustion and the pain that came with that run.  She hadn’t felt one single bit of that freeze, her lungs hadn’t burned quite like they used to.

Not until now.  Not until she came to a standstill in the middle of that field.  Not until she had the nerve to stop and breathe and try desperately to recover her thoughts.

It isn’t long after that when Jane appears at the entrance to the dugout where Myka sits and when Myka looks up at her, no doubt mirroring that guilty look her mother had given her just an hour before, Jane steps into the dugout.  She walks over to the bench and drops herself down onto it and it is then, sitting directly beside her, that Myka notices how winded she is.

“When I suggested fresh air,” Jane sighs, sitting back against the bench and taking in a deep breath, letting it slowly escape her, “ _this_ is not exactly what I meant.”

“You told me to go,” Myka says softly, voice breaking, eyes wet with tears.  She turns her eyes down to her hands in her lap, “so I went.”

“You run a lot faster than I remember.”

Jane sighs, turning away from Myka, looking straight ahead. Myka follows her gaze, out onto the softball diamond, out into nothing but darkness. They sit there silently for a while as Jane’s breathing slowly begins to calm and Myka’s adrenaline, the warmth and the buzz of red wine in her veins, begins to wane.

She can feel that it is too cold now.  That the cold against her perspiration is making it colder by the minute.  And she wants nothing more than to go home, to her home, and climb into bed, close her eyes and go to sleep.  But going home means being close to Helena and being close to Helena means putting her at risk of Myka’s… frustrations.  Her so many, and far too many of those unchecked, frustrations.

“I’m sorry.”

They say it at once and also at once, they look to one another and they both have that expression on their faces that asks the other what they are apologizing for.

Jane takes the lead when she also takes in a deep breath and heaves it out with some exasperation.  “Your mom and I… we don’t fight a lot anymore.  Not like we used to.  At some point we slipped into this place where a lot of things just… didn’t matter enough to argue about.  But… there are those few things… that we do argue about.”  When Myka says nothing, when Myka only watches Jane with anticipation and curiosity, Jane goes on.  “One of those things is you kids.”

“There are so many of us,” Myka says just beneath her breath, thinking out loud when she had not meant to say those words at all.

“There are definitely more of you now,” Jane sighs, “and the dynamic of our family has changed as we’ve grown… seems to constantly be changing. Even if we have never lived all under one roof… I have always seen us as a family.”  Jane pauses and adjusts the way she’s seated, turns slightly more toward Myka and let’s her elbow come to rest just over the back of the bench.  “Sometimes, I think that I forget… that I didn’t actually raise you, Myka.  You spent so much time at our house as a kid, you really did just blend in with mine.  I forget, in those moments when you are happy and expressive and carefree, about your father and the things he’s done and…” Jane lowers her head, fiddles with her fingers, looks back up to Myka and nods.  “And then you sort of… _crash_ and my first instinct is to treat you like one of mine, to kind of… encourage and motivate, and I push you way too hard.”

Myka nods only slightly and looks up at Jane who is quiet, who is looking elsewhere in apparent thought before she looks back at Myka, offering a most pitiful smirk.

“That’s when your mother gives me _the look_ ,” Jane nods and her smile grows a bit more, “that’s when I have to stop myself.  _Remind_ myself.”

“You think I’m fragile,” Myka offers softly, quizzically.

“No,” Jane shakes her head and adjusts her seating again, pulls her hands into her lap, “not even close, Myka.  I know you’re strong.  You can carry the weight of basically everything the world has put upon you.  But when the weight of everything that the world has put upon you becomes more than you can bear… you won’t stop taking on more weight.  As things keep piling on and up and higher, _you_ keep sinking down lower.  And one of these days, Myka… it’s going to crush you. Everything that your mom likes to say you aren’t running from, that you’re facing head on?  It’s going to come crumbling down all around you and I’m just… really afraid you’ll be crushed beneath it all.”

Myka is wiping away tears, sniffling and wiping at her nose.

“Does that make sense?”  Jane asks, and also, “Or am I reaching?  Because your mom and I… we have had this talk. I’ve talked to her about this and she seems to think you’re okay.  She thinks this is just… adulthood knocking at your door.  She thinks you’ll be perfectly fine.”

Myka is settling back into stillness, into quiet and thoughtfulness, when she says softly to Jane, “You’re not wrong,” and when she looks up at Jane, “it’s a lot.”  She nods, to affirm Jane’s worries, to affirm even her own frustrations. “And worse than that, it is a lot that is completely within my control.  That I have the absolute power to change.  That I just need to… get the motivation and the courage _to_ change.”

Jane tells Myka, “As long as what you’re doing to change these things isn’t just putting more weight on you, Myka.  Is that… something we can come to an understanding on? As long as when you are trying to affect this change, it doesn’t also change you… and who you are.” Jane reaches her hand to Myka’s hand, just in her lap, and squeezes gently, “I miss the you that is full of love and mostly carefree.  I know we all have to grow and change to adapt to the world as it seems to fold in around us. I know we often have to leave our former selves behind in the wake of these things… but I know _that_ Myka is still here somewhere.

“I would really love to see her again.”

Myka is nodding and returning that hold that Jane has on her hand and wiping at more tears with her other hand when she manages to say, “Me, too.” 

“And no more wine,” Jane says this firmly, shaking her head. “No more alcohol, at least not at our house.  We have given you way too much freedom when it comes to drinking, Myka.  Because you’re with us and you’re an adult and we trust you.  But taking into consideration this evening?  And with your father’s history, his alcoholism?”  Jane shakes her head and squeezes Myka’s hand again, “No more.”

“I’m sorry,” Myka cries softly.

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“I don’t want to be like him,” Myka sniffles, wiping at her face.

“You will not be anything like him,” Jane says determinedly, just above a whisper.  “I know you think it’s not your choice, Myka.  I know you look at him and see only yourself in the future. But trust me when I say that you will be nothing like him.  Nothing you have done or could do will ever measure up to the pain that man has caused you and your mother and sister.”

“How could you know?”  Myka asks, turning furrowed brows on Jane.  “ _Really_ know?”

“The fact that you’re even worried about it in the first place, Myka,” Jane smiles and nods reassuringly, “is exactly how I _do_ know.”

“Myka?”  Helena’s voice is soft and full of worry and sadness when Myka looks up and catches those eyes, also filled with sadness, gazing back at her from across the dugout. That she had been the one to come here, that she had likely been the one to know exactly where Myka had been hiding, should not come as a surprise to Myka. 

Still, when she sees Helena there and remembers that Helena is really truly there, she cannot help the sudden intake of air at the sight of her, the smile that slowly pulls into her lips, or the way she reaches out for that older girl, who is now moving hesitantly toward her, with her own hand, bandaged and blood-stained, outstretched.

Jane is up and out of the way before Helena even makes it to them, before Myka takes Helena’s injured hand gently in hers and pulls that woman in close to her.   Helena sits knowingly, fitting perfectly just beside her.

“I’ll be in the car,” Jane announces, and also, “don’t be too long. It’s getting late.” Helena and Myka both nod as she goes and when she is gone, back toward the parking lot, back into that car, Helena wastes no time.

Helena is turning back to Myka, moving her hands to Myka’s cheeks, pulling Myka into her until their lips are together and their mouths are moving into a kiss far too cold to the touch for the amount of heat that touch induces inside of Myka.  Helena is pulling her closer, kissing deeper, whimpering into that kiss for what feels like an eternity.  For what Myka wishes could be forever.

When they part, Helena presses her forehead to Myka’s forehead, sets another small kiss to Myka’s parted lips, and she shakes her head. Frustration and sadness take over her expression, tears run warm down her cheeks.

“I’m sorry--” Myka begins but Helena is quick to cut her off with another quick kiss, another shake of her head.

“Don’t apologize to me,” Helena says and she holds up her injured hand for Myka to see.  “For this? I should know by now to watch my hands when I’m around you.”  Helena sets another quick kiss against Myka’s chin and smiles for only a second before that smile falls away and this look of absolute guilt, of complete sorrow, overtakes her expression.  “I should know by now… not to force the weight of my own world, my own struggles and insecurities, onto you.”

“You heard that, did you?”  Myka puffs out a soft laugh and smiles, sitting straight and dropping her head back, to rest against the chain link fencing behind her. She reaches to grasp Helena’s uninjured hand.  “If lecturing me were an Olympic sport, Jane would win the gold every time.  My mother knows this.”

“She has a way of getting through to even those she isn’t speaking directly to,” Helena offers softly, “I think that’s… what makes her such a great teacher.”

Myka sighs and closes her eyes.  She closes her eyes and holds tighter to that hand in hers until she feels Helena moving from just beside her.  Helena is moving to stand in front of Myka.  She is tugging gently at Myka’s hand until Myka’s eyes are open and gazing up at Helena, and up at this expression on Helena’s face that Myka cannot quite decipher.

It is sad but also happy.  It is wanting and demanding.  Helena’s head is tilted just slightly to the side and she takes Myka’s hands in hers with some hesitancy, with some guilt, and then pulls Myka’s hands entirely around her waist.

It is a quiet plea, this gesture but Myka understands, even to her own surprise.  Myka just knows exactly what Helena wants.

Myka sits straight and pulls Helena down and into her lap. Helena’s arms are moving slowly around Myka’s neck until they are cradling her head, until Helena’s chest is flush against Myka’s and Helena’s feet are entirely off of the ground and Helena’s cheek comes to rest, cold at first and then gradually warmer, against Myka’s cheek.

They sigh in tandem.  Myka tightens her hold, moves her arms higher up around Helena’s back, holds her even tighter so that she doesn’t fall.  Helena moves in close to Myka and whispers against Myka’s lips, with a hand just under Myka’s jaw line and a thumb trailing just below Myka’s lower lip, “I’m sorry.”

Myka presses a kiss to those lips before they can say anything more.  She kisses Helena and that kiss is meant to be gentle, meant only to silence the apology. To silence the confession that Myka knows is lingering just beyond that.  And when that kiss has ended, Myka speaks before Helena can…

“We have three nights,” Myka whispers.

“More countdowns,” Helena sighs.

“Shh,” Myka smiles and quickly kisses cold lips again. “We have three nights together and I don’t want to spend a single one of these nights thinking of, talking about, touching, or kissing anyone or anything that isn’t you… that isn’t this beautiful smile,” Helena rolls her eyes, “or that beautiful eye roll. Okay?”  Helena offers her a single head nod and Myka trails gentle fingers over the length of Helena’s arm.  “No more apologies.  No confessions or regrets.  No Liam or Leena.  Just…” Myka sits back against that bench and she pulls Helena back with her as Helena’s arms find their way back around her shoulders.  “Just you and me. Okay?  Just like that summer in the city.”

Helena responds with a kiss.  A gentle nod.  An almost sympathetic smile.

Helena responds, too, with a very soft, “Okay.”

***

“Go to sleep.”

Myka whispers this in Helena’s ear and right on cue with that command, Helena yawns.  She yawns and she stretches her whole body, entirely naked and mostly exposed, with long legs tangled up in sheets, then settles in against Myka again. 

“I’m not tired,” Helena smiles, pressing a kiss to Myka’s ear and this simple touch causes a chill to run down Myka’s spine.  Compels her to turn toward this older woman, now in her arms, and pull her into another kiss.

“Clearly,” Myka smiles, and another kiss after that.

She moves her hand into Helena’s hair and Helena closes her eyes, breathes out softly beneath that touch as Myka yawns.  Myka closes her eyes, Myka rests her head so close to Helena that she can feel that older girl’s breath against her lips. She yawns again..

“You don’t have to stay up with me,” Helena whispers and Myka feels the touch of a finger between their lips, tapping gently.

Myka’s protests don’t have the chance to leave her thoughts before she is quickly and soundly asleep.

***

She wakes to lamp light.  To Helena’s bandaged right hand in her hair.  To the tips of fingers dragging gently across her scalp. And it is the placement of that hand, the path those fingers travel across her scalp, that pulls her further from sleep.  Because Helena’s fingers are over that spot, the tiny dip in her skull and the barely-there feel of scarred tissue.

It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust but even without the aid of her glasses, she can see Helena sitting beside her, knees bent and folded up, book placed before her in her lap.  A pair of glasses, which Myka has never seen before, are gracing her face.

“That’s kind of sexy.” 

That girl is already smiling, already rolling her eyes and reaching for those glasses but Myka tells her, “Don’t you even think about taking those off,” and Helena, in all of her obedient nature, her sometimes unquestioning loyalty, lowers her hand again.

Helena leans over Myka, her hair falling in Myka’s face, and she lingers there for a moment, kisses her cheek, kisses her lips, whispers “brat” into her ear and kisses that too.  Then she is sitting straight again. Much too far away again.

“You’re the one trying to cop a feel,” Myka teases, reaching up for Helena’s injured hand, where it still rests over that scar, and pulling it down to her lips to kiss that bandage, “Miss Wells.”

  
“Well, if I knew _how_ my girlfriend came to have such a dent in her skull…”

“No confessions,” Myka reminds her, kissing her hand again and letting go, “you’ll just be upset.” 

“That… doesn’t help me feel better,” Helena smirks but seems to let it go as she turns her attention back to her book.

Myka glances at her watch and back up at Helena. She is wide awake and she has probably been wide awake since Myka passed out beside her.  “It’s three in the morning,” Myka informs her.

“I can’t sleep,” Helena shrugs, pushing those glasses up on her nose and turning a page.

Myka smiles, reaching into Helena’s lap to lift that book a ways, to see the cover of it, squinting through her blindness, then she laughs, “You might sleep better if you weren’t reading _those_ types of romance novels.”

Helena sighs, stretching her legs out across the bed, letting that book fall to her lap, “My girlfriend has been drooling on herself for the past four hours.  I already couldn’t sleep.  How else was I supposed to entertain myself?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

Helena rolls her eyes, “I should clarify that my girlfriend is quite present and very much accounted for.  I would just as soon, much sooner in fact, wake you up… were I truly that desperate.”

“And why didn’t you?” Myka asks, reaching her hand to Helena’s bare leg to palm her inner thigh, and winking up at her.

“I was not truly that desperate.”

Myka flashes a skeptical look her way.  Skeptical and charming is what she’s aiming for. It must work, that charm, because Helena bites down on her lower lip as she eyes both that skepticism and that charm.  Then Helena leans into Myka again, kisses the bridge of her nose, sits up once more.

“I was happy to sit here and watch you sleep,” she whispers, reaching and brushing her thumb across the corner of Myka’s mouth, “and drool.”

“Helena,” Myka sits up on her elbow now, her hand on Helena’s hand once again, “if you really can’t sleep, I have some NyQuil--”

“Thank you, my love,” Helena smiles, “but it’s all right. At any rate, that stuff hardly works on me.  It just makes me feel… loopy and out of touch.”

“You’re sure?”

Helena nods.

“Okay, well,” Myka reaches for Helena’s book again and slowly pulls the thing from her hands, “I’m awake now, so… I don’t think you’ll be needing this.” Myka tosses that book to the floor and reaches for Helena, pulls Helena into her as she lies back on the bed, until Helena is almost entirely on top of her with a mischievous smile, with a skeptical brow and flirtatious gaze in her direction.

“Prove it,” Helena says, leaning down and into another kiss. And Myka does just that.

***

The next day is for Claudia but it begins with Jane and Myka’s mother checking in on Myka when they drop Claudia off with her, checking in on Helena’s hand and Kelly’s sanity, too.  And when that affair is over, Myka and Helena and a not-so-little Claudia are in the car, on the way to the Cho residence to pick up the twins.

Claudia is out of the door before Myka can ever put the car in park.  Helena is unbuckling herself from the passenger seat, telling a very apprehensive Myka, “It’s okay,” with a gentle hand over Myka’s where she tugs at her own seatbelt, “I’ll go.”

Myka offers a nod and Helena leans forward, over the center console, and into a kiss. Quick. Simple. _Normal_. That’s how these kisses feel to Myka now.  As if they were never not part of her day and her daily routine. As if they had never not been part of the past two years of her life.  As though they were always meant to be and always _will_ be. 

Helena smiles at Myka before she gets out of the car and that smile is sweet and full of love and happiness.  It makes her heart melt.  It also makes her want to cry and she can’t figure out exactly why.

Claudia is already at that door greeting Leila and Laila. The twins are already spilling out of that door with their overnight bags and pillows underarm. And Tracy… Tracy is there with Mrs. Cho and she looks anxious but she only looks anxious until she sees that it is Helena walking up the drive, making her way to the Cho’s front door. After that Tracy is one big smile with two wide open arms, pulling Helena into a very big hug.

They talk for a while, Helena and Tracy.  They talk for such a long while that the twins and Claudia are already in the car, already saying hello, already buckling themselves in and ready to go.  _Beyond_ ready to go.

By the time Helena and Tracy are done talking, Tracy is in tears.

Tracy is wiping at her eyes when Helena pulls her into another big hug and kisses her cheek and whispers something in her ear that makes her smile.  Then Helena is walking away, waving goodbye, and Tracy is there, lingering in the doorway, watching Helena go and, for only a second, watching Myka, too.

Myka looks away, she looks away and stares down at her lap and it isn’t out of spite or disdain for her little sister.  Mostly what she feels is shame… regret. She feels lonely, too. Even when she has Helena and Kelly and a car full of pre-teens, she feels lonely and alone without her little sister.  Without the only person in this entire world she can truly call her sister. 

When Myka looks back up toward the Cho’s front door it is closed. Tracy is gone.

Helena, back in the car, is wiping away tears and audibly sighing, leaning back into her seat, turning one of her not-so-reassuring smiles on Myka.

“Everything okay?”  Myka asks, reaching a hand to Helena’s, resting in her lap.

“She apologized,” Helena nods. 

“For what?”

“The thing she said to you… that made you hit her…” Helena says softly, “it was about me?”

Myka is silent and biting down on her lower lip. She is squeezing her hand gently around Helena’s in her lap.  She is furrowing her brows, lowering her head and the only thing she says after that is, “I’m sorry because this shouldn’t be about you and I--”

Myka stops speaking when Helena lifts her freshly bandaged hand to just under her chin and Helena is lifting Myka’s head to catch her gaze, guilty and sorrowful and full of regret, Myka’s sure.  But when Helena kisses her, to kiss all those words away and to kiss away that apology, it is almost too much for Myka to handle.

It’s the sweetness in that kiss and the gentleness in that touch that makes it almost too much.  Her emotions, this absolute inability to neither contain them or figure them out, is near to bounding out of control.  But it is the sound of one very sweet “awe” and a duet of “ews” coming from the back seat that grounds Myka’s resolve and makes Helena smile into that kiss.  Helena glares, when they part, to the row of ten year olds behind them.  She says, “Close your eyes,” and Claudia does, Leila does… but Laila just grins from ear to ear.

“It’s so sweet!” she declares.

“It’s so romantical,” Claudia offers, with a hint of sarcasm, behind still-closed eyes. 

“It’s gross, that’s what it is,” states the always delightfully blunt Leila.

Ignoring their commentary, Helena turns back to Myka and presses another quick kiss to still parted, still silent lips.  Helena tells Myka, “No apologies.  Remember that?”  Myka only nods.  She doesn’t say a word.  Helena’s smile grows, entirely satisfied, and she sits back into her seat but pulls Myka’s right hand back into that seat with her.  “Then shall we?”

***

It’s a long day at the zoo.

This long day translates into three exhausted ten year olds who hardly have enough time to shower and change into sleepwear before they are half-asleep and watching a movie, curled up on the living room floor with Kelly.  Kelly who very promptly tells Myka and Helena, “ _Go_ ,” before waving them off.

They had gone, without question. 

They had said goodnight and they had slipped away into a darkened hallway.  Helena silently leading the way with her fingers loosely intertwined with Myka’s and Myka wordlessly following her into her bedroom.  Into what is, for this weekend at least, _their_ bedroom.

Before the door even closes, Helena has Myka pressed up against it. When it does slam closed, Helena makes a face as if to say “oops” and this face makes Myka laugh softly, makes her body relax between that door and the weight of the older woman still pressed against her.  It’s only then that Myka realizes how unrelaxed she had been in the first place.

And after the laughter Helena notices right away.

“You’re tense,”  she whispers softly and she pushes herself up on the tips of her toes, so that she is Myka’s exact height, before leaning to press a gentle kiss into Myka’s lips. 

Myka’s hands instinctively find their way to Helena’s waist and pull her body even closer in an attempt to show Helena that she is okay, that she isn’t really all that tense, that whatever Helena was beginning to sense about her and her mood and her happiness in general, was not a thing to worry about. Not a thing to question or furrow those beautiful and confused and definitely already questioning and worrisome eyebrows at.

“Is it Tracy?”  Helena asks this while moving her hand to Myka’s cheek, caressing that cheek, then moving her hand down to rest against Myka’s chest, just over her racing heart. The second her hand is there and stilling over that beating heart, some hint of sadness moves into Helena’s expression.  She sighs and begins to step away from Myka but Myka, shaking her head and telling Helena “no”, pulls her in close again.

“It’s not Tracy,” Myka says softly, just above a whisper, thinking the entire time about how much this _is_ about Tracy.  How much it is also about herself… and Helena… and even Leena, too, and how much everything, so many things, have changed recently.  “Not entirely…” she says this trying to sound confident and sure of herself.  She says it trying to sound like a person who doesn’t need to be questioned about how she feels because how she feels is fine.  Absolutely fine.

“Do you still not want to talk about it?”  Helena asks and she gives Myka a small knowing smile but it is a timid smile.  It is unsure and even more worried than it had been before and in a second it is gone. It slips away and gives way to more of that sadness.  Helena eventually says, with her brows stitching together, not in upset but perhaps some attempt at understanding, some small frustration, “I assume these rules you have set for us… have something to do with--”

“I just want...” Myka starts strong again then let’s her voice soften, “…to slow down.”  Helena’s expression changes very little but her eyes are on Myka’s and they are more curious now.  More anxious in their wait for something more.  So Myka tells her, “I just want to stop thinking,” and this is soft when she says it too, “about everything for a while.”

At this, Helena nods.  She nods and lets her head tilt slightly to the side before she is on her toes again, pressing her mouth to Myka’s again, moving her hands to Myka’s hands.

When that kiss ends, she tells Myka, “Okay,” with a single nod and, “come with me.”

***

It’s a tight fit because Helena’s legs are inconceivably long, even with her shorter-than height.  Her legs are long and they are bending, somehow entirely underwater, beneath where Myka’s legs are bent and rising above water.  Helena is mostly on her side but her bare breasts are resting against Myka’s belly and her head is resting against Myka’s chest. Her ear is just over Myka’s heart, no doubt listening to that heart beat.  No doubt waiting for that heart to race again.

If her heart races now, in this state they are currently in, lying together in warm bath water, an absolute tangle of arms and legs, it won’t be from the panic induced by the far too many fears that have been flowing through her mind.  It will be because of Helena.  It will be because of Helena’s hand, trailing lines and circles over her thigh. It will be because of Helena turning and pushing the tiniest kisses into Myka’s skin, just between her breasts. Because of Helena sighing into these kisses before turning a quick, concerned glance on Myka then resting her head and damp hair and the familiar weight of her body, against Myka once more.

“I love you,” eventually escapes from those lips of hers. And she is turned away, speaking softly while Myka is resting her head back, with her eyes closed and almost asleep. She says it so softly that Myka almost does not hear her but somehow… somehow Myka does hear her. She doesn’t think it’s audibly… so much as she feels the vibrations of Helena’s voice against her chest. So much as she feels the trail of those fingers on her thigh moving to far more intimate places.

Before she speaks, Myka lifts a hand to Helena’s hair, to carefully palm the side of her head, and she holds Helena closer to her, kisses damp hair at the top of her head.

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

Helena sits up and she turns to Myka and that expression returns. Knowing and questioning all at the same time.  But she smiles softly and her hands are on the tub floor, submerged below water at either side of Myka’s waist, as she leans in close.  She kisses the corner of Myka’s mouth and whispers, almost against it, “Could you?”  And when Myka says nothing to answer that question, she also asks, “Are you even capable… of hurting me?”

Helena winces then, pulling her injured hand, not currently wrapped but exposed to the water, up and out of the bath.

“You were saying?” Myka asks softly, taking Helena’s hand in hers to inspect that wound.

“Superficial,” Helena sighs.

“The way I hurt Trace is not, however--”

“Your sister?”  Helena interrupts with a growing smile.  “You’re comparing me to your sister?”

“I’m… comparing myself with myself,” Myka sighs out an incredulous laugh and shakes her head, allowing Helena her hand again.  “I’m comparing my inability to control my anger at her to… I don’t know.”

“Your anger at me?”  Helena offers.

“I’m not… angry at you,” Myka shakes her head.

“That was almost believable,” Helena says, resting her head against Myka’s shoulder.  She wraps her arms around Myka’s waist and sighs, moving her lips to kiss Myka’s shoulder, resting again.

They are quiet.  They are quiet so long that the water has stilled around them again, as much as it can against the slight movement of their breathing.  Of the breaths they take, seemingly together. Helena matches her breathing with Myka’s breathing, with the rise and fall of Myka’s chest.

“I’m sorry,” Helena says eventually, “about Liam… about everything.”

“I said no apologies,” Myka sighs.

Helena sits up again and she is back to where she had been, hands at either side of Myka’s waist, less pressure on her injured hand this time around.  Their lips an inch apart. And those gorgeous brown eyes are at first on Myka’s and then on Myka’s lips.  Helena takes in a deep breath and she slowly lifts her eyes to Myka’s again.  She licks her lips and this, what it does to Myka’s entire body, adds to the ripples in that water.

“I am… sorry,” Helena nods.  “I have been for a long time… but it’s different now, being here with you, seeing how much you have changed.  How unhappy you are.  Knowing that I did that…”

“I’m not unhappy,” Myka shoots once again for that confidence. It has gone.  It had left her so very long ago.  “I’m not sad.”

“Myka,” Helena shakes her head now and closes the small space between them.  Myka’s hands are just under Helena’s jaw line and Myka’s thumbs are caressing cheeks, touching soft skin at the tip of Helena’s chin.  Moving into place just below her lower lip.

When they part, Myka’s thumbs are over that bottom lip, warm and soft and more than anything she thinks she deserves.  Simultaneously undeserving of anything she can possibly want to give.

Helena pulls that lower lip in between her teeth and the next kiss she gives Myka is quick and gentle, and it is knowing, that kiss. It is a kiss that knows the conversation to follow has the potential to end very badly. But it is also a kiss that knows the conversation needs to be had.

“Ask me,” Helena tells Myka, “what it is you want to know.” And Myka is hesitant for a long time, moving a finger to Helena’s forehead, where damp hair falls slightly into her face.  Myka moves that hair away from beautiful brown eyes in wait.  She tucks that hair behind Helena’s ear and lets her hand fall back into the water, tracing her finger along skin the entire way down.

“When was the last time…” Myka doesn’t want this sentence to end. Like so many things in her life right now.  Like so many friendships and relationships, she does not want to end this.  “The last time you were with him?”

“ _With_ him?” Helena asks and Myka is nodding as if she really truly wants to know the answer. 

Myka knows very well that she does not want to know the answer to this question.  That she could probably die never knowing the answer.  But she might also die never knowing Helena beyond this moment. That could very well happen, too. If she kept feeling this way. This _unexplainable_ way.

Helena’s eyes are first looking up and then to the side and then looking too guilty, far too guilty for Myka’s heart to handle. She braces herself when Helena opens her mouth to speak, her eyes are shut tight when she hears the word “March” from those beautiful lips that she has imagined, more than once, kissing that boy.  Kissing some conjured up images of Jules as that boy.  She has imagined on so many occasions, Helena’s beautiful lips on that boys mouth and her beautiful hands on that boy’s legs and, worst of all, beautiful brown eyes looking into that boy’s eyes. 

But she hears that word “March” again and it hits her, when she finally draws herself away from her thoughts and back into this reality that is now.  That is November. That is eight months _later_.  Now her eyes are wide and her mouth is falling open and she almost has absolutely nothing to say.

Except, “March?  Helena…” she wants to laugh because that is a lie.  It is a very bold, not even cunning lie.  March is not even a contending month, as an answer to this question.  Because March is when Myka had found out and March is when all of this shit began hitting the fan and March is when they had almost broken up.  When they would have been broken up if not for Helena’s pleading, if not for Myka conceding to the fact that she knew, and that she knew from day one that it would be a possibility.  That _he_ was always a possibility.

March is when Myka had decided that breaking up with Helena, especially over the phone, over a video chat, over anything sort of communication device at all, was never going to happen.

March is a lie because they had gone on dates since then. Myka could hear the evidence of those dates in Helena’s voice whenever she spoke to her.  And after a while, at her own apparently self-loathing request, Myka had been told about the very real existence of every single one of those dates.

Though she does concede that there hadn’t been that many. There hadn’t been that many at all in the last several months.  None, at least, that Helena had not either rejected or canceled in order to spend more time talking to Myka.

But March?  No. November.  Even October, Myka could believe.  She’d expected to hear that it had happened just days ago.  That it had happened sooner even than that.  She expected to hear that he had seen her off to the airport and that is where it had last happened, between the two of them.

She had, at some point, accepted the idea that Liam probably wouldn’t have gotten on that plane with Helena.  Booked a seat beside hers. Traveled all the way home with her. Or to even New York. She accepted _that_ but it didn’t stop her from thinking about it. From thinking that it could be true.  That there was nothing about it that was an impossibility.

But March?

And why would Helena lie to her?  Helena who had once promised she never lied except clearly by omission. Why _now_?

“March,” Helena says softly.  “That’s the last time we--”

“Don’t say it,” Myka says and tears are slipping from her eyes. They are falling so fast that Helena is sitting up with more of that concern and worry.  She is sitting up and turning to Myka as if she is prepared to catch Myka from falling to the ground when she is already seated. “March is not possible, Helena. All of the dates… the dinners…”

“Just dates,” Helena says softly.  “Just dinner and…”

“And what?”

“He would stay with me overnight sometimes,” Helena bites down on her lip.  “Just to stay.”

“Just to stay,” Myka repeats.  “For what?  To _hold_ you?  What, like--”

“Like we talked about, Myka.  Like with Claire,” Helena says this even more softly than she has said anything else and it hits Myka.  For some reason that name on Helena’s voice in the midst of _this_ conversation hits her like a ton of bricks.  When she is most vulnerable and lost, when she is drowning in all of these feelings of confusion and pain, jealousy and… what she hopes can still be classified as love… what she hopes still makes Helena feel loved… it hits.  Because it is too much.  And then, “Like _you_.”

Myka is quiet.

“If my eyes were closed?  If I didn’t focus too hard on his breathing,”  Helena’s smile is sheepish and she shrugs, “it could have been you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It didn’t matter,” Helena says shaking her head, “it _doesn’t_ matter. That you didn’t know. You seemed happier… with Leena.”

“It matters, Helena,” Myka’s tears are still falling. Her voice, somehow, finding it’s way.  “It matters that I carried on an intimate relationship with Leena because I thought you… I thought you were involved and happy and… all the way through _August_ , Helena.  We did not just _spoon_.  We did not just fall asleep in each other’s arms…”

Helena’s brows furrow and her expression is a flash of sadness before it is mostly indifference, and she brings her hands to rest over Myka’s chest once more.  She kisses Myka’s cheek, her chin, her lips.  She rests her forehead against Myka’s and whispers, “I’m not upset.”

“You _should_ be upset, Helena,” Myka cries through a laugh, incredulous, disbelieving. “If I am upset, you should be, too.”

“I’m not,” Helena sighs, sitting up, “we set those rules, Myka. You and I, together. We both knew…”

“I didn’t know,” Myka emphasizes. “I did not know… or maybe I just chose _not_ to know, but however you look at it, Helena, once I _did_ know, all I really wanted to do was hurt you.  Everything we’ve talked about, everything that has happened. And that’s all I wanted to…” Myka wipes away her tears and takes in a deep breath, blows it out slowly through barely parted lips.  “All I wanted to do was know… that it _could_ hurt you, as much as it hurt me.  That you loved me even that much… but I…” Myka shakes her head, “you already...”

She shakes her head and she is moving herself up and out from beneath Helena’s weight.  Helena slips quickly away, to the opposite end of the tub, to let her go. She slips away and she sits there quietly, wordlessly, as Myka stands and steps out of that tub, grabs her towel and wraps it around herself.

Helena remains quiet, even as Myka tightens that towel around her. Even as Myka moves for the door, opens it as fast as she can, leaves that bathroom as fast as she can.

She hears the water begin to drain in the tub from behind her. She hears the sound of Helena’s wet feet against the linoleum floor, too.  

But Helena is quiet.  Wordless.  Unspeaking.

***

“You’re not very good at running away,” Helena’s voice is soft when she finally comes out of the bathroom.  It has been about five minutes, Myka thinks.  Probably less but it has felt like absolutely forever. And Myka is already regretting leaving her.  She is sat on her bed in a towel.  She has her back to where Helena now stands just outside of the bathroom that is in her bedroom. Next to the door leading into the hallway. 

Myka is expecting her to go.  She expects to turn around and find Helena dressed and packed and heading out of that door.  She expects to have the ability to turn around to face that woman at all, but she can’t manage doing that now.  She just cannot bring herself to look at her.  Helena, seeing and knowing and always comforting Myka so well… Helena doesn’t go anywhere. 

She stays and she keeps her voice soft.  Keeps it sweet and compassionate.

She says, “I could give you some lovely tips,” and Myka hears that her voice is not quite as steady as it usually is.  Myka can hear that Helena has been crying, that she may still be crying and hiding it.  Trying to hide it anyway.  “Wolly always tells me that.  That I run.”  Her voice is the slightest bit closer.  “That I run and rarely do I look back--”

“I got a C in one of my summer classes.”

“Well,” Helena laughs softly and it is more evident in that laugh that Helena is crying.  Still she says, “therein lies the root of all of our problems.”  Myka is shaking her head as she feels a dip in the bed behind her.  “Do I need to have a talk with your professor?  A la Mr. MacPherson?”

“I feel out of control,” Myka adds.  “I feel lost and like I’ve lost control of everything that I love.”

“Myka…”

“School has always been more than just school for me, Helena,” Myka says this as she feels Helena moving further onto the bed, closer to where she sits.  As Helena moves so close to her that her shadow alters the light around Myka.  Around the nothing that she is staring at on the wall just in front of her.  “School is something I _know_ … very well. It’s something I’m good at and have always been good at.  It’s something I have control over and have always had control of… even with Dad.  Especially with him. And it’s something I… can escape to.  Something I always knew, always _dreamed_ , would save me from this place.” 

Myka is holding a hand out to emphasize the fact that this place, from which she’d once needed saving, is now her home more than ever. It feels more like a home to her now than it ever has before. 

She lets her hand fall back to the bed and turns her head slightly to the side as she feels Helena moving closer still.

“School is my escape. School is the one thing in my life that I have always had complete control over and,” Myka shakes her head, “if I have lost control over even _that_ … then Kelly and Tracy are right.  Jane is right.  _Mom_ is right.  I have lost control and I tried to get it back by taking advantage of Leena’s attraction to me.  By using her to make you jealous.  By trying to reassure myself, through your jealousy, that you still loved me.”

Helena’s hands on Myka’s shoulders give her pause and a chill runs through her skin, makes the hairs along her arms stand on end. The touch of those hands is soon followed by tender lips at the base of her neck and again on her shoulder. Another on her back, just above her shoulder blade.

Myka takes in a deep, unsteady breath at that touch. At the gentle reminder of what, exactly that touch and those lips can _do_ to her.

“I feel out of control.  I feel lost.  I feel… like I don’t know myself and this just makes me think I’m becoming… someone else. Like, I’m becoming…” Myka sighs, lowering her head.  This only allows more room for Helena’s lips against her neck, against Myka’s ear and just behind it, too. 

Myka allows her head to tilt further to the side, allows Helena’s lips far easier access to the base of her neck and her lips do find their way back there, eventually.  Trailing from Myka’s ear, across her jaw, down her neck and to her shoulder. Slowly, gently, with Helena’s hands still grasping her forearms.

“Becoming who?”  Helena whispers, moving her lips back up and against Myka’s ear and she gently, lovingly kisses that ear again.  “Like everyone else?”

Myka shakes her head and turns to Helena, to where they are just inches apart, and Myka has her eyes fixed on that woman’s eyes for the longest time, saying nothing at all, until she finally takes in another steady breath and whispers, “Like my dad.”

***

Helena, from where she sits just behind Myka on their bed, is tugging at the towel Myka wears.  She tugs slowly, with her fingers between fabric and skin, and Myka let’s the towel go, lets it fall to the bed where Helena seems to want it to go.

Then Helena is telling Myka to turn toward her and it takes no further persuasion than that.  Myka turns to face Helena on that bed and she’s looking at all of Helena for the first time since she left her in that bath. 

Helena is gorgeous.  She is _always_ gorgeous but she is now gorgeous in a black lace bra, in black lace panties to match.

Helena is gorgeous and she is, with one finger, beckoning Myka to come closer to her.  She is sitting back further on that bed, reaching for Myka’s hand, and pulling Myka toward her as they now sit face-to-face with one another. 

“Myka, Jane was right.  You are not your father.  You will never be him.”

Myka reaches her hand to Helena’s arm and slowly runs her fingers down the length of it.

“You are so very far away from ever becoming him.”

“I really want to believe that.”

“Believe it,” Helena says with a gentle nod, “because if you were anything like that man…”

She doesn’t finish the sentence.  Instead, Helena sits back on that bed with her legs crossed in front of her and she reaches for Myka’s wrist, grasps it tightly. She tugs and Myka moves to her. She moves where Helena pulls her, over that woman’s lap, on her knees and straddling Helena’s hips, close enough to press her lips into Helena’s forehead.  Close enough for Helena’s lips to fall back into that space just between her breasts, for Helena to wrap her arms tight around Myka’s waist.

“All this talk of losing control….” Helena whispers, lips against Myka’s chest, pressing another kiss to her skin, “…is making me want to take you over that edge.  To show you just how far you _can_ go.”

“Helena--”

“Slowly,” Helena adds, “ _safely_. With me…” Helena kisses her chest again, looks up at Myka with eyes that are still concerned and curious, that are simultaneously wanting and hungry.  Her hands are moving from Myka’s back to her hips, to the sensitive space between her hips and her thighs.  “You hold on to so much,” Helena whispers, kissing her breast, trailing the fingers of her right hand down Myka’s thigh.  Allowing those fingers to move slowly against Myka’s inner-thigh.  “Maybe you should try… letting go.”

Myka’s breath hitches at the feel of Helena’s fingers moving slowly, tickling against her inner thigh.  She brings her arms up and over Helena’s shoulders, around Helena’s neck.  She realizes, as she does this, how new this feels.  How strange, too, to have Helena beneath her.  To be sitting over Helena’s lap, to have Helena comforting her in this way.  To have anyone at all like _this_ with her in this way…

And Helena’s eyes… her eyes are hungry and wanting but they are still understanding.  Helena’s brows are still furrowed and she is still cautious, still with so many unspoken questions.  Even when she asks Myka, “Would you allow me…” and let’s her voice trail away, it is with so much love and concern, it is with even more questions that, unasked. It is with fingers trailing lightly over, brushing through and against curls between Myka’s legs and no further than that. 

Helena is watching Myka with so much love in her eyes. With so much concern…

Myka whispers, “I don’t want to hurt you, Helena,” not entirely sure what she means by that because this could hurt in so many ways.

There are so many ways the two of them together, in love and not unhappy but not entirely happy, can possibly hurt.   There are so many ways that Myka’s allowing Helena to take her… to _try_ and take her over that edge can hurt, too. 

Myka sighs heavily as Helena tilts her head back and sits straighter and stretches her neck just a little bit more to be closer to Myka’s lips. And Myka obliges her with the kiss she is seeking.  Myka moves in until their lips touch and they are kissing and Helena is whimpering, softly and sweetly into that kiss below her. 

When they part, Helena’s eyes are closed and Myka kisses her forehead.  She kisses her eyelids and rests the bridge of her nose agains the warmth of Helena’s forehead. She sighs and pulls Helena in closer, as Helena moves gentle fingers further between Myka’s legs, into the little bit of space that is left between them.

“I love you,” Helena says softly again and Myka realizes she had not told Helena how much she loves her, too.  How much, these days, she is afraid to love her.

So Myka moves and lowers her head and presses another kiss to Helena’s lips.  This time it is more than just tender, it is so much more than just chaste.  Myka kisses Helena and it is deep and warm and then hot and laced with mint… with the taste of  mouthwash and toothpaste and Helena’s sweet exhalations.

When their lips barely part and their breathing is simultaneously heavy and somewhat labored, Myka whispers, almost into Helena’s mouth, “I love you, too,” and that is all she needs to say.  That is all Helena needs to hear before her hands are on Myka in so many places.  So many wonderful places and for so long, so very long, that Myka loses absolute control of herself, of her body, of every ounce of her soul.

***

Myka feels Helena in so many ways that Myka has not felt Helena before.  All of these ways, new and unfamiliar and plentiful and so satisfying, all of them _work_. 

Helena’s fingers inside of her and against the very center of her, _works_.  Just having Helena below her _works_.  Having Helena’s lips against her breast, Helena’s mouth warm and wet over her nipples, having the sudden strength of Helena’s grasp on her back, pulling her closer and closer, pushing Helena further and faster against her. It _works_.

Everything works. 

It works so well that Myka has lost herself.  She has let go of her hold on just about everything and allowed herself to fall over that edge.  To be taken over that edge.  And she is taken over that edge more than just once.

It works so well that Myka has to bite down on her bottom lip to keep the entire town from knowing how well this works.  It works so well that Helena is whispering to her, with a rise in her brow and an accomplished smile on her lips, “I need to hear you,” and Myka wants to oblige, “if we didn’t have a house full of kids, Myka. What I would give to hear you like this. Completely unrestrained. Letting go.”

“Do not.  Stop. Talking,” Myka demands on a whisper.

But Myka wants to yell out and sound off and scream in ways she has never wanted to scream before but she is as quiet as she can be. She is biting down on her lip as hard as she can between gasps of air.  She is allowing her tears to fall in as near to silent as she can possibly manage.

More reasons not to have children, Myka thinks as Helena whispers so many beautiful things into her ear.  More reasons children do not factor into her perfectly imagined future.

With, or even without, Helena Wells.

***

Myka is a mess of her former self, lying back into pillows and lingering somewhere between asleep and awake.  Somewhere between exhaustion and excitement.  Between heaven and earth or six feet deep into its crust.

Myka is a mess and Helena is an angel of perfection above her. Awake, though her eyes are barely open, and smiling, though that smile is much smaller than it was just minutes ago. Helena’s hair is in perfect order, she is perspiring but it glistens, makes her radiate more beauty. Helena is leaning over Myka and touching a finger to Myka’s lips before kissing those lips and touching her finger to Myka’s cheek before kissing that cheek.

Myka has caught her breath, she has tamed her muscles… rather, she has survived the period of time that it has taken for her muscles to relax… and she is closing her eyes at the press of Helena’s lips against hers again. And when that kiss is done, when Helena is above her once more and quiet, Myka tells her, “You are unreal.”

It makes Helena laugh softly before pressing another tender kiss just over Myka’s top lip.  In that space just below Myka’s nose. 

“Get some sleep,” Helena whispers to her, pulling away. But Myka pulls that girl back into her and into a deep kiss and says, when that kiss has ended, as she sleepily slips her fingers beyond black and lace, between parted thighs, and slowly inside of the woman she loves, “Not… so fast.”

***

“Your efforts to tamper down the brightness of the fuck rainbow you two were sliding down last night is very much appreciated.”

Myka is rolling her eyes before Kelly even finishes this sentence but she pulls Helena into her, where they sit together on the couch in the living room, and she presses a kiss to Helena’s temple.  And Helena is smiling, trying very hard not to grin, as she turns to hide her face in Myka’s neck.  Away from Kelly’s now very amused expression.

“Welcome back,” Myka smiles at Kelly. 

“Thank you for taking the girls home,” Helena adds, sitting straight again, “we appreciate the extra sleep it allowed us after breakfast.”

“Extra sleep, yeah sure, _cabronas_ ,” Kelly says, waving a hand at the both of them as she reaches behind her to lock the front door and moves immediately into the kitchen. “Thankfully all of those girls sleep like sunken logs but I couldn’t get them out of here fast enough this morning.” Kelly looks back at the both of them over her shoulder and says mockingly and with much skepticism, “Extra sleep.”

Helena turns a knowing smile on Myka before rolling her eyes, too. She kisses Myka’s cheek and says softly, “I am going to run and get ready,” then is up and disappearing down the hallway.

Myka joins Kelly in the kitchen, where she is already going through cupboards and pulling things out of the fridge.

“Did you guys eat?”  Kelly asks before laughing and shaking her head and saying, “I have no idea why I even just asked that.”

“No,” Myka says, playfully backslapping her arm. “I’m taking Helena out for lunch but thank you.” 

Kelly eyes her with some suspicion for a while, points at her and says, “You seem off.”

“Off?”  Myka questions.

“Maybe off isn’t the right word,” Kelly stands straight, turning to Myka, and looking her up and down, studying her for a moment more. “You seem less… on edge.”

This makes Myka puff out a small laugh.

“I’m happy… today,” Myka nods.

“Does that mean you weren’t happy before?”  Kelly asks and her expression is more serious than what Myka has seen of that girl in a long time. 

Myka just  shrugs and shakes her head, “I don’t know, honestly.”

Kelly twists her lips to the side and shrugs, turning back to the task of preparing food that awaits her on the counter.  She says somewhat over her shoulder, “I guess it’s a start.”

Myka wants to question her about that, to further this conversation but Helena appears from out of the hallway and she’s putting on a sweater while also handing one over to Myka.  She’s taking Myka’s arm and linking hers around it. She’s leaning into Myka and hugging close, pressing a kiss against her cheek, smiling _that_ smile.  It’s a smile that says she is happy.  That she is content and comfortable and exactly where she ought to be.

“Ready?”  Helena asks.

“Yeah,” Myka says softly, moving her hand carefully into Helena’s, freshly bandaged, and slowly leading her toward the door. “We’ll be back late,” she tells Kelly.

“Don’t worry,” Kelly is all smiles, turning back to them, “I’m having a sleepover party with your mothers and Claudia tonight. You can make all the noise you want.”

“As long as you’re back before my flight leaves,” Helena warns, pulling Kelly into a quick hug.

Kelly nods, waving her off, pushing her away, “ _Go_.”

***

They are a spectacle of a pair, sat on a blanket in their usual spot at the lake… dressed in sweaters with jeans, thick socks and shoes on. They are each sporting a mug, one with hot tea, the other with hot chocolate.

Helena tells Myka, “I have been under the impression, for at least seven years, that you don’t eat sugar.”

Myka says, “I don’t like to,” and she is already smiling, a mug full of that warm liquid chocolate lingering at lips, when she also tells Helena, “but I never said anything about not drinking sugar.”

“Aren’t you clever,” Helena whispers, leaning further into Myka, “Brat.”

“You already knew what you were getting yourself into when you decided, three years ago, to make me your girlfriend.”

Helena sighs and it feels reminiscent.  It feels like the sigh of a woman who is losing herself in thoughts of the past.

Helena says, “You’re right,” and sighs again, “I have always known.”

It is the sigh of a woman who is losing herself in dreams of the future.

***

All Myka has to do is reach.

When the tea is gone and the hot chocolate consumed, the rain comes.  It is at first light and Myka is at first tolerant of it but then it is faster and heavier, it is cold as ice.  They and the blanket and the sand that refuses to fall are running for the car amidst screaming and laughter. 

The mugs are left abandoned by the beach. There is no turning back for those.

Myka gets to the car first but Helena is an arms reach away and Myka _is_ reaching, catching her hand, pulling her close.  Myka opens the door to the back seat and Helena is inside in no time, Myka climbing into that seat behind her and shutting the door before they can become any more soaked and sandy than they already are.

They are still laughing and smiling, sat facing each other in the back seat.  Myka reaches into the front seat, over the console, and puts the key in the ignition, starts the car, turns the heat all the way up.  And when she sits back again, when she settles into that back seat and into near silence, she is again face-to-face with that smile barely masking chattering teeth.  With this impossible presence of Helena Wells.

“Take off your sweater,” Myka tells her while removing her own.

Helena, allowing her mouth to fall wide open in mock insult, says, “She doesn’t even say please anymore.  Just demands I strip for her.”  Myka tilts her head and gives Helena a look and Helena is all smiles again, pulling her sweater off and tossing it into the front seat.  “Now what?” Helena asks with a wink.

“Now shut _up_ ,” Myka tells her, reaching, “and come here.”

All Myka has to do is reach.

When she reaches, before her hand is even on that woman, Helena is moving into her arms, into that hold, and resting her body against Myka’s, resting her head against Myka’s shoulder. 

  
Myka closes her eyes and she is engulfed in warmth.  In the warm press of Helena’s body against hers and Helena’s arms wrapping around her abdomen, of Helena relaxing entirely against her. Myka closes her eyes and rests her head on Helena’s and holds on so tight to that girl that Helena soon says, “Too tight.”  And when Myka loosens her hold, Helena sighs and says, “Not tight enough.”

Eventually Myka gets it right.  Not too tight, not too lose.  Eventually Helena is no longer critiquing the hold but sinking further into it, kissing the girl providing it, thanking her by pressing their lips together, again and again.

Eventually, Myka is on her back in the back seat of that car and Helena is lying on top of her in the back seat of that car. And they are close and warm and quiet.  And things are so much like they _used_ to be between them, that it’s almost easy to forget how things are between them now.

 _But almost_ , Myka thinks and she is thinking exactly of Kelly as she thinks it, _doesn’t count_.

***

They are home again, standing below the awning just in front of the bookstore, prepared to escape the rain.  Myka is unlocking that front door.  She is taking her sweet time.  Helena does not hesitate to inform her of this. But then Myka pauses and she turns curiously to Helena and she asks that other woman, “Would you ever…” and that is all she asks.

Helena is wrapping her arms around herself in some sad attempt at warming up.  She is failing quite miserably in this attempt when she looks at Myka with some annoyance.  But that annoyed look soon turns to concern and her hand is on Myka’s arm, rubbing up and down in an effort to comfort her.  To break her from her thoughts or perhaps remind her that she had been thinking in the first place. 

She asks Myka, “Would I ever what?”

Myka’s smile is sheepish and she shakes her head and turns back to the task before her. Unlocks the door, pushes the thing open and pulls Helena inside with her. 

Door closed and locked, cold abandoned, Helena moves to Myka before she can escape up the stairs, and asks her again, “Talk to me. Would I ever what?”

Myka’s face _feels_ flushed.  She can see that Helena is concerned but what she wants to ask Helena is nothing close to this concerning.  It is nothing serious.  It is frivolous, actually.  Beyond even that. Myka laughs softly and moves a hand into her hair and scratches at a non-existent itch.

She says hesitantly, “Would you ever,” then pauses, then pushes forward, “ _actually_ strip for me?  I mean dance. The way you and Kelly used to…”

Helena’s eyes are wide.  Her eyes are so wide that Myka laughs again and shakes her head again and starts to move away from her _again_. But then Helena’s hand is on her arm and when she turns back to Helena, that girl is smiling. That smile is small and it is knowing and just a little bit flirtatious.

“How long have you wanted that?”  Helena asks this in a low whisper, moving much closer than she already was, and it is teasing, it is meant to make Myka blush. It is one hundred percent effective, that whisper.  “Since you found out?  Since the day you chastised me for doing so?”

“Helena--” Myka sighs, smile falling, hand dropping to her side.

“I don’t mean it like,” Helena sighs now too but that soft smile is still in place and she is shaking her head as if to brush the sudden rise in tension completely away.  She stands on the tips of her toes and presses one freezing set of lips to another set of freezing lips for one too-quick second. “You are not yet old enough for that,” Helena smirks, that flirtatious tone is heavy and soft. It is thick and transparent.

It sends a chill through Myka’s skin. Causes the hairs on her arms to rise.

“Not old enough for that,” Myka questions, “but old enough for this?”  She pulls Helena into her arms, to demonstrate exactly what _this_ is.  She pulls Helena close and wraps her arms around the small of her back and allows her hands to wander lower than that, to move over Helena’s ass, to grasp and pull her even closer than before.

Helena is laughing.  She is laughing and falling against Myka and wrapping her arms over Myka’s shoulder and pulling herself even closer, too.  Myka buries her face into Helena’s hair, against Helena’s neck, and kisses that neck until Helena squeals.  She is squealing and squirming and laughing even harder.

“Okay stop, that tickles,” Helena laughs out and Myka stops.  She stands straight and smiles and presses a quick kiss to Helena’s lips.

“Not yet old enough,” Myka scoffs, “and here I was thinking we had gotten over this age gap between us.”

Helena rolls her eyes, “Nearly,” she whispers and with another soft whisper, “but I still owe you a date on your twenty-first birthday.”

“Oh,” Myka had forgotten all about that date. Amidst everything.

“Yes,” Helena sighs and she moves slowly backward, toward the stairs, “so you see, some things… you are not yet old enough for. Some things, I have to keep to myself.”

“Selfish,” Myka smiles softly, leaning into the wall beside her as Helena slowly begins to ascend those steps. 

“Freezing, actually,” Helena says this still facing Myka, still moving further up those stairs.

“That, I do agree with,” Myka says turning back to the door, “let me get the mail, I’ll be right up.”

“Don’t be too long, darling.”

“Don’t be so theatrical,” Myka teases as she goes.

***

Myka has only just finished sorting the mail, junk to the trash, Kelly’s upon the kitchen counter, her own on a side table near the front door, when Helena is approaching her from the hallway. She is down to her underwear, panties and a tank top, but the way she moves to Myka in what she wears, casually and without any thought at all as to _how_ she looks as she moves a hand through her hair absent-mindedly, makes Myka smile.

Helena is beside her now, hand on her shoulder, leaning into her and pressing her lips against Myka’s arm as Myka holds up the final piece of mail.  It is addressed to both her and Tracy.

“You receive such eloquent post,” Helena teases, taking that piece of mail from Myka and flipping it over to see who sent it, “from Jeannie Jr?”

Myka takes the envelope back and glares playfully at the woman lingering by her side, “Probably her wedding invitation.”

“Oh,” Helena sighs out a soft laugh, “right,” and without another word, Helena moves away from Myka’s side and into the living room. Myka sets the envelope down on the table and follows Helena until that girl seats herself on the couch and pulls the throw down from the back of it and over her legs. 

“You all right?”  Myka asks, standing just before her.  The smile she gets from Helena in response is weak. It is anything but reassuring. But she looks tired, more than anything.  She looks like she is about to pass right out.  The yawn that soon overtakes her is only further testament to that. “Nap before movie?”

“Precisely,” Helena’s smile widens and she stretches out on the couch, pats the cushion beside her while gazing at Myka. “Join me?”

Myka looks down at herself, at what she wears, at how soaked and sandy her clothes had truly become.  She looks back up at Helena and without having to say anything more, Helena waves her off to change.

***

Myka is in loose fitting shorts, just putting a fresh shirt on, when Helena comes into the bedroom wrapped in that throw and eyes almost completely closed.  She walks wordlessly to Myka and leans quietly into her. 

“Hey,” Myka laughs softly, wrapping an arm around her, “what’s wrong?”

“You’re taking too long,” Helena yawns and reaches for Myka’s hand.  She tugs her toward the bed and abandons the throw as she fall into it, as she pulls Myka down into that bed with her. 

They are lying there in silence, facing one another. Helena’s hand is still holding on tight to Myka’s, Helena’s fingers lacing with hers.  Helena’s eyes are closed, her breathing softening, her grip on Myka’s hand beginning to loosen.

“I have missed you,” Myka whispers softly, reaching her free hand to Helena’s hair and moving it behind her ear from where it falls in front of her face.  Helena smiles softly but does not open her eyes.  She sighs and she reaches for Myka’s hand and pulls it to her lips and kisses it softly.

“I’ve missed you, too,” Helena says with another quiet sigh.

In the time it takes Myka to pull herself closer and press her lips to Helena’s lips, they are unmoving.  Helena is still smiling softly but she has already passed out.

***

It is still early when they awake but it is dark and overcast.  It is raining so hard that Myka cannot tell if it is just rain or if it is hailing also. The wind has picked up and it is howling loudly all around them.  If the sun is setting, if the sun has set, Myka cannot tell when she looks out the window, when Helena looks out that window from over her shoulder.

“Maybe we should stay in,” Helena says softly.

“I can’t cook,” Myka sighs, turning back to her, “not anything significant.  Not anything _nice_.”

“Maybe we can have a quick dinner with your mothers,” Helena suggests and when Myka gives her the look she hopes translates into exactly what she means to say to that girl in this moment, Helena’s smile grows and she rolls her eyes.  “Maybe we should just order in,” Helena corrects.

“Maybe we should just order in,” Myka nods agreeably.

***

Dinner tonight is Chinese food and it is delivered by a less than enthusiastic driver who is soaking wet.  He is soaked and he is giving them a report of his evening, relaying the weather and his thoughts on the weather along with that, while Myka and Helena bicker slightly over who gets to pay him.

“You’re my guest,” Myka tells Helena.

“Guest?  Even if I were just your _guest_ , it would only be courteous of me to pay him,” Helena argues.

“It would be courteous of _me_ to pay for _your_ dinner,” Myka sighs.

“Because I’m just your guest?”  Helena questions.

“Because you’re my guest who also happens to be my girlfriend,” Myka clarifies.  “And because I clearly love you enough to want to buy you dinner.”

“Nice try.”

In the end Helena wins because she, “still has a wad of useless American currency” on her and what is she going to do with it in Brazil?  Myka tells her the obvious, “Exchange it?” but Helena, as she sometimes forgets, _has_ money and plenty of it so exchanging a few American dollars is not worth the extra trouble.

Not when she can just leave them in America.

She unloads a one hundred dollar bill onto the driver who, at this point, is far less enthusiastic about his evening than he had been when he arrived.

“Your total was only thirty dollars,” he says, clearly annoyed, “I don’t have seventy dollars in change on me.”

“Darling, I don’t need change,” Helena laughs incredulously, taking the food upstairs and calling behind her, “keep it.”

“It’s seventy dollars--”

“Dude if _I_ can’t win an argument with her, you shouldn’t even  try,” Myka smiles and repeats, “Keep the change.” She thanks him as he goes, dumbfounded and staring at that one-hundred dollar bill, and closes the door.

***

After dinner they are sat side-by-side on the couch in the living room, beneath a blanket, not quite watching a movie. They are not quite watching a movie as much as they are watching each other and watching each other’s lips and kissing those lips that they watch on each other.

Myka decides, amidst all of this kissing, that she cannot get enough of Helena.  She could kiss Helena a million times and in a million different ways and she would never be over kissing this woman.  That is, at least, what she has concluded, quietly, in her own thoughts. Kept mostly to herself.

Out loud she asks, between kisses, “Can I kiss you too much?”  to which Helena arches a brow and says, “Huh?” and compels Myka to restate, “Is it possible that I can kiss you so much… you become completely disgusted by the thought of me kissing you?”

Helena smiles and kisses Myka and says, “I’d sooner develop an allergy to you kissing than ever be disgusted by it.” It makes Myka laugh, too. It makes Myka want to kiss her even more.

She does and they do, continue kissing until the credits on that movie roll and the DVD begins to play that movie all over again.

“We should stop the movie,” Myka says, recognizing the sound of the opening credits.

“You should not stop kissing me,” Helena suggests instead.

“Okay,” Myka nods, “okay.”

The power goes out.

“The electricity just turned off,” Helena announces.

“I, too, have eyes,” Myka sighs.

The power goes out and Myka is getting up with every intention of finding a candle, a flash light, a lamp, anything at all to light up this darkness but Helena’s hand on her arm is pulling her back down to the couch and Helena is pulling her closer and into her arms and into even more of these so-many if not too-many kisses that Myka loves so very much. That Myka hopes they never become disgusted by or allergic to.

“Stay,” Helena tells her, “we don’t need the lights.”

Myka stays and she sits back into the couch and reaches for Helena with her hands over Helena’s thighs, and she pulls the near-weightlessness of that woman up and over her lap.  Helena settles there, never breaking the flow of their lips, pressing together and then apart, together again and apart. 

Helena is straddling Myka’s lap and pushing herself closer and kissing Myka a lot deeper than she had been just moments ago, when the power turns back on again.

Helena suddenly stops.  She hesitates or she is distracted or she is lost in her thoughts because Helena is sitting more straight and watching Myka in silence. Palming Myka’s cheeks with her hands at either side of her face. Sighing one rather fantastic sigh.

“Hel--”

“I’m ready for bed,” Helena says quickly.

***

Helena is ready to get into bed, she is not ready to fall asleep.  She is nowhere near ready for that or turning off lights or closing her eyes.  And this is okay with Myka.  Myka is perfectly okay with being able to see every second of this.

When she moves in that way she loves to move, down into that space between Helena’s legs, first against cotton, because today it is cotton, and eventually against the very real feel of that other woman… Myka is perfectly okay with the lights being on.  Myka is perfectly okay with Helena’s eyes being open. With Helena’s hands on her shoulders and then in her hair.  With Helena’s thighs at her sides, her legs locking up on either side of her. With Helena’s back eventually arching up in combined delight and protest against the gentlest strokes of her tongue.

Myka is okay with rising quickly to meet that girls’ parted and gasping lips with her own, to feel Helena’s body shaking, shuddering, falling almost entirely apart just below her.

Myka is okay with knowing that she will always want this.  That she will always _remember_ this. That she will always want to love Helena in this way, even if… even _when_ Helena is no longer hers to love in this way.

Brown eyes finally close.  An audible cry escapes those lips.

***

“I didn’t know about the wedding,” Helena says quietly, thoughtfully, lacing her hand with Myka’s and pulling that hand over her exposed belly.  Myka opens her eyes to see that other girl staring up at the ceiling, nibbling on her lower lip.  “Jeannie Jr. and Jules,” Helena clarifies, turning her attention to Myka now, “until Jane said something at dinner Thursday night.  I didn’t know.”

“It’s the only thing Junior ever talks about anymore,” Myka says softly. 

“We haven’t talked,” Helena sighs with a shake of her head, “not in a long time.  Not really since she and Jules… and not since you and I…”  Myka arches a brow and Helena continues shaking her head, shaking away those thoughts.  “I’m sorry.”

“What did I say about apologies?”  Myka smiles turning onto her back, closing her eyes but tightening her hold on Helena’s hand, still resting over that girl’s abdomen.

“I spent a lot of years thinking about what I would say to him,” Helena says softly, “about the pregnancy.  If I ever saw him again.”   Myka opens her eyes and turns her head back to Helena, Helena whose gaze is steadily on that ceiling.  “And when I did finally see him again, I was too scared to say anything at all.  It seemed pointless after so long.  It seemed so inconsequential.”

Myka fans her fingers out and moves her hand to just over Helena’s belly button.

“I don’t know what I would say to him even now.”

“Why would you say anything at all?”

Helena sets her hand over Myka’s hand on her belly and says, “So that he knows what happened?  So that he knows what could have been?”

“Why?”

Myka doesn’t mean to actually question Helena’s reasoning. She truly doesn’t understand why Helena would want him to know, after all of this time.  She doesn’t understand why Helena would want to draw that connection between her and Jules.  Drive a wedge between Jules and Jeannie Jr.  

But Helena is so quiet for so long in the wake of that question that Myka’s mind begins to wander.  Why Helena cares that Jules and Jeannie are engaged. Why Helena cares that Jules knows what could have been.  If his knowing would not make a difference on how active he is in Helena’s life, why would she care for him to know?

Unless it would make a difference.  Unless that connection or reconnection, or whatever it may be, is exactly what Helena wants.

Myka’s next question is not quite as innocent as the first.  It is not quite as nice, either.  And she knows it before she ever asks it but she has already been seated at the cusp of her frustration with Helena, with their relationship.  With all of these things gone wrong.   She has already asked so many questions, already had those questions answered and left more confused by them.

What is one more question?  What is one more infuriating answer?

“Do you think he will feel indebted to you for the rest of your life?”

“No, Myka,” Helena sighs, pushing Myka’s hand away from her belly and Myka is immediately reminded of a time in high school, where Helena had done the same thing to Giselle, “so that he can feel the same way for the rest of his life that I have felt about it for most of mine and will _feel_ about it for the rest of mine.”

“You know that’s not going to change his feelings on anything,” Myka says softly, rolling back onto her side to face Helena. “He didn’t care enough when he was seventeen and having sex with a fourteen year old, he’s not going to care now that he’s getting married.”

“You really know how to comfort me,” Helena sighs, rolling her eyes.  The expression that is next on her face when she turns to look at Myka, is guilty and upset, “I fell in love with you when I was eighteen, Myka.  You were only fourteen.   What does that say about me?”

Myka rolls her eyes, “And then you spent the next three and a half years _not having sex with a fourteen year old_.”

“What is the difference,” Helena sighs out. “We kissed.”

“You actively avoided being intimate with me because you knew how it made you feel, you knew you weren’t ready then and you knew I was too young, you _knew_ I was vulnerable, that I was _attached_. Now matter how crazy it made me even at fifteen and sixteen, you _knew_ better.  _That_ is the difference, Helena, between you and Jules. When I didn’t know any better, you did not take advantage of me.”

It is an argument they have had for years. It is a point that Myka has tried to drill into Helena’s mind for years.  It has still not gotten through.  Helena still carries all of that guilt with her, Myka has learned this very well over time.  Helena, for some reason, still looks at her sometimes and sees the child who is actually no longer a child.

It frustrates Myka.  It has always been a source of frustration for her. Of tension for them. If things had been different this year, if absolutely everything about this year had been different, she would never allow that frustration to bubble over. 

She would never keep pushing to have this conversation. She would never keep pushing their relationship in this very unavoidable direction.

“Look, I just don’t understand why you would bring it up _now_.  You didn’t feel any sort of urgency to bring it up before now.  Not until you found out they were getting married.”  Helena is already turning away from Myka, onto her other side.  “Georgie, you clearly know how I feel about that guy. You _know_ I am the last person on this planet who would stick up for him… but he makes _Jeannie_ happy and he treats her nice. Just let them live blissfully ignorant--”

“I’m not _trying_ to be vindictive,” Helena sits up and turns to Myka suddenly and she is upset, she already has tears forming in her eyes.  “Myka, I’m not trying to _ruin_ anything.  I was fourteen. I was _pregnant_.  He almost had a child.  _We_ almost had a child together.”

Myka sits up now, too, and she is quiet for a while as Helena wipes at her eyes and turns to face the foot of the bed, away from Myka again, lowering her head to stare at her hands, now in her lap. One finger is running over the bandage wrapped over the edge of her right palm.

“Almost,” Myka says softly and she reaches a hand to Helena’s arm, “but there is no baby, Helena.  There is no child.”

“Thank you… for the reminder,” Helena says this harshly, pulling her arm away from Myka’s grasp, and then sarcastically, “because of course I had forgotten.” 

Myka sighs her defeat.  They are quiet for a long time, sitting up and side by side in bed, when Myka dares herself to say what she is actually thinking. What she has wanted to say to Helena for far too long.

It is the culmination of all these events. Of this entire weekend. Of just about the entire year.

“Your timing is off.”

Helena turns to her, curious and already defensive. Her brows furrowed, her gaze steady.

“ _What_?”

“You could avoid so much pain, Helena. You could avoid _causing_ so much pain, if you would just say what you mean to say, exactly when you _need_ to say it.”

“Who…” Helena hesitates to ask, her expression falling suddenly into sadness, “who am I causing pain, Myka?  Because the last time I remembered, _I_ am the one who had the miscarriage.  _I_ am the one who went through that pain.  And let me assure you, my love, that it was both physical and emotional. And if Jules managed to feel even a minute of that pain, if he could just know what I went through and share the pain that I felt for even five seconds, Myka?  I would welcome it.  With open arms wide open.”

“That would make you feel better?”  Myka asks, “Dumping your pain on him and Jeannie, when they are at their happiest, would make you feel better?”

“Dumping…?  No, Myka,” Helena is frustrated again, “ _sharing_ the pain.  How is it even remotely fair that I went through that alone?  How is it even remotely fair that he knows nothing about it? He _should_ know.”

“Maybe,” Myka shrugs, “maybe a year ago. Maybe two years ago. But now, Helena? You want to tell him now? Your timing is off. It isn’t great. You should have told him when it mattered.  You should have told him when it mattered only to you and him and not after it would also impact Jeannie. Not after it would also impact everyone else around you.”

“Oh,” Helena says softly, nodding.  She is slowly moving off of that bed, standing beside it, turning to face Myka, “ _this_ is about Liam.”

“It isn’t _just_ about Liam. It isn’t _just_ about Jules.”

“But it _is_ about Liam, correct?  About my telling you too late about him and I?  Or not soon enough or--”

“Or not at all,” Myka interjects.  “Helena, you didn’t tell me.  I found out.  In the worst way possible.”

“Myka, I _wanted_ to tell you,” Helena says softly, “from the very beginning, I wanted to tell you but you--”

“But you didn’t,” Myka shakes her head, shakes away all of Helena’s excuses, all of these things she has heard already. “Why?  Because you were waiting to find the right words? Because you were trying to piece together _how_ you were going to tell me?”

“ _Because_ … it’s hard to find the right time, the right way to say something like that… when all we have is a phone to say it through.  When all I have of you is the image of your face on a screen. When we are _thousands_ of miles away.”

“Helena,” Myka  laughs and it is soft, it is incredulous, “you didn’t even _try_.  If I hadn’t found out through Sam and Tracy, I wouldn’t have known.  How _long_ would I have not known?”

“Valentine’s Day,” Helena says and nods and sits back down on the bed, “I intended to tell you everything about Liam but then you…”

“I _what_?”

“You said… everything that you’d said. About loving me the way that you do.  About falling in love with me… the way that you did.  I wanted to tell you everything that day.”

“On Valentine’s Day,” Myka laughs again, “my girlfriend wanted to tell me she was seeing someone else on _Valentine’s_ _Day_.”

“You can see how I would have had my reservations,” Helena sighs, rolling her eyes.  “I wanted to tell you that day because that’s when it started.  Absolutely nothing happened before then. _Nothing_ , Myka.  And I didn’t tell you after because I didn’t expect anything to happen after--”

  
“You didn’t expect it,” Myka is shaking her head, moving her feet out of that bed and to the floor.  “But it did, right?  _Something_ happened.” 

Helena is quiet for a long time before she is on that bed again and moving across it to where Myka sits.  She is sat behind Myka quietly, unmoving, breathing softly, when she says, “I cannot change the past.”

Myka is quiet.  Myka is trying to control her breathing.  Trying to control her emotions.  Trying to control anything at all.  Myka is quiet and breathing and steadying that breath when she turns slightly to Helena, who is still sitting behind her, who is now reaching a hand to her hand, where it rests on the bed.

She is turning slightly to Helena and she is saying what she knows needs to be said.  What she has been waiting half the year to say to this girl in person. Face-to-face. 

No miles, no ocean, no Liam or Leena between them.

“And I cannot do this for another year.”

  1.   Long moments of silence.  Never ending silence.  _Eternal_ silence.



Myka slowly turns back to Helena, to look at that older girl whose hand is no longer on hers, whose eyes are no longer on her.

Helena’s head is lowered.  Her hands are in her lap.  And she is crying.  She is crying softly, quietly but she is crying so very much.

“I can’t stop this from happening, can I?”

In Myka’s silence, she begins to cry more audibly. When she finally lifts her eyes, Myka knows her expression is resolute and she is gently shaking her head. It is such a gentle motion that Myka isn’t entirely sure that she’s even managed it.  It had been such a hard thing to imagine _doing_ , telling this girl no, that Myka isn’t entirely sure she’s actually doing it but…

Helena begins to sob.  Helena begins sobbing, lowering her head into her hands again and Myka is sure now more than ever before that it is done.

 _This_ … is done.

“We cannot go on like this, Helena. I absolutely refuse to be like this with you.”

“You’ve no more love for me…”

“This isn’t about love, Helena.  I _love_ you. I have always loved you but I cannot _be_ with you.  We should not be together.  Not when things are like this.  Not when you are way over there and I am way over here. Not when you keep things from me.”.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry is not good enough, Helena,” Myka says, frustrated, “sorry doesn’t make up for you manipulating our situation for your own emotional peace of mind.”

“ _Manipulating_?”

“That is _exactly_ what you did, Helena.” 

“Myka, I--”

“Sorry isn’t good enough, Helena.”

  1.   _Too_ much silence.



“You said it yourself, Helena,” Myka continues, even if for nothing more than to end that silence, “you cannot change the past. _I_ cannot change the past.  All we can do, at this point, is stop perpetuating this lie we keep telling ourselves… that everything between us is okay.  That we can just fix this.  That you and I… are inevitable.

“We should not be together, Helena. And this should have happened a year ago.  This should have happened before I ever left London.”

“A year,” Helena cries, “that you haven’t wanted to be with me.  That you have just put up with me for my own amusement?  For yours?  A whole year, Myka, that you haven’t loved me?”

“You’re not listening to me,” Myka sighs, “ _again_ , Helena, you’re not listening to anything that I’m saying.  I _love_ you, Helena. I never said I didn’t love you…”

“Then why can’t we be together?”  Helena asks.  “How can you want to break up with me if you love me? If you keep saying you do. How can you not want to work on this?  To fix it? To make it better in the future?”

“This has never been about love, Helena. I have told you before, love has never been our problem.  It’s _this_.  The arguing, the insecurities, the distance. Your need to be with someone else and never tell me.  Your apparent refusal to be with someone else and never tell me that either. Whatever _your_ needs are, whatever you are _not telling me_ , _that_ is the problem.  That I will always want to put your needs before my own, even when I don’t fully understand them? _That_ is the problem.  It will always _be_ a problem.  Even into the future.

“I cannot keep up. I cannot _fix_ this.”

Myka drops her head into her hands, runs her hands through her hair. Sits straight once more, turns to Helena again.

“I can’t keep prioritizing your happiness over my own. I can’t keep ignoring the fact that I am not happy with this.  That _this_ is why I’m not happy. I _can’t_ … I’m _tired_ , Helena. I am so tired of everything that I don’t even want to _try_.”

Helena says nothing to that.  She is lowering her head again, looking away from Myka again.  Crying all over again.

Myka stands and grabs the throw from the floor and she tells Helena, “You can sleep here tonight.  I’ll go… to Kelly’s room,” and she turns to leave her bedroom, to leave what used to be, what could have been _their_ bedroom.  Once upon a time.

She turns to leave and as she goes, Helena calls out to her in protest.  Helena’s hand is on her arm and Helena is crying so hard that she is not speaking but she manages Myka’s name and she tugs until Myka gives in, until Myka can no longer stand to hear her crying or no longer stand to either look at or away from that crying face.

She sits. Myka sits on the bed beside Helena and she is wiping away her own tears, trying to strengthen her own voice when she says, “Sweetheart,” and this only seems to make Helena cry even more. It only makes Myka cry even more, too. 

Myka lets go of that throw and brings her hands to Helena’s face, to wipe away her tears and she leans her forehead into Helena’s, touches her nose to Helena’s, and hushes her softly, begs her to calm down. Kisses warm cheeks, kisses wet lips.

“Georgie, I _love_ you,” Myka sighs, “but we cannot...”

“Please,” Helena finally breathes in and sobs out, “don’t leave me,” and she shakes her head, “not tonight,” and she sighs, pressing a kiss to Myka’s lips, “not right now.”

“Helena--”

“Tomorrow,” Helena interrupts and nods, “tomorrow I leave and I will be gone and we can say goodbye.  We can end this then.  I will be out of your life--”

“I’m not asking you to be out of my life, Helena,” Myka sighs in frustration, “I’m telling you that we can’t be together like this.  You are still my friend, Helena.  You will always be my family.  But we can’t be together when you keep making the rules.  When you keep changing them, too.”

“I’m sorry, Myka, that I hurt you this much. That I hurt _you_ of all people.  I’m sorry but please don’t go.  Not now,” Helena cries and it sounds too much like a plea.  It sounds too much like begging.  “Not when we have one more night, Myka.”

Helena presses another kiss to Myka’s lips and when she pulls away, Myka leans back into her.  Kisses her again and draws that kiss out much longer than she had intended.  Much longer than she should want to.  But she nods, at the end of that kiss.  She nods and she presses another quick kiss to Helena’s lips, pulls Helena into her arms.

“No countdowns,” Myka reminds her, brushing away her tears. “Okay?”

It doesn’t make Helena smile.  Not tonight.  But Helena nods and she pulls Myka into her, into another kiss and much closer than that, until they are free of what little clothes they had put back on, free of these sheets, free of the painful words that brought them to this very place. 

They are nothing but hands on bare skin, mouths breathing hot breath, tongues over wanting places, lips asking for more, tears crying I love yous.

Pleas that are most certainly pleas. Begging that is unquestionably begging. 

There is no trying for calm and quiet and discreet. Myka takes Helena over the edge and Helena pulls Myka over that edge right along with her. Shows her everything, absolutely everything, that she is giving up.  That she is letting go.

Absolutely everything to which she has said, _is_ saying, goodbye.

***

It isn’t late enough.

This night can’t end fast enough.

Myka has been lying wide awake, staring up at the ceiling in a room that is completely dark.  Helena is lying wide awake beside her.  She’s been sure Helena is wide awake since the older woman had coughed not even a few minutes ago.  Since that older woman had reached up to wipe away more of her own tears and turned onto her side.  Turned onto her back once again shortly after that.

But they are quiet and they have been this way for a while.  For far too long when Helena’s hand brushes against Myka’s hand where their hands come to rest in-between them.

Helena’s hand brushes Myka’s and at first, Myka is sure it is unintentional.  She tenses at that touch, she waits for Helena to withdraw her hand. But then Helena’s fingers are moving to brush against the backs of her fingers and she is sure, she is absolutely certain, that this touch is intentional.

Seconds later, Helena is moving her hand into Myka’s hand.  Without a word. Without saying anything.  She moves her hand into Myka’s and she laces their fingers together. Helena turns on her side, facing Myka, and she lifts their hands to her lips, presses her lips to the back of Myka’s hand.  Kisses that hand gently.

Myka turns to face her, still quiet. Still wordless. Myka turns her eyes to Helena and she is crying again.  Quietly, to herself.  She has her eyes shut tight and tears are slipping down her cheeks, over the bridge of her nose, to her temple, wetting the bedsheets below.  She kisses Myka’s hand again and pulls their hands, still clasped together, into her chest, against her heart, and continues to cry quietly. In complete silence.

Myka reaches a finger of that hand, still held tight to Helena’s chest, to touch her chin.  She presses a gentle finger to Helena’s chin and lifts that girl’s head slightly and this touch moves her.  It compels Helena to move. 

Helena pulls herself closer to Myka and Myka pulls that girl closer to her.  Helena is releasing her hold on Myka’s hand and moving her head to rest against Myka’s shoulder, draping her arm across Myka’s chest and resting her hand just over Myka’s collar bone.  Myka is moving that now free hand around Helena’s body, wrapping that girl in arms, pulling her closer.

There are no words to be spoken.  Myka has no words to say to this woman that can possibly relay to her how she feels.  How she feels, and all at once, both in love and heartbroken. How she feels both happy and discontent.  How she feels both freed of everything they have been through together and simultaneously tethered to Helena by all of those things.

They will always have a connection. They will always be connected in this way.  And Myka will both miss with every ounce of her soul, and not miss at all, Helena George Wells.

Myka has no words to properly express to Helena any of these things that she is feeling, so she says nothing.  She says nothing at all but moves her lips to Helena’s lips.  Moves her mouth against Helena’s mouth.  She is pressing, gently, her tongue against Helena’s lower lip, against teeth and another tongue and softly, sweetly, into Helena’s mouth, against the roof of that mouth.

Helena whimpers.  It is a soft cry.  It is the only sound, besides that of their own breathing, that they have made for an hour.  This soft whimper. Those gentle cries. And they are calling to Myka. They _move_ something within her, rather something within compels her to move at the sound of those whimpers.

They are kissing and kissing and quiet and still kissing when Myka’s hand trails that familiar length of Helena’s body. When the tips of Myka’s fingers find the familiar feel of elastic and move in that familiar way beneath silk and lace.

The whimpers grow into tiny pleas.  Tiny wordless pleas as Helena moves her leg over Myka’s leg and Myka, in turn, moves those legs further apart with a palm to Helena’s thigh and pulls herself up and over Helena.  Helena welcomes that familiar reach of Myka’s fingers as she moves them not at all slowly between her legs, not at all gently against her. Not even remotely hesitantly inside of her.

 _Nothing is quick with that girl_.

These words play like a broken record in the back of Myka’s mind. Giselle’s very own words from millions of years ago. Myka realizes just how often she has said these words to herself, allowed these words to echo, while Helena has whimpered and cried and _actually_ quivered below her.

 _Nothing_ is quick with this girl.  Usually. But Myka moves quickly. She moves quick and sure and knowing.  She moves with so much familiarity, knowing exactly what Helena wants.  Knowing exactly how to give Helena what she needs.

Myka is moving quickly and quietly and she is looking down at Helena.  Watching the furrow in Helena’s eyebrows, the look of utter sadness, of the combined frustration and arousal that plagues that girl’s face.  Myka is moving quietly but then she is no longer moving quickly. She is slowing down, she is kissing that furrow in Helena’s brows.  She is pulling away.

Helena’s protest is audible.  With Myka’s hand no longer against her, with Myka’s fingers no longer in her.  Helena breathes out, “What are you…” but can’t quite manage the full sentence. She breathes out, “I was almost…” but can’t quite manage that either.

Myka kisses now wordless lips.  Trying to speak.  Trying to say anything at all.  She kisses those lips, breathing heavy breath, and when Helena inhales deeply through her nose in the midst of that kiss, this too moves Myka. It moves Myka to deepen this kiss, to hold her claim on these lips for that much longer. For as long as she can before she can no longer call these lips hers.  Before these lips are no longer hers to kiss.

“Myka…” Helena is crying again.  She is crying and pulling her arms around Myka’s shoulders, around Myka’s neck and pulling Myka back into her.  “Please don’t… don’t stop now.”

“I _have_ you,” Myka assures her, running a hand through her hair, “I always have.”

Helena cries but she let’s go.  She wipes tears from Myka’s eyes and tucks her hands beneath the pillow behind her head, and Myka takes her, just this once. Just this one last time, all the way home.  With hands gripping sensitive spots on inner thighs and lips kissing sensitive spots between those thighs, Myka takes Helena all the way. 

And Helena just let’s go.

***

Helena’s labored breath is all that takes up the quiet now.  It is all that fills up the silence.  She is staring up at the ceiling again.  Wiping tears away from her eyes again.  Fingers laced with Myka’s again.

Myka is wiping the taste of that girl from her lips. Wiping the taste of that girl’s tears from her lips, too.  She is rubbing her eyes with her free hand, squeezing Helena’s hand with her not-quite-free hand.  She is breathing and thinking and trying to remember that this needs to happen. That this _is_ happening.  That there is no going back on this happening with Helena.

For her own sake.  For Helena’s sake, too.

Helena eventually breathes out her name.

“Myka,” falls soft and breathy and low from those lips, from those way too perfect lips belonging to Helena Wells. 

Myka says nothing.  Myka says absolutely nothing and waits.

Helena says, into darkness, “I don’t want to fall asleep.” 

Myka takes in a deep breath, she let’s go of a shaky sigh.  Her resolve crumbling beneath the weight of this evening.  The weight of everything that has led to this point in their lives.

 _The end,_ she thinks, quietly and to herself, _the absolute end_.

They had not quite been inevitable after all.

“I don’t want this night to end,” Helena’s voice is still so soft, still so pained.  She is turning slightly, she is looking at Myka. She is trying so very hard not to cry but her lips curls uncontrollably under and that cry comes out anyway. “It feels too final. It feels like forever. It feels like the end.”

“And so what if it is?”  Myka asks, not turning to Helena.  Not daring to even look at her.  Barely surviving the sound of that girl breaking beside her.  Forcing herself to be stubborn.  Forcing the harshness in her voice and the appearance of uncaring.

Helena has no response for her anyway. Helena has nothing to say to that question.

“For once in your life, Helena,” Myka sighs and she pulls her hand from Helena’s grasp and rolls onto her side, completely away from Helena, “this can’t be about what _you_ want.”

Not one single word after that is spoken between them.

***

Myka is sat in a dark office in a closed bookstore, tapping away at the keys of her laptop.

She is tapping and she is only tapping, there are no words coming from those fingers tapping lightly against those keys. There are no words, none that are intelligible or coherent anyway, in her thoughts at all.

Her mind is not thinking clearly. Her thoughts are all a haze.  And all that Myka can see, as she stares blindly ahead at a gray wall, is Helena’s face. Helena trying so very hard not to cry.  Helena trying so very hard not to be upset.  

Helena had spent the day with Kelly.

The second Kelly had come home and through that door and saw them standing, unspeaking, across from one another, she took complete control.  She’d whisked Helena away and into her room.  They’d been there for an hour before Myka finally left the apartment, unable to listen to Helena’s sobbing through that bedroom door anymore.

How many times had Helena cried in her arms in that bedroom?  How many times had she thought of _wanting_ Helena in that bedroom?  How many times had she told her too-young self, in that very bedroom, that she would never let go of Helena, if she were ever lucky enough to have Helena in the first place?

She couldn’t count the times even if she tried. And she couldn’t stay there listening to Helena cry anymore, even if she tried to do that, too.

When Myka returned home they were gone but Kelly had text her, not long after they’d left, to say she would take Helena to the airport that evening.  That they would be back for a short time before that if Myka wanted to stay and say goodbye. Or if Myka wanted to leave and avoid saying anything at all. Whichever she decided.

Myka stayed.

Against her better judgment she’d stayed and now she is trying hard, she is failing miserably, to get those sad eyes out of her mind.  To wipe those tear-stained cheeks from her memory.  To silence that storm of never-ending whimpers.  From the crying. From her hands finding purchase against Helena’s hips.  From that mistake of a goodbye kiss she never should have pressed to Helena’s lips.

Now she is trying, but she is no longer trying very hard at all, to forget about everything she has ever had with Helena Wells. Even if just for one moment.

***

Myka expects a lecture from Kelly.  When that older girl comes home, she goes immediately upstairs, and Myka assumes it is to pack.  Myka assumes that it is to vacate this place, much like her sister had done, and move very far and very quickly away from Myka.

But after an hour, what Myka gets from Kelly when she finally comes downstairs, is a plate full of seasoned potatoes. Onions, bell peppers, on top of a warm store-bought tortilla with a bit of salsa on the side.

“ _Papas_?” Myka asks turning away from her laptop, to look up at Kelly.  Just when she doesn’t think herself capable, a small smile pulls into her lips. She cannot stop that smile from forming. She cannot help but find this amusing.

Kelly sets a fork down on that plate.

“Are they poisoned?”

Kelly glares at Myka for a moment and then says, “You think I’m mad at you for breaking up with Helena.”

Myka says nothing but lowers her head to stare at her hands, now folded together in her lap.

“You know, I noticed… that you didn’t cry when you broke up with Abigail.”

Myka’s smile falls into a smirk and she turns back to her laptop, somewhat thrown by that statement.  But there is no denying that.  She definitely did not cry when she broke up with Abigail.

“You didn’t cry when Leena broke up with you,” Kelly adds.

“There were tears,” Myka says softly, shrugging. “Not many because, as Leena so eloquently stated, it can’t be a break up if we were never together.”

“But you were crying when I came home this morning,” Kelly says, ignoring Myka’s thoughts, “you were crying when we came back for Helena’s things.  You’re _still_ crying right now.”

Myka reaches her hands to her cheeks and is simultaneously surprised and not surprised at all to find that they are wet. To find that there are tears there.  She puffs out a soft laugh at the sight of her wet palms.  She shakes her head and still more tears fall.

“Hey,” Kelly says and she is holding up a finger to Myka, wagging that finger back and forth, shaking her head, “none of that shit. You did what you had to do.”

This makes Myka laugh even more.  It makes her cry even more, too.

“I love her,” Myka whispers.

“She knows that,” Kelly says that as a matter of fact.

“I broke her heart,” Myka adds.

“She’ll be fine,” and Kelly is just as sure of this statement, too, “eventually.”

Myka sighs.  She _knows_ this.  She wants to believe it, too.  But in the back of her mind, she’s remembering Helena in her bathroom, a mess of tears, and crumbling to the floor beside a countertop with an open bottle of pills.

“She’ll be fine,” Kelly reassures.  And it’s easier to want to believe, when Kelly says it. Because Kelly had been there with Helena. Through whatever was happening, whatever had been going on, Kelly was there by her side and while Myka has had several glimpses into their friendship, into just how close a friendship they have, she has never really known the full scope of that friendship. 

She still doesn’t understand how Kelly pulled Helena out of such a dark place and continues to know Helena even better than Myka does. Even better than Myka knows herself.

“Thank you for making me dinner,” Myka says sniffling, offering Kelly a sheepish smile, wiping more of those tears away. “Thank you for taking Helena to the airport.  For always being there for her.  Between you and Wolly…” Myka can’t think of what she actually wants to say.  She just puffs out a soft laugh and lowers her head again.

Kelly nods and when Myka looks up at that girl again, she is brushing a hand quickly over her eyes.  She says, “Yep,” and continues nodding, then adds softly, “and you’ll be fine, too, Myka.”

“Eventually?”  Myka questions, still laughing… _crying_ again.

Kelly’s hand is on her shoulder, grasping her shoulder gently, patting that shoulder with something resembling physical comfort.

“Eventually,” Kelly echoes and then much more softly and almost but not quite to herself as she is turning and heading out of that door, “ _hopefully_.”

***

“At least you can’t blame this one on me…”

Myka knows exactly what Sam is trying to do.

“…I wasn’t even in town for Thanksgiving.”

He is trying to cheer her up.

It is not working.

“Did you give her the letter?”

Myka’s eyes move slowly to meet his where he stands just beside and below where she is, upon a ladder in a random aisle of the bookstore.

“From the time capsule?”

“I did,” Myka says softly, “when I said goodbye to her. Before she left for the airport... I just put it in her hand.”

“Has she read it?”

Myka narrows her eyes on Sam and gives him her best look of annoyance but reminds herself that it isn’t his fault. Her, in this mood, having been in this mood for a week, isn’t his fault.  She takes in a deep and calming breath then turns her attention back to the books before her.

“I haven’t talked to her since she left,” Myka says and even despite that calming breath, she is so very tempted to _accidentally_ drop several books on top of Sam’s head, “the last time we talked, I was telling her goodbye.”

“Right,” Sam nods sheepishly, that hand of his flying nervously to his neck, “sorry about that.”

“Look Sam, I appreciate that you’re trying to cheer me up by finding the silver lining in all of this--”

“I’m actually just here for the calming atmosphere.”

Myka assumes that is also meant to be a joke. Judging by the wry smile on that boys face as he shrugs his shoulders.  She rolls her eyes and turns her attention back to the books, ignoring him completely.

“But the last thing I want to do right now is talk or even think about Helena,” Myka says, concluding her original thought. “I have finals and holidays and the bookstore, and the very real problem that Tracy is no longer here to help me with _that_ , to worry about.”

Sam sighs but remains quiet, allowing his shoulders to slump.

“Helena,” and Myka hesitates to say this but does eventually concede to this fact, “is no longer mine to worry about.”

The next book Myka reaches for is a paperback anthology of works by H.G. Wells. It is not at all where it is supposed to be. She’s not even sure where the book came from or why it is lying at the very top of the shelf. And despite the image on its front, a black and white profile of the _actual_ H.G. Wells, Myka cannot stop herself from thinking of _her_ H.G. Wells.

It has been a very long time since Myka has called Helena by her initials.  Her mind, so reluctant to let go of every thought, of any thoughts at all of that other woman, pulls her back into one of the last few memories she has of calling Helena “H.G.”.

***

_“H.G.”_

_Myka is fourteen. Helena is eighteen. And the difference in their ages seems so much more significant than it ever has before, than it ever will again._

_Not because it is a wide gap.  It has always been those same four-and-a-half years.  But now Myka knows that she absolutely loves Helena.  Now Myka thinks that Helena might actually, at the very least, like her, too._

_They are sat side-by-side in the bleachers just before the start of Myka’s softball game and Helena isn’t quite mad at but she isn’t quite happy with Myka either._

_Helena sighs heavily, dramatically.  Absurdly theatrically, as she has been known to do.  She sighs and her arms are crossed defensively in front of her. She is looking away from Myka and she seems to have no intention of ever looking back._

_She isn’t quite happy at all._

_“Einstein,” is all she says in response to Myka calling her name and even then she says it curtly.  She says it as if to scold or chastise Myka.  To draw attention to her displeasure._

_“I’m sorry,” Myka says softly, “but this is not okay.  You tell me that all of the time when things happen to me that shouldn’t be happening to me.”_

_“I was fine without Giselle knowing,” Helena says, still looking stubbornly away from Myka, “I was fine with just you… walking me to class.”_

_“I don’t think that would have always been the case,” Myka whispers, lowering her head. “What if one day I_ can’t _be there and he escalates from just following you, from just trying to talk to you, to trying to touch you? He’s done it before. Pete said…”_

_Myka’s words disappear into a sigh and Helena says nothing._

_“How would you feel if it were me?  If I were being followed?  Talked to like that? Threatened by someone like him?”_

_Helena finally turns to Myka with brows furrowed, with an expression of upset and frustration all over her face and she says, sounding far too calm, “Has he been following you, too, Myka?  Because I will do him great bodily harm.  He will feel every moment of his life slipping slowly out of his reach and away from him for several very long hours before I ever actually allowed to him his death.”_

_Myka doesn’t know why this makes her laugh but it does.  She laughs and she is biting back that laughter and nodding and telling Helena, “I was just speaking hypothetically, H.G.  But now you get it,” and sighing, looking down the bleachers and toward the softball field where Giselle is leading a warm up, “how Giselle feels.  Knowing you could have been in danger and she never would have known.”_

_Helena sighs and she is quiet again, turning away from Myka again, resting her chin in the palm of her hand, following Myka’s gaze out onto that field.  Out to where her girlfriend turns and waves and flashes her a concerned smile.  Helena waves back.  It is a half-hearted wave.  Just a quick flick of her wrist, a simple sway of her hand._

_“It’s how I feel, too,” Myka says, “knowing you could be in danger,” and she feels nervous when she says it, “and I never would have known.”  She does not know why she feels nervous but she does. Her hands are close to shaking, her palms beginning to sweat, though that could have far more to do with this heat._

_It is so very hot outside._

_But when Helena sits up and turns to look back at her, it feels suddenly hotter. Myka is sure she’s sweating even more profusely than before.  Helena is looking at her and the look she wears has so much concern in it. So much worry and so much of what Myka thinks could actually be love._

_But maybe that look_ is _just concern.  Maybe that is just the look one best friend gives to another best friend when they have told them, in so many words, how much they truly care about them._

_Helena is still quiet and still watching Myka when she turns slightly away to look back toward that softball field.  She is looking for Giselle, wondering if Giselle can see how nervous she is in the presence of her girlfriend.  Wondering if Giselle is five seconds away from knocking her senseless… for somehow making Helena look at her this way.  If ‘this way’ could even be considered anything special._

_But Giselle is talking to Pete now.  She is gesturing up to where Myka sits with Helena while talking to Pete, and he is nodding. He’s nodding and he has that determined look on his face, so Giselle must be telling him what she knows, asking him to keep an eye on Helena during the game as they had planned._

_They are still talking when Helena’s hand on Myka’s wrist pulls Myka out of her thoughts and pulls Myka’s eyes back to Helena’s.  Helena is still quiet, still not speaking.  She is moving her hand further around Myka’s wrist and then moving her hand over Myka’s hand, lacing their fingers together.  Holding on tight._

_“Myka,” Helena says softly, thoughtfully, small smile pulling into her lips and then falling immediately away as her thoughts progress.  “I need to be honest with you about something,” Helena drops her eyes to their hands and Myka arches a brow, waits quietly for her to continue, for Helena’s confession, “I need you to understand that I’ve been working through a lot of feelings.  About how much our friendship has grown, about how much it means to me. And how I feel about you? It’s… I mean to say that I have… I--”_

_“Never fear, m’lady! Prince Lattimer is here to rescue you, fair damsel in distress,” Pete’s announcement comes complete with one hand against his hip, the other thrusting an invisible sword into the air. Both Myka and Helena startle from the quiet bubble they’d managed to find themselves locked in. “By order of the most demanding, Queen King,” Pete pauses and thinks and laughs and repeats, “Queen King. I crack me up.”_

_When he is done, when he finally turns his attention to them, it is to first find Myka’s glare upon him and Helena’s not long after.  That smile disappears from his face far quicker than it had arrived._

_“Did I… interrupt… something?”_

_“Yes,” Myka says waving him off and then sounding a little more frustrated than she’d expected, telling him through gritted teeth, “go somewhere for five minutes.”_

_“Major wing-man fail,” Pete says, wincing in sympathy, turning to go._

_“No, it’s fine,” Helena sighs and Pete pauses, turning back to them.  Helena squeezes her grip on Myka’s hand before letting go, “It’s okay.”_

_“But you were--”_

_“Bering!” Giselle is calling from the field, waving Myka over, “Lattimer’s got her.  Let’s get this game started.”_

_Myka sighs now, too. Utterly defeated._

_“Sorry, Mykes.”_

_“Go. We’ll talk later,” Helena tells her softly, nodding.  She lifts her hand to Myka’s hair and pushes a stray curl, freshly escaped from her ponytail, behind her ear.  “I’m not going anywhere.”_

_But that talk never comes._

_Myka goes and Pete stays but then Helena disappears and there is a scuffle, Myka is frantic, even if it doesn’t show.  Her heart is racing a thousand miles a minute.  The softball game is cancelled in its final inning amidst word of an attack. Leo is practically dragged to the office, leaving a trail of blood and the echoes of bone-chilling laughter behind him. Helena is a mess of dirt and tears and mostly unvoiced confessions beside her._

_“I like when you call me Helena,” that older girl tells her softly, crying and Myka, for the most part, only calls her Helena after that._

_It is a long day to follow.  It is an even longer night._

***

“I can help you,” Sam says and Myka snaps out of her reverie, suddenly aware of where she is, blinking away warm tears.

“What?” Myka asks looking at Sam again. Sam who is completely serious now. Who has abandoned, hopefully, his attempts at making jokes.  At cheering Myka up.

“With the bookstore,” Sam says, “during the evenings. That’s when Tracy worked, right? I can do that between my classes.”

“You don’t have to--”

“It’s cool, Bering,” Sam shrugs.

“I can’t pay you.”

“You don’t have to.”

Myka arches a skeptical brow at him.

“Look Myka, it’s been a year almost, right? That I’ve been bugging the hell out of you?”

“Don’t keep track of it, as if there will be an annual celebration.”

Sam laughs at that for just a moment before continuing to say, “I’m going to tell you something that you probably didn’t know about me,” and he pauses a short while, pretending to think very thoughtfully on what he is about to say.  “I did… start coming into the bookstore… because I really liked you. Because I think… you’re gorgeous and hilarious and… nice.  You are still all of the things I remember you being.”

“Wow, Sam.  I am so shocked,” Myka hopes her sarcasm is obvious enough to drown in, “Can you see the absolute shock on my face?  It’s so shocking and simultaneously flattering that I want to rip all of my clothes off right here, right _now_.”

Right here, right now.  It triggers another memory of Helena in Myka’s mind. One from not quite as long ago. One that is not quite as innocent. One she manages not to get lost in, right here or right now.

“Okay, number one… please don’t.  While I still think you’re gorgeous, I like to think our friendship has kind of evolved beyond… _that_ ,” Sam says with an arched brow, “and number two, I take back everything that I just said about you being fun and nice.  My point is that it’s been a year and I think I owe you an apology because I’ve… learned a lot more about you and had a lot more fun hanging out with you _this_ way than any way that I could have imagined. So--”

“I don’t even want to know,” Myka says exaggerating her frown and waving him off, “all the ways in which you have imagined hanging out with me.”

“I’m baring my soul to you right now,” Sam says with his brow still arched, with the point of his story still apparently unreached, “and I’m not saying you have to care or even listen… I just want you to know that I appreciate your friendship and I really respect what you and Helena have.”

“Had,” Myka corrects, “but thanks.”

“ _Have_ ,” Sam restates, “and, you know, it’s whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Myka laughs softly and when that laugh tapers off, she sighs and breathes out, “whatever.”

In another long moment of quiet, Myka tucks the paperback under her arm and lowers herself from that ladder, leans somewhat into it once her feet finally touch the ground.  She turns to Sam and he is staring at her expectantly, patiently.

She rolls her eyes.  She asks him, “So when can you start?”

“I think I started an hour ago,” Sam says reaching for and tugging that book from under Myka’s arm, eying its title. When he sees who it is, what the book is about, he looks back to Myka with that same questioning brow arched in her direction, “I don’t think your plan, you know the one where you avoid thinking and talking about the girl you’ve been in love with your entire life, is working very well.”

Myka is overwhelmed by the sudden urge to poke Sam in his eye. She thanks her mother for blessing her with more patience than anything her father has ever managed in the nineteen, almost twenty years that she has known him.  Instead of poking Sam, she backhands him in his arm.

It is gentle.  It is not nearly as hard as she hits Pete.  It induces not nearly the same reaction in Sam as it does in Pete.  Because all Sam does is smirk.  With his stupidly arched brow and his even stupider blue eyes and that idiotic look on his face, he smirks and then he smiles and then he is laughing and shaking his head.

“So,” he says, no more phased by that slap than this, “you hungry?”

Myka sighs and throws her head back far too dramatically, Helena-levels of theatrically, then stands straight to look at Sam once again.  Absolutely defeated.

“I’m starving.”

They are heading out of the store, Myka is pulling out her keys to lock up.  Sam tells her, “You want to hear something funny?” to which Myka says, “No,” at first but then, “sorry, I’m sorry.  Yes. Tell me,” and she locks the door.

“I met this girl a week ago,” Sam starts, “and instead of thinking ‘Wow, she’s really hot.  I wish I had the guts to ask her out’, I thought ‘Wow, she’s really hot. If Myka were here, she would definitely think this girl is hot, too.’”

“And probably ask her out,” Myka adds.

“And probably ask her out,” Sam laughs, nodding agreeably.

Myka laughs as they start walking toward the diner. _This_ , she thinks, is actually funny.  Still, she slaps Sam playfully again, provoking actual protests. 

He tells her, “I’m not even kidding. I really thought that.”

“Did you at least get her number?” Myka asks pushing that boy to an arms length away from her as they continue walking down the sidewalk.

“Like I said, I wish I’d had the guts,” Sam shrugs, “but you know me.”

 

“You are the worst wingman ever.”


	24. The Merry Very Overdue Christmas Chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posting this now before I throw it all out of my window. I will full-edit later so don't mind the typos and misspellings. Half of this chapter is flashbacks because it was originally intended as "filler" but... that was four months and 20,000 words ago.

_“London is so much warmer with you here.”_

Myka hears Helena’s voice and it is nothing but an echo in her memories as she pushes herself, her body, and every ounce of her soul to run and climb, one step after another step after another.

Up then down. Back up and then down again. There are eight sets of stairs on the visitor’s side of her high school stadium. Another eight on the home team’s side. Going up is torturous, coming back down is slightly less so but she keeps her pace and she pushes her way through. The same way Giselle had always pushed her through when she was a scant thirteen years old.

Four times around, despite her aching legs. Visiting team’s side then home team’s side and back again, despite the freezing cold. It had taken her body the past two weeks to wake up to the demands Myka had thrust upon it but it needed to happen. She needed something else to do. Anything else at all to keep her mind off of school, off of keeping the bookstore going, off of her issues with Tracy, but mostly just off of Helena.

Anything at all to help her focus and to simultaneously distract her.

She reaches the top of another set of stairs and it is only then that she slows and lingers to peer through chain link fencing, to gaze out across the town from this higher vantage point.

The view from up here is spectacular. Her town, however small, is a valley of Christmas lights in white, green, red, and gold, wedged between snowy hills and forests with the lake, _their_ lake, in the far distance.

“It could be London,” she says softly under her breath to no one at all because no one is around to hear. It could be London, albeit much smaller than that. Much _much_ smaller. But it reminds her of London, of looking out across London, the twinkling and colorful lights, the smell of wood burning in fire places, the sharp sting of ice cold breezes against her face. It reminds her, too, of spending Christmas with Helena.

Determined, she shakes away the thoughts. Of Christmases, of Helena. Of warming Helena in her arms. Myka turns and jogs the handful of yards to the next set of stairs and descends that final staircase before setting a course for home.

***

_“Bering, I dare you to walk instead of running these stadium steps and see if I don’t add another set to the four you already have to do.”_

_She’d groan, Myka would, but Giselle would hear it. Giselle would hear it because Giselle hears everything, and then Myka would be doing ten sets on the stadium steps instead of four. Up, down, up and then down again. Home side to visitor’s side then back around again. The ups, torturous. The downs, sightly less so._

_Myka is thirteen years old and it is a Saturday night. School has ended, giving way to Winter break. Most kids, Myka’s friends to be very precise, are out having fun, celebrating or, at the very least, at home and warm, getting ready for bed._

_Most kids, Myka thinks as she runs through the burn in her legs, in her chest, and her lungs, don’t know Giselle King._

_Myka does not slow. She does not walk. Her pace is steady, despite the pain, despite the exhaustion and the cold, too cold but not quite cold enough to snow. Myka is praying for snow. For hale. For a meteor shower, an asteroid. Anything. Absolutely anything at all to end this madness._

_She still has one more set to go._

_“Giselle Imani King!”_

_Then, a miracle._

_Myka is already jogging her way back around to the visitor’s side to start her last set, when Helena appears just before her at the entrance-end of the stadium._

_“Hel.”_

_“Stop,” she tells Myka as Myka approaches her._

_And breathless, in response, “But… Giselle said…if I slow down…”_

_Helena grabs Myka’s wrist as she jogs by and pulls Myka back to her, gives her an almost menacing look and says with a voice to perfectly accompany that look, “I said stop.”_

_Myka gives in to that pull without further protest. Now all she wants to do is fall to the ground, curl up into a ball and die a peaceful death. Instead, she walks away. She walks just slightly away from Helena, to catch her breath, to keep her body moving, to calm her heart. Then she walks back to Helena._

_“What are you doing?” Giselle asks as she approaches them. But the look that is on Helena’s face, that Myka can see from where she continues pacing, is enough to make even Giselle rethink her approach. “She had one set left.”_

_“Do you know how cold it is out here?” Helena asks, reaching back for Myka when Myka approaches them again, before Myka can walk those few steps away. Helena pulls off the beanie she wears and tugs Myka closer, puts that beanie over Myka’s head and low enough to cover her ears. “And you have her out here in shorts and a T-shirt? For hours?”_

_“I told her to cover up,” Giselle says with a shake of her head, “she said she was fine. Running warmed her up.”_

_“I’m taking her home before she catches a cold,” and Helena is reaching for Myka’s wrist again, tugging her away from Giselle and toward the parking lot._

_“I don’t need her slacking off over winter break,” Giselle argues as they go, not bothering to follow, “she needs to stay active. She needs to work out. If I can do it…”_

_Helena turns back to Giselle, clearly upset and says, “Myka is not you, Gigi. She’s thirteen, it’s past nine o’clock. It’s freezing cold out here. I’m taking her home.”_

_“She’s fine, Hel.”_

_Myka really does feel fine. Now that she’s walked off the breathlessness. Now that her heart has slowed its rhythm to something resembling a normal heartbeat. She feels fine._

_She wouldn’t dare say so to Helena._

_Helena turns to her suddenly, pulling off her coat and putting it over Myka’s shoulders. She tells Myka, “Put it on,” and when Myka does, Helena reaches into the pocket of that coat and pulls out her car keys, takes Myka’s hand and sets those keys into her palm. “I’m parked just up front, get in the car, start it, turn up the heat. Okay?”_

_“Okay.”_

_“Go,” Helena adds softly, turning Myka away and giving her a gentle push._

_“I’m going,” Myka smiles as she goes._

_Myka gets into that car, turns it on, turns up the heat. She doesn’t know how awful she feels until she is sat there in the warmth, in Helena’s jacket with Helena’s beanie on her head and over her ears, pushing thick curls against her neck, no longer exposed to cold. Still, her teeth chatter and she can feel the cold in her legs now._

_She is exhausted and falling asleep by the time Helena returns to her car, falls into her seat, slams the door hard enough to startle Myka awake._

_Helena stills then. She sighs and she sits back and she stares straight ahead and she is like this for long moments of silence before she sniffles and wipes at her face. But she isn’t crying, as far as Myka can tell._

_“You’re getting sick,” Myka says softly._

_“It’s just a cold,” Helena whispers, turning to Myka and forcing a smile into place. Myka thinks that smile is beautiful and even if it isn’t real, even if Myka still feels like she is practically on her death bed, it makes her smile, too._

_“I’m sorry,” Myka adds quietly, turning away from Helena, pulling that beanie off of her head and handing it back to the other girl, “for agreeing to run so late. I just… figured it was better than being at home.”_

_Helena’s smile dissolves faster than it had materialized. She seems to slump in her seat and turns away from Myka, covers her face in the process, before pushing the heels of her palms against her eyes. As if to rub away some exhaustion._

_“Don't apologize,” is all Helena offers in response to that before reaching into her back seat and pulling a thermos out and into her lap. “Here,” she says twisting off the cap and pouring warm liquid into it. She hands the cap to Myka who takes it without question or protest and sips from that lid without thought._

_Hot chicken broth. It warms Myka’s entire being. Helena, when she presses the back of a freezing cold hand to Myka’s forehead, also warms her entire being._

_There’s a light tap on Helena’s window and Giselle is there when they turn. She looks guilty as Helena lowers the window and asks her, in her harsh tone,“What?”_

_“I’m sorry,” Giselle says softly, almost a whisper as she leans against the driver’s side door. Helena rolls her eyes and sighs. Giselle apologizes again and reaches into the car. She tugs at Helena’s hair, where it falls over her shoulder and again, “Hel, I’m sorry. You’re right, it’s late and I pushed too hard,” then looking at Myka, “I’m sorry, kid.”_

_Myka shrugs and offers a sympathetic smile. She looks back to Helena who is looking at her with mild annoyance then turns back to Giselle and says, “We’ll talk about it later.”_

_“Answer your phone later,” Giselle says in response. Helena nods curtly and turns away from Giselle. She faces forward and reaches for the gear, puts the car into drive and says to Giselle, without ever turning back to her, “We’re going now.”_

_Giselle smiles, she rolls her eyes, she shakes her head, and Myka is trying very hard not to smile too, because the last thing she needs is the Helena treatment. The treatment that Helena is now giving Giselle. But Giselle just smiles, she must be used to it by now. She has probably received this treatment so many times in the past that it is nothing more than a Saturday evening for her._

_Giselle smiles and she leans further into the window and kisses Helena’s cheek. She tells Helena, “Don’t be mad,” and Helena tells Giselle, “Don’t piss me off.” Giselle simply rolls her eyes again and tells Myka, “Merry Christmas, shorty.”_

_“Merry Christmas, Giselle.”_

_When Giselle steps back, Helena takes off without another glance in her direction but when they are out of the parking lot and down the street, Helena appears less frustrated. She says softly, “I think I’m going to be in the market for another girlfriend soon.”_

_At first, Myka is quiet. She is hesitant and waiting. She is trying to determine the weight of this conversation, this statement that Helena has just made. Because she cannot tell if Helena is mad or if Helena is just being Helena._

_But then Helena glances at her and smiles. Helena asks, and Myka knows that when she asks it, it is a tease, “Are you eighteen yet?”_

_Myka rolls her eyes and finally lets loose her smile. It is a grin by now. She is grinning and warm and no doubt turning red when she laughs softly and says “no” just as Helena’s hand finds its way around her wrist and squeezes tightly._

_“Good,” Helena sighs, smile softening, eyes still on the road ahead of them, “stay my little Einstein, just a while longer.”_

***

When Myka hits downtown, she slows to a walk to settle her heart, relax her breathing, distract her thoughts. She slows to a walk and there are still a couple blocks to go before she reaches her street. She passes the library, the courthouse, city hall. She passes the police department, a local bank, a church she’s never stepped foot inside.

By the time she reaches her turn, the corner with Leena’s family’s diner, the cold has settled deep into her bones, making her now-aching muscles even more difficult to move. But it’s a relief, this struggle and this pain. They are a welcome relief compared to the previous struggle, the former pain.

Helena and Liam, her and Leena, she still thinks about it. Everything that happened this year. Everything that didn’t happen this year…

She still tries very hard _not_ to think about it but it hasn’t even been a month since they broke up. Since she sent Helena on her way. Since Helena had, once again, left the country indefinitely.

The diner door swings open just as Myka is rounding the corner and no one else could possibly come out of that door at this very moment than Leena. Leena who is not paying attention as she walks. Leena who’s grandmother is calling her name and reaching a hand out to stop her but doesn’t quite catch her in time before she bumps into Myka.

Instinctively, Myka wraps her arms around the smaller girl to both catch her balance and to prevent Leena from falling. Instinctively, Myka doesn’t immediately let go when Leena turns around, apologetic and worried in her arms, only for green eyes to meet green eyes, to widen with surprise, to linger.

“I’m so sorry, Myka. I wasn’t even looking…”

“Leena, you must at least _try_ to be more careful,” her grandmother, now-principal Frederic, says with a slight roll of her eyes.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Frederic… Leena,” Myka says softly, eyes still caught in Leena’s gaze. She tries a smile, through the cold and the stiffness, through all of her frozen muscles. She smiles and Leena puffs out a soft laugh before slowly pulling herself away from Myka’s grasp. Myka lets go, lets her arms fall to her side and takes a step back. “I wasn’t really paying much attention either so...”

“Myka, what are you wearing? It’s freezing cold out here. Like, _about to snow_ freezing cold,” Leena is chastising, eyeing the thin fabric of her exercise pants, the sleeveless top she wears.

“Better yet, what are you _not_ wearing,” her grandmother chimes in from just behind her.

“I was just… on my way home from a run,” Myka smirks at the familiarity of Leena’s worry. “It actually feels pretty nice when you’re constantly moving.” And then a tease because Myka knows exactly how Leena feels about recreational running, “You should join me some time.”

“ _Please_ ,” Leena laughs with a roll of her eyes, “if you ever see me running, Myka, you’d better run too,” Principal Frederic is already laughing, “because I am probably being chased by an army of undead.”

“Amen,” Irene Frederic is saying under her breath, eyes closed, slightly bowing her head and raising a palm to the sky.

Myka cannot help the laugh that bubbles up, that causes Leena to laugh, too.

It breaks her heart, Leena’s laugh. How close she used to be to that laugh. How often she used to make her laugh, how much they used to make each other laugh. It breaks her heart but it warms her heart, too, that she can still make that girl laugh and smile like that. That they can still run into each other and be like this.

It is as close to what they used to have, to the way things used to be, as Myka is certain they will ever get.

“Well, don’t let us keep you from your run,” Mrs. Frederic says and gives her a warm smile. A genuine and wide smile.

Myka has learned, since high school, that she is a very warm person. That she must reserve those stoic expressions for her students because the second you are no longer her student, she transforms. You see how much she genuinely cares for her students. You see the mother of a kind diner owner. You see the grandmother of one of the sweetest girls in town and you know exactly how they both, Leena and her father, grew into the lovely people they are today.

“We have some last-minute grocery shopping to do,” Leena pauses and turns back to glance at her grandmother. Mrs. Frederic sighs and rolls her eyes, waving a dismissive hand at her.

“I will meet you at the car,” she smirks and heads back around that corner, toward the parking lot behind the diner. She calls out to Myka over her shoulder as she goes, “Have a Merry Christmas, Miss Bering!”

“Thank you and you as well, Mrs. Frederic!”

Leena’s heavy sigh brings Myka’s attention back to her and when their eyes meet, Leena tilts her head, shakes it, smiles up at Myka.

“You _have_ to be freezing.”

“I am, actually,” Myka smiles, laughing through the cold and allowing her teeth to chatter.

“I just wanted to ask… about Tracy.”

Myka stands straight and turns slightly away from Leena with a shake of her head, then lowers her head to look at the ground. Leena sighs again, in to that lingering silence, and Myka glances sheepishly at her from the corner of her eye and turns back to Leena once more.

“I’ve tried,” Myka nods. “ _Mom_ has tried, _Jane_ has tried. She’s stubborn--”

“I know,” Leena nods, smiling. “I know too well how stubborn your sister can be.” Myka shares her soft laugh, breathing a warm cloud of steam into the air as the temperature drops even more than it had been when she started her journey home. “And you, Myka? How are you doing?”

Myka shrugs and turns away from Leena again, “I’m all right. Between school and the bookstore,” Myka nods and it is not at all reassuring, she’s sure of that, but it is the best she can do for now. “I’m good.”

Leena’s smile is sympathetic and understanding, the slight nod she gives to Myka after that is relenting. “Good,” she says this softly and Myka doesn’t expect it, not really, when Leena looks around the corner and behind her, back into the diner, before turning to Myka, pushing herself up on the tips of her toes, and into a small kiss against Myka’s lips. Myka doesn’t really expect it but she embraces it, steadying Leena with her hands. At first on Leena’s arms then moving to cup Leena’s cheeks.

Leena squeals into that kiss at that touch and breaks it off with laughter. She cups her cheeks, now free of Myka’s grasp, between her own gloved hands. “Myka, your hands are freezing. Go home!” Myka laughs, too, but leans in to press one last freezing cold kiss against Leena’s cheek.

“Merry Christmas, Leena,” Myka smirks and Leena pushes at her arm, pushes her in the direction she intends to go.

“ _Go_ ,” Leena smiles and Myka takes off, waving behind her as she barely manages to jog the last block home with those stiff muscles and frozen bones.

The only thing warming her now is the ghost of Leena’s lips against hers. She misses it, she truly does. She does not long for it, she doesn’t ache for it, not like she does for Helena. Not like she always will for Helena. But she misses those lips, that smile, the laughter. She misses the care that Leena used to take with her… how simultaneously care-free they were together.

She misses Leena a lot.

***

The apartment is dark and empty and warm. It feels good to be out of the cold. It feels better to stand still for five seconds, for thirty seconds or more, and just breathe.

Baked apple and cinnamon.

That’s the smell that lingers in the apartment, that’s the smell that overwhelms her. And Myka finds the source, a baked apple empanada with cinnamon sprinkled over the top, sat upon a napkin and next to a note in Kelly’s handwriting.

_At Jane’s. You better fucking eat this. Love, Kelly._

Myka smiles and lifts the empanada from that napkin to take in more of that delicious scent. But beneath where that pastry sat on that napkin, more of Kelly’s handwriting.

_P.S. Helena called. Again._

“ _Kelly_ ,” Myka groans, setting the baked good back down on the napkin, over that note, and brushing sugar and cinnamon from her hands.

She is no longer smiling.

She has lost what little appetite she had.

***

Myka is definitely not thinking about the two missed calls and accompanying voice messages that are currently taking up space on her phone’s voice mail.

She is in her room, pulling off a shirt that is both sweaty and cold. Kicking off her shoes and slipping off socks to free her pained feet. She is relieving herself of her shorts, squeezing her way out of a bra, tugging a hair tie free of her mess of a curly ponytail.

All of these things are now a pile on the floor and despite how hard she tries not to think about it, all she can think is what Helena would have to say.

“Why bother with owning a laundry basket in the first place?” Myka speaks out loud and when she does, it is with Helena’s accent. “Why have a walk-in closet? Why buy clothes, just to throw them all over the floor, Myka?”

Myka huffs out a frustrated groan and rolls her eyes at these memories, at the sound of Helena’s voice floating through her mind. _Scolding_ her.

She wants to call it nagging, she wants to be annoyed by it. But it is anything but nagging, it is far from annoying. When she thinks of Helena and when she thinks of Helena cleaning up after her, taking care of her, doing much of the same thing Helena has always done for her… for her entire life? And on a much more intimate level?

 _Love_.

Love is the only word that comes to mind. Helena loves her. Helena _loved_ her, anyway. She isn’t so sure what Helena thinks of her now.

Myka is stepping out of her underwear and throwing them over her shoulder, throwing them into that pile on the floor with the rest of her dirty clothes, as she heads into the bathroom to get the shower water going. And she is ready to step into that shower, ready to wash away all of these thoughts and memories of Helena’s presence in her life, when the guilt sets in.

This guilt sets in and it is ridiculous, pointless, absolutely useless because what does Myka even have to feel guilty about? Helena is gone. Myka is alone. She is home alone and in her apartment, in her bedroom. And still…

She hears Helena’s voice one more time. It says, “The less time I spend cleaning up after you… the more time I spend getting clean _with_ you.” It is a ghost of a whisper in the back of her mind but it is Helena’s whisper. The type of whisper that is impossible to ignore. It is the type of whisper that is not easily forgotten and with that whisper comes more memories. More memories that Myka doesn’t want to think about. More memories that Myka, with her non-forgetting burden, does not want to remember.

Not right now, anyway.

Myka sighs. Throws her head back. Groans. She back tracks into her bedroom, straight to that pile of clothes to pick it up. She picks up a pile of yesterday’s clothes, too.

“The hamper is right there,” Myka says out loud, in the English accent that she’s certain she has perfected and taking those final two steps to throw all of those clothes into the hamper where they belong.

Her cellular phone, sat on the dresser just beside that hamper, takes this exact moment to complete it’s charge. The small screen upon it lights up and a new notification appears.

Myka opens the top drawer of her dresser and drops her phone into it with another sigh, another groan of frustration.

As she returns to the bathroom to step into a hot shower, she is definitely not thinking about those three missed calls and accompanying messages that are currently taking up space on her voice mail.

***

Myka is stuffing overnight clothes and an outfit for the next day into a small duffle bag. She steps into Tracy’s room… Tracy’s _old_ room… to glance at herself in the full length mirror, at the outfit she wears, at her hair parted down the middle and braided into two pig tails that fall over her shoulders. She tugs at one and reminds herself that she needs a haircut. Maybe before New Year… maybe after. She imagines, for a second, how short she should cut it. She imagines, too, Helena’s hand in her curls with fingers scraping gently against her scalp before tugging and smiling at the length of her hair.

 _“I love these curls,”_ Myka hears Helena saying and this time it isn’t Myka just speaking out loud. This time, again, it is the ghost of Helena’s voice, whispering in her ear. It is the memory of Helena pressing her lips softly against Myka’s shortly after that. And it is the sound of Helena’s laughter when Myka tells her, at the end of that kiss, “I bet you would love Pete if he had these curls. You would love anyone else at all if I cut these curls away.”

“Don’t you dare,” Helena had told her, softly laughing her way into another kiss. And there was just something about that authoritative tone… about Helena telling her what to do… that made Myka want to love that girl forever.

***

The faint sound of her phone ringing pulls Myka out of her thoughts and leads her back into her bedroom, to her dresser, to open that top drawer. For only a second, Myka hesitates to look, but it isn’t Helena calling and she doesn’t realize how frightening that idea truly is until she is sighing in relief at the sight of Sam’s name.

She flips the phone open and says, “You better not be backing out, Martino,” because they had long-ago abandoned formalities and greetings and anything at all that could, even remotely, be mistaken for flirting.

“And deny my step-dad the glory of knowing that his eight-cheese macaroni bake is being consumed by actual people, other than me and Kurt and Todd? Bering,” Sam laughs, “even if I wanted to, he wouldn’t allow it.”

“Eight cheeses?” Myka throws her duffle bag over her shoulder and turns out lights as she moves toward the front of the apartment to collect her keys.

“I doubt he’ll even let us back in the house until this casserole dish is empty. I hope your mom and Jane have plenty of Tupperware.”

“Tupperware is for rich people, we’re talking about two elementary school teachers with a combined five and a half kids. You’ll be lucky if they don’t stuff it into Ziplock bags.” Myka is cutting off the kitchen light and opening the apartment door, closing it behind her as she goes. “Your mom really has turned that man into the perfect house wife.”

“That’s sexist, Bering,” Sam responds.

She rolls her eyes, “What do you want? I’m leaving the house right now.”

“If Claudia is the half, who is the fifth kid?”

“Kelly is the half,” Myka informs, “and again, what do you--”

“Smart guy Kurt over here threw away the paper that had Jane’s address on it. Remind me--”

“Paper my ass. He wrote the fucking address down on a pizza box,” Kurt protests softly in the background. “Of course I threw it away. We haven’t had pizza in two weeks. It was trash.” It makes Myka smile. For being as quiet as he is around her, it makes Myka smile whenever Kurt actually has something to say. Especially when that something is a smart ass response to Sam’s occasional teasing.

“Dude, a pizza box?” Myka questions taking the stairs down to the bookstore.

“It was the closest thing I had to write on,” he argues his defense.

“Just meet me in the lot behind the bookstore and you can follow me over…”

“Copy that.”

“…I’m heading out now, I just need to load some gifts into the car--” Myka loses her footing and slips along the floor but catches her balance before she falls, “Shit.”

“You okay?”

“Jesus Christ. Yes, I’m fine,” she says, reaching for the decorative yellow envelope on the floor that nearly ended her life. “Who delivers mail on Christmas Eve?”

“Um, the United States Postal Service?” Sam offers.

“Goodbye, Sam!” Myka flips her phone closed, shoves it into her back pocket and turns that envelope over in her other hand. It is addressed to both her and Tracy, and that handwriting…

Even without a Brazilian return address Myka would know, by the handwriting alone, that this is a Christmas card from her very own H.G. Wells.

***

Myka is seated in the driver’s seat of her mother’s car as it idles in the cold, in the dark, in the dimly lit parking lot just behind their store. She turns up the heat and checks her rear view mirror for any sign of Sam but it’s only been seven minutes since their phone conversation ended and she’s sure, knowing him better than she’d ever intended to, that he’d not even been near his car when he called.

She glances to the empty passenger seat, to the yellow envelope that she had discarded there, and she stares at it for a several seconds in silence.

She waits. And waits. She is waiting as if she expects that envelope to grow arms and legs and a mouth and a conscience that is confident enough to serenade her, to argue a case for its existence. To compel her, in some way, to open the thing up. To see what’s inside. To do anything at all to jumpstart actual communication between her and that girl who Myka has never before felt this estranged from.

There had, of course, been those many months they didn’t talk. But Myka was just fifteen and Helena twenty. What they’d had then, what they were then missing, was nowhere close to what they had now. Nowhere close to what they’d seen and done and been through ever since. Because at fifteen, what Myka had missed most about Helena was only as much as Helena had given her. Her love, her care. Compassion halted by reservations. But at nineteen, what Myka misses most about Helena now, is so much more than that.

Her touch, their passion. The sights and sounds of Helena letting go.

The envelope doesn’t grow arms or legs. It doesn’t try to seduce Myka into wanting it any more than the car steering while might. It does, however, compel her, though not audibly, nor by song and dance, to open it.

 _How bad could I possibly be_ , it convinces telepathically, _if I am also addressed to Tracy?_

She opens it, resigned to her fate and this love that she knows, that she has slowly began to realize over the last four weeks (longer than that even), will never go away. That she’s not entirely sure she ever wants to be rid of.

Myka opens the envelope with great care so as to preserve the return address, just in case she finds that information useful in her future (thought she doubts it, at least she tells herself that she doubts it, just to make herself feel better about not doubting it at all). In that envelope is a folded piece of card stock with a child’s drawing on the front. It is colorful and bright, an image of the world covered in snow, an image of the sun wearing a red and white Santa hat. On one side of that world, two stick figures, on the other side of that world, there are three more.

In a child’s handwriting, squished into one corner, reads “FELIZ NATAL MYKA TRACY”, though there is a crossed-out “A” between the M and the Y in Myka’s name, and the “A” in Tracy’s name had been cleverly converted from an “E”.

It is not at all what she expected. It makes her smile. It also makes her almost forget who sent her that card in the first place.

When she opens it up, a photo falls out of it and into her lap. Inside the card, more of a child’s handwriting reads, “That means Merry Christmas,” and it is punctuated by a large smiley face. It is signed _Analisa_ and in parenthesis just below that, she dutifully notes that she is “6 años”.

Helena, Myka thinks, knows her way too well. She can practically feel her heart melting, even as she rolls her eyes.

Myka picks up the photo and sighs. It is a picture of Helena, smiling wide and kneeling between two young girls with tan skin and long brown curls. One looks to be Claudia’s age, the other, Myka guesses, is a very confident six years old. Helena is a ghost of too-pale English glory between them. Myka puffs out an amused laugh but, really, she wants to cry at just how well she has avoided seeing this face, perfect and beautiful and so very familiar, for the past four weeks.

On the back of the photo, Helena’s handwriting:

_First summertime Christmas with my host family’s daughters, Nat (9) and Lis (6). They remind me so much of you two, when you were little. Somehow always fighting and always the best of friends._

_Family, when it actually works, is worth holding on to. Please, don’t stay mad at each other._

_Merry Christmas with love,_

_Helena G. Wells_

Myka can’t stop thinking about how Helena knows her, and Tracy, far too well. How that fact should not still surprise her after almost thirteen years.

***

Myka could and does consider, just for one second, murdering Sam when he pulls his car up beside hers, without her noticing, and honks the horn. She jumps mostly out of her skin, her heart, for the second time tonight, gets a workout. But he’s been growing on her over the past year. He has grown on her, especially, over these last couple of weeks since he started working in the book store. So she decides, reluctantly, to keep him around for a while.

With Kelly always working and with Pete gone and Tracy staying away and Helena out of her life, even if she isn’t truly out of her life, Sam is a welcome distraction. He has a tendency to be funny, too.

It is becoming his only saving grace.

“Why?” Myka asks, as she is rolling down her window, and also, “Hello, Kurt,” as he leans forward to greet her.

“Hey, Myka.”

From the back seat of that car, “Hi Myka!”

“Hey, Todd!” then back to Sam, “ _Why_ are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“You were staring out at nothing with that look on your face,” Sam smirks.

“What _look_?”

“That look you get when you say you’re not thinking about anything but everyone knows you’re actually thinking about your hot British ex-girlfriend.”

Sam’s smile grows and it is oddly reminiscent of Pete. Sam, when he isn’t being awkward around her, reminds her so much of Pete. Makes her miss her best friend even more than she sometimes misses Helena. Also makes her want to slap that smile right off of Sam’s face.

She glares at him, silently, for several long seconds and then says, “Vine Street and Meadow Lane, try not to get lost,” and without another word, she rolls up that car window to drown out the sound of Sam’s amused laughter.

***

“Boys!” Jane is greeting Sam, Kurt, and Todd with open arms. Myka’s mother is not very far behind. Jeannie frees Kurt of that casserole and hands it to Myka without a word. The mothers engulf them, kiss their cheeks, pat their backs, take their coats, ruffle Todd’s hair. And to little Todd, Jane says, “Claudia’s in the game room if you’d like to join her.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Lattimer!” he says running off in that direction.

“Oh boys, I’m so glad you could join us for dinner this year,” Myka’s mother is still clinging on to Sam’s arm, leading him into the kitchen. Myka is rolling her eyes, trying to shake her own coat off of her, as it is half-off and half-on. Somehow, she is still stuck carrying an eight-cheese casserole in her other arm. “What sort of dish did you boys bring?”

“My step-dad’s famous eight-cheese casserole,” Sam says and he flashes a teasing smile, that Myka thinks is trying really hard to be charming, over his shoulder and in her direction. “I’m sure it won’t compare to the feast you two have created, though.”

“Well, I’ll let you be the judge of that,” Myka’s mother says, clearly flattered by Sam’s attempts to win her over.

“Easy target,” Myka says under her breath, with a gentle shake of her head.

“Myka,” Jane is calling as she walks past her, leading Kurt into the kitchen, “are you just going to stand around the living room with the casserole dish all night? Bring it into the kitchen.”

“Great to see you, too, Mama Jane,” Myka scoffs as her jacket falls to the floor, finally free of her arm.

Jane stops and turns and offers Myka one long sympathetic look before returning to her side and pressing a kiss to her temple. “You’re still our favorite,” Jane whispers into her ear and pats her back gently.

“Thanks,” Myka sighs out, as Jane takes that casserole dish from her and heads for the kitchen.

“Pick up your coat from the floor, Myka, we aren’t animals,” Jane adds, as she disappears into the kitchen. Leaving Myka almost alone, both annoyed and perplexed in the living room.

“You know for a couple of lesbians,” Myka turns a relieved smile on Kelly as she approaches her from the dining room, “they sure do get hung up on the presence of _boys_.”

“They’re used to being eaten out of house and home,” Myka smirks and Kelly arches a curious brow.

“I _really_ thought that sentence was going to go in a completely different direction,” Kelly says with a bit of concern, “but I am so glad it did not. And it makes sense that it would take three boys to fill the void of food consumption that Pete has left behind.”

“ _Kelly_ ,” Myka exhales a soft laugh and welcomes the quick hug that Kelly gives her. But soon Kelly’s expression is falling into something far too serious for the occasion. So Myka, not even really wanting to know, asks, “What is it?”

“Su esposa. Can we talk?”

“Before we even get into _all of this_ , I just want to know if she’s okay.”

“She’s okay, Myka,” Kelly nods but that expression on her face doesn’t look all that reassuring. That expression mirrors, all too well, Helena’s when she’s not so sure that she is okay.

“Help me get the presents out of the car and then we can talk.”

As they turn to leave, Myka’s mother appears in the archway between the kitchen and the living room. She says, “Don’t go too far girls. Pete should be calling in ten minutes or so.”

“Just going out to the car, Mom,” Myka smiles back, as they head out the door.

***

“You should talk to her.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh, her breath escaping her in a swirl of warm fog into cold night air. The front door has just closed behind them, Kelly is following her out to the car. They are not even in the driveway before Kelly says this thing to her.

“I really do think you should.”

“But not that I have to, right?” Myka wants to clarify. “Not that you’ll move out again if I don’t.” Myka reaches the car and unlocks the driver’s side door, turning a skeptical eye on Kelly as she does. Kelly is quiet. Oddly, so. She twists her lips to the side and tilts her head in apparent thought as she leans against the car, while Myka reaches in to pop the trunk.

“It’s not about me,” Kelly says softly.

“Then what is it about?” Myka asks this while closing the car door. Closing it a little too hard, judging by the look that Kelly shoots her. “Four weeks ago, when we broke up, you said you were proud of me. You said this is exactly what needed to happen.” Myka heads toward the back of the car, reaches for the handle of the truck. “You made me _potatoes_ ,” she adds, just to drive that point home.

“ _Four weeks ago_ ,” Kelly says sharply, coming to Myka’s side as she opens the trunk, “you told Helena, _as_ you were breaking up with her, that you still loved her, that she would always be your family, and _then_ you blindly handed her some sort of letter… that you wrote when you were ten years old? And you haven’t talked to her since.”

“She hasn’t talked to me,” Myka says under her breath, pulling two gift-wrapped and bow-tied boxes out of the trunk of her car and handing them off to Kelly, “the top one is for you and Pete.”

“She’s _tried_ ,” Kelly sighs, adjusting those boxes underneath one arm, “and thank you.” Myka shakes that thanks off and pulls more gifts out of the trunk, places them under Kelly’s other arm. “Just call her.”

Myka heaves out a heavy sigh, pulling out two larger paper bags with more gifts inside and shutting the trunk. She throws her head back and groans softly into cold air, more of her breath, cold and smokey, disappearing into the night.

“Tell me this isn’t emergent. Tell me this isn’t her and a bottle of pills on the bathroom counter all over again and that I don’t have to fly to Brazil to drag her back here. That’s _all_ I need to know because none of this is worth it if she’s not okay… if she can’t find a way to cope.” Myka stands straight again but turns her gaze away from Kelly. She is looking somewhere down the street, at darkness and nowhere and nothing at all. When Kelly doesn’t respond, when so many moments have passed and the only sound that Kelly makes is the gentle clearing of her own throat, Myka looks back at her and sighs. “I would do it. I would go get her. Do you understand what I’m saying Kelly? Breaking up with her, putting space between us? It isn’t worth her losing her grip…”

“I know,” Kelly says softly, nodding, “but that’s part of the problem.” Myka waits quietly for Kelly to elaborate, “ _I_ know that you feel that way. Helena _doesn’t_.”

Myka knows that if aggravated exhalations were an Olympic sport, she’d take home the gold every single time. She is aggravated. She exhales heavily.

“There’s a reason I don’t tell her anymore,” Myka lowers her voice when she says this, she lowers her head, too, to stare at the ground, to sigh another sigh. She looks back up at Kelly, shaking her head. “There’s a reason I don’t talk to her and it’s not because I have a ton of self-control. It’s because I lack it entirely.”

“ _Call_ her,” Kelly nods, “or, at the very least, answer when she calls. Respond to her emails. Send her a card? Even if all you have to say is that you love her but you can’t be her friend, for your own mental health. For hers? _Call_ her.”

“Kelly, Myka!” Claudia is in the open doorway, shouting across the yard, “Pete’s calling!”

“We’re coming,” Myka calls back, leading the way back up that driveway.

“She opened it today.”

“Opened what?”

“That letter you gave her,” Kelly says and when Myka looks back at her, she is rolling her eyes. She is looking at Myka as though she is the stupidest thing on the planet. It’s a look she’s gotten used to seeing over the past four weeks. From everyone and anyone who knows about the break up. They are looking at her like she’s an idiot. Like she is the stupidest genius that ever lived. And why? Because of Helena. Because Helena is _Helena_ and Myka is, well, Myka.

The dumbest person alive with little to no self-control. Who acts on her impulses. Who dumps her girlfriend for not cheating on her.

“I have no idea what it says,” Myka’s laugh is soft and incredulous.

“Then why the hell did you give it to her?”

“It seemed appropriate,” Myka shrugs, “at the time. I guess I figured ten-year-old me had more comforting things to tell her than I did.”

Claudia, when Myka and Kelly make it to the door, says, “Hi Mykes!” and relieves Kelly of some of those presents she has under her arms.  
  
“Hey Claud,” Myka smiles, following her over to the Christmas tree, tucked into a colorfully well-lit corner of the living room, where she sets down those gifts. Myka and Kelly follow suit, placing everything neatly under the tree. Taking care not to disturb, too badly, Myka’s mother’s newly obsessive present stacking aesthetic. “So, what did she say? You talked to her, right?”

“You obviously didn’t know what that letter said when you gave it to her,” and Kelly arches a brow at Myka, fixes, slightly, the arrangement of some presents she’s just set down, “or else you wouldn’t have given it to her.”

“It can’t be that bad,” Myka shakes her head, rolling her eyes, “I was _ten_. It’s just a stupid letter.”

“You know what else is stupid?” Claudia asks and they both turn to find her hovering behind them with her arms crossed, a stern look on her face. “Pete is on a video call and you two Chatty Catherine’s are wasting time stacking presents like you’re marathoning the world’s most boring game of geriatric Tetris.”

Myka and Kelly exchange similarly perplexed and simultaneously amused glances. Myka puffs out a soft laugh but when Claudia refocuses that glare on her, she straightens her face and clears her throat.

“You’re ten. Where do you even learn words like geriatric?” Kelly wonders aloud with a shake of her head.

“Claudia,” Myka begins to scold softly but Kelly sets her hand on Myka’s arm and shakes her head. She stands and walks to Claudia’s side, wraps an arm around her neck and drops a kiss on the top of her head.

“Let’s go talk to Pete,” Kelly says softly and Claudia nods, wrapping an arm around Kelly’s waist and pulling her toward the hallway that leads into the game room. “And Myka?” Kelly turns back, pausing momentarily and catching Myka’s attention before allowing herself to be dragged down the hallway, “Call her or don’t call her, you’re stuck with me either way. Just do me one favor, okay?”

“All right?”

“Stop treating her like you don’t care about her. Because the only person who’s gullible enough to believe that bullshit right now is Helena, and it’s the last thing she needs.”

“ _Language_ , Kelly,” Claudia’s voice echoes from the hallway as Kelly disappears into it.

***

“Guys, do you mind if I talk to Mykes alone for a minute?”

Everyone in the room turns to Myka who, up to this point, hasn’t managed more than a “Hey, Pete” to the image of her best friend being projected onto the large television screen that takes up space in the game room. Myka offers a sheepish smile before ducking her head low as everyone else says their goodbyes, goodnights, I love yous, and Merry Christmases. When they are gone, the room is quiet and Myka is alone with that oversized projection of her oldest best friend staring at her expectantly, quietly, in wait.

“I miss you, Pete,” Myka manages almost below her breath, and she doesn’t think he hears but he sighs and says, “I miss you, too, Mykes,” and “how are you holding up?”

“I’m good,” Myka nods and she sits straight and smiles, forces that smile to grow wide and perfect and reflecting all of the things that are actually going well for her right now. The bookstore, school, and her finances… the fact that she hasn’t heard from her dad in months. Running into Leena outside of the diner and Leena kissing all of their former awkwardness away.

But this is Pete and, like Helena, he knows her too well. More than Helena, Pete knows Myka well. And just when Myka starts to believe that he is the least observant person in the world, about everything else in the world, he reminds her of just how intelligent he truly is.

“How are you _really_ holding up?” Pete laughs. “How’s life _after_ Helena Wells?”

“Pete,” Myka puffs out a soft laugh and shakes her head, “I don’t want to waste all of your time talking about Helena.”

Pete’s eyes go wide in mock surprise and he tilts his head and asks her, “That bad, huh?”

“I think you have more important things to worry about,” Myka smiles.

“Uh yeah, I mean, I guess I do. Do you know that the other day, my buddy Souza over here ate the last ice cream bar and it’s going to be at least another three days before we can restock the freezer?”

“Only you would go to war to fight over ice cream bars,” Myka says with a roll of her eyes, to Pete’s laughter. “I’m glad it hasn’t changed you.”

“Well,” Pete’s smile softens as he tilts his head to the side and looks off into the distance, “I wouldn’t go _that_ far but,” he returns his gaze to Myka and nods, “it hasn’t made me stop caring about even the littlest things. It certainly hasn’t made me stop caring about you. _So_?”

“We haven’t talked,” Myka sighs, leaning back into the chair she sits in. “I’ve resolved myself to moving on without her, Pete. I think… that I need to.”

“Okay,” Pete nods, “so no more Helena?”

“No more Helena.”

Pete continues nodding and leans forward to rest his chin into the palm of his hand. He says, slowly at first, squinting one eye in thought, as if the very action of thinking about this pains him. “And the fact that she’s part of our family, that we’re pretty much the only family she has,” he starts, and Myka realizes it isn’t thinking about this that pains him, it’s Myka’s reaction to those thoughts, “you don’t think that’s going to be a conflict of interest somewhere down the road?”

“How is it a conflict? She’s not even thinking about moving back here.” Myka runs the palms of her hands over her face, rubs her eyes, her forehead. She allows her hands to fall back into her lap. “She’s in Brazil. She _lives_ in London. We rarely saw each other when we were together, I doubt she’ll make the effort now that we aren’t.”

“Except, you aren’t the only person in this family who cares about her, Mykes,” Pete smiles. “You aren’t the only person in this family that she’ll fly across an ocean to see and think about it for a minute. This is Helena we’re talking about. She needs…” Pete is holding out his hands in front of him as if trying to reach out and grasp the word that is currently evading his thoughts. “She _needs_ …”

“Too much,” Myka offers. “Attention? Love? Validation? You name it, she needs it. Too much of it.”

“I was going to say emotional support,” Pete shrugs.

“I have given her too much of that, also,” Myka shakes her head, “only to get heartache and gray hairs in return.”

“You can’t blame that on Helena,” Pete smirks, “your mom is gonna be a silver fox. You may as well embrace your hereditary fate.”

“Don’t call my mother a fox, Pete,” Myka pouts in response.

“Anyway, I didn’t say she needed it from you,” Pete laughs at Myka’s dismay. “My mom? Your mom? Jeannie Jr. and Kelly and even Claudia. They love her, Mykes. They’re her family. _We_ are her family--”

“I’m not saying she can’t come back and visit,” Myka sighs, slouching further into the chair she is seated in, “I know I can’t stop her and I wouldn’t want to. I just don’t think she will. After three years of being in a long-distance relationship with her, I knew better than to get my hopes up about that. I won’t let the opposite of that start bothering me now.”

“Okay,” Pete nods, “so let’s just forget about the fact that the only reason she’s even in London is because her dad is basically holding her education hostage--”

Myka groans loudly, moving a hand over her face and closing her eyes, “ _Here_ we go.”

“He’s doing it _because_ he knows how much she values her education. He _raised_ her to value her education because without that, she’s just the spoiled daughter in a long line of a successful, rich, hoity-toity Englishmen. And Helena has a lot of pride. Of _course_ she went back to London. She’ll probably stay until she’s Dr. Wells. Mykes, if _I_ have heard all of this bullshit from mom and Jean, you cannot even pretend to act like you haven’t.”

Myka doesn’t give him the satisfaction of confirmation. Instead she asks, “What is your point?”

“My point is that eventually she’s going to get her degree and she’s going to move back to the states and if you really think that the moms aren’t going to convince her that she needs to be close to home, you, my friend, are a bigger idiot than even I.”

Myka drops her hand and squints her eyes at Pete and she’s not sure if she’s more annoyed or impressed by how much Pete actually cares. Not about them but about Helena. So she opens her mouth to speak, to say anything at all, about how she doesn’t care… if Helena moves back, if Helena doesn’t. Even if that is a lie.

“I’m sure she’ll be married by then,” Myka smiles, “at the very least engaged. I’m sure that I mean about as much to her now as she thinks she means to me. She’ll find someone else. There’s _always_ someone else. _Everyone_ loves Helena.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Pete laughs, “but you’re the only one with the patience to be _in love_ with her for twelve years.”

Myka glares at Pete.

“Like I said, she requires… emotional support. Even if she convinces herself that you don’t quite love her as much as you did, she’ll know that you love her enough to stay.”

“I can’t even tell what _you’re_ trying to convince _me_ of,” Myka adjusts herself in her seat, holds out her arms with apparent anticipation, “because it sounds like you’re just reaffirming all of the reasons I shouldn’t be with her.”

“She’s emotionally draining,” Pete smirks.

Myka nods, “Yep.”

“She lied to you by omission,” Pete adds.

“For _months_.”

“Time and time again you bared your sole to her, only to receive nothing in return,” Pete scoffs.

“Not really _nothing_ …”

“And now you can’t stand the thought of talking to her,” Pete shrugs.

“Well, I wouldn’t say--”

“Never want to see or hear from her again,” he nods his understanding.

“Pete--”

“Probably for the best, Mykes. I’m saying if she thought she was protecting you by keeping her non-relationship with Liam a secret, who’s to say what else she’d keep from you, thinking it was protecting you?”

Myka glares at Pete.

“Mistakenly believing that she was sacrificing herself for your happiness?”

“What do you know?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“ _Clearly_ you don’t know anything. Or else you’d know that this conversation makes absolutely no fucking sense.”

When Pete’s eyes finally meet Myka’s, guilty and expectant, she shakes her head and sighs and waves her hand in the air. Waves everything about this conversation, about her lost thoughts, and feeling lost in general, completely away.

“My own sister hasn’t talked to me in months, Pete,” Myka sighs. “If Tracy and I can live in the same town for months and never talk to each other, I’m sure Helena and I can manage.”

“Uh, except you don’t want to jump your sister’s bones, Mykes?” Pete says making a disgusted and somewhat annoyed face.

“Did you get a head injury at some point in middle school that stunted your mental growth?”

“Also, Tracy is just really good at disappearing. Do you remember how many times she disappeared after school?”

“Yeah, well, I can’t argue that.”

“Look Mykes, you told me,” Pete says softly, “that you did not want to stop being friends with Helena. Talking to Helena. Keeping up with what was going on in her life. You knew she would need you. You knew you would need her, even in some small way. You _knew_ it would be hard and that it would hurt but you never wanted to stop being close to her or a part of her life. You just couldn’t _be_ with her--”

“Why is everyone suddenly such an advocate for her? This is _her_ fault, she brought this all upon herself but _I’m_ the idiot? I’m the cruel one for doing what I needed to do to be happy again? Mom and Jane give me shit all of the time about breaking up with Helena, Kelly basically just begged me to return her phone calls and now you, Pete, of all people. Sat in a desert in fucking Iraq and all you want to talk about is Helena?”

Silence. Close to silence, anyway. Beyond Myka’s frustrated exhalations and whatever is happening in the room behind where Pete sits, now unspeaking, in front of a computer screen.

Silence.

Then Pete sighs.

Pete sighs and sits up in his chair, clears his throat, then begins to speak softly. So uncharacteristically soft. He says, “We have spent so much of our lives talking about Helena, Mykes,” and he smirks, just a little, as he continues, “that sometimes I wonder if, without her, we would actually have anything else to talk about.”

Myka averts her eyes, she lowers her head and sighs out another heavy breath. It is guilt this time. The way she feels, for what she says. Because now she wonders if this, if Helena, is the foundation for all of her relationships. She has spent so much of her life thinking about her, wanting her, loving her, giving everything to her, that she’s now, _just now_ , beginning to wonder… who she is without her.

“Pete--”

“We all know she fucked up and she hurt you and you’re just doing what you need to do to be happy again,” Pete interrupts, nodding, “but you’re not happy. I’m not even there and I know you’re not happy. So, I don’t know, Mykes, maybe it isn’t _actually_ her we’re advocating for. Maybe it’s you… and you just can’t see that yet.”

“If that’s the case, then you all have a funny way of going about it,” Myka laughs softly, allowing her eyes to meet Pete’s again. “You _do_ know that this is not how reverse psychology works, right?”

“Historically, straight talk has rarely worked out in our favor,” Pete laughs, too.

“I think Kelly would disagree with you there,” Myka smiles.

“Okay then, straight talk, Mykes.” Pete takes in a deep breath. “You broke up with your best friend for _not_ cheating on you.” Hearing Pete refer to Helena as her best friend jars her in a way she had not quite expected. “You still care about her. You’re still as madly in love with her now as you were when we were ten. But you don’t talk about how you feel anymore. Not to us, not to her. Not to anyone. _Not_ talking to her is slowly killing you inside. You are more miserable now than you were when you were together. And everyone, except for maybe Sam, secretly hates you for it.”

“And Leena,” Myka adds quietly with a soft laugh as the memory of Leena’s kiss floats into her thoughts. She shakes her head, shakes that thought away faster than it had materialized.

“I’m not even going to ask,” Pete smiles, “but I was kidding. We don’t secretly hate you. We very openly care about you. And we love you. A _lot_. And you care about and love Helena, a lot. So stop acting like you don’t. You don’t have to ask the girl to marry you, just stop torturing yourself and call her. Tell her how she made you feel, listen to her voice. Pine over her secretly. Spend another five years not telling her how much you love her,” Myka is hiding her smile and her laugh behind her hand again, “just stop pretending like you don’t. Stop acting like it’s over forever between you two because you and I both know damn well that if Helena moves back to that godforsaken town--”

“All right, all right. You have proven your point.”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Pete challenges with a growing smile.

“But you _are_ wrong,” Myka says, sitting straight again and flashing Pete her accomplished smile, “it was six years I pined, not five.”

“One cannot keep proper track of time whilst one is being tortured by another’s obsessive crushing on a hot girl,” Pete says with an attempt at an English accent and a roll of his eyes. This soon gives way to laughter, both his and Myka’s. And as that laughter softens, he tells her, “I’m done with you now, peasant. Please, send in the hot one.”

“I don’t think Sam is interested in spending alone time with you,” Myka teases to a skeptical-faced Pete, who is quiet for only a moment before arching his brow and allowing a mischievous smile to take over his expression.

“I can see that you think you’ve made a clever joke by trying to draw my sexuality into question when, in actuality, all you have done is made me questions yours… by admitting that you find _Sam_ _Martino_ hot.”

Myka’s accomplished smile falls flat. Pete picks it up from where she left off.

“Mykes, if _this_ is the reason you haven’t been speaking to Helena, then forget this conversation ever happened.” The scary thing to Myka is that Pete actually sounds half-serious.

“ _Shut up_. I love you. Be safe over there, Pete,” Myka stands and, with arms wide, she moves in to hug the television screen, pretends to kiss the web camera perched on top of it.

“I’ve got this, Mykes. And I love you, too. But to be clear, since you’re apparently into guys now, that’s solely as a sister.” Myka scoffs and turns away. “Anyway, I’m spoken for now. You had plenty of opportunity, Mykes,” Pete goes on as she heads for the door, raising her middle finger behind her, amidst all of his laughter, “all those years wasted on some mega hot chick from England.”

Myka is calling out for Kelly to come check her boyfriend as she goes.

***

Myka is staring at her phone, at a screen that indicates that she has three missed voice mails, with her finger over the call button that would allow her to listen to those voice mails. She hears her mother say, “She’s not going to call herself.”

“ _Mom_ ,” Myka scolds. Her mother raises her hands in surrender and takes a seat beside Myka, where she sits on the couch, her legs folded up in front of her. She flips her phone closed and tucks it into the front pocket of the hoody she wears.

“How long has it been?” Jean asks her daughter, looking up toward the ceiling in thought.

“Four weeks,” Myka sighs, “since we broke up.”

“No,” Jean shakes her head and looks back to Myka with a smile, “how long have you two been carrying on this way? Six years? Seven? It feels like forever.”

“Let me just stop you right there, Mom, because I’ve already been lectured by both Kelly and Pete today. I definitely don’t need it from you, too.”

“Who’s lecturing?” her mother asks, somewhat affronted. “Myka, it makes no difference to me whether you two are together or broken up, talking, not talking. Saying you love each other, pretending you don’t? _Eventually_ , Helena is going to have our grandchild and whether that is with you or someone else? It makes no difference to me.”

Myka is groaning loudly again. It is swiftly becoming a Christmas tradition, this lecturing, her groaning, constantly hearing about Helena. And children? Why were they so starved for those when they still had one in the house and a fully grown man-child overseas?

“I just hate to see our family so marred by all of this,” and she gestures toward Myka’s now-hidden phone when she says with emphasis, “ _miscommunication_.”

Myka arches a brow at her mother and considers the consequences, weighs the outcomes, decides it is worth the risk, before saying, “It didn’t seem to bother you before Tracy found out about her father.”

“Well,” her mother sighs heavily and shrugs a single shoulder as she lowers her head, “Tracy was happier not knowing. And I know that she knows that.” Myka’s mother smiles and nods, looking back up at her daughter. “She’s not mad that I never told her. She’s mad because I don’t regret making that decision. That I never apologized for keeping it from her.”

Myka wants to tell her mother to keep believing in whatever helps her sleep at night. But she isn’t trying to make either of their lives anymore difficult than they already are. She keeps that last thought to herself and, instead, puffs out a soft laugh and drops her head back against the couch. She is still clutching tight to that phone in her front pocket.

“I don’t think Helena would tell me about Liam either, if given the chance again,” Myka responds quietly. Her mother doesn’t seem to expect that response. Not so quickly, anyway, but Myka is not stupid. She knows exactly where this conversation is going. “I don’t think it was a good decision, Mom,” Myka turns to look at her mother now, “sacrificing one daughter for the other’s happiness.”

“Sacrificing,” her mother laughs softly, shaking her head. “Thankfully, you don’t know your father as well as you think you do, Myka. Despite knowing him as well as you _do_.” Her mother is quiet for only a moment, her eyes turning away from Myka and somewhere beyond where they sit, beyond the space they take up in the living room, beyond even this house, “And I won’t apologize for that either.”

Myka rolls her eyes at this new stubbornness her mother has taken on. “I don’t think Helena’s decision was a good one. Dating me. Moving to London. An open relationship. Not telling me about Liam,” Myka thinks and pouts, “not telling me about _not_ Liam. Whichever one of those things got us here in the first place,” Myka’s mother nods her understanding but doesn’t speak. Myka goes on, “For the record, I don’t think my decision was a good one either. Agreeing to stay together, after London. Expecting her to be alone,” Myka sighs, “letting her go… the way that I did.”

“Seems like we have all made a lot of mistakes this year,” Myka’s mother sighs, turning back to Myka with another slight nod, pressing her lips tightly together. “Looks like we all have a lot to learn from those mistakes. And from each other.”

“Which would require communication,” Myka concludes her mother’s unspoken thoughts with a roll of her eyes in her mother’s direction. “You’re not clever. I was already thinking about calling her.”

“And _now_ you’re actually going to do it,” Jean smiles, patting Myka’s leg and pulling herself up from that couch, “just not right now, Myka, it’s 1:30 in the morning in Rio de Janeiro.”

“How do you even _know_ that?”

“Helena called two hours ago to say Merry Christmas before going to bed,” and her mother says this as if it is the most obvious conclusion that Myka could possibly come to.

“So basically everyone has talked to Helena today except for me?”

“Oh, don’t get your boxers in a bunch, Myka. Helena calls us _every_ week,” Myka’s mother says, heading into the kitchen with a smile. “Dinner should be ready shortly.”

Myka pulls her phone out of her pocket, as her mother disappears beyond that archway, and she flips that phone open. She toggles back to her voice mail, takes in a deep and steadying breath, and hits the send button to recall those messages.

With the phone to her ear, she sighs and, just below her breath, she says, “Some days, Georgie, I am very certain everyone in this family wishes _I_ were the one in Brazil.”

***

Helena’s voice, in the first voicemail, is soft and broken.

 _“Hi, it’s… me. I just… wanted to let you know that I landed safely in Rio de Janeiro. You don’t have to call me back or anything. I just wanted you to know.”_ There is a long pause. Helena clears her throat. “ _Bye.”_

Helena had called Kelly around that time, too. Myka didn’t have her phone on her then but she’d been with Kelly at the salon, next door to the bookstore. Not getting anything done, just taking up space. She remembers Kelly’s phone ringing, Kelly looking at that phone and then giving Myka a look that she didn’t quite understand. But the second Kelly had answered with a “hello, English muffin”, that was Myka’s cue to get back to work.

Later, Kelly had told Myka that Helena had reached her destination. Myka didn’t bother pretending not to care then. She’d smiled at Kelly and nodded and sighed and said, simply and relieved, “Thank you.”

But Myka still lost way too much sleep imagining Helena crying the entire flight there.

There are no words on the second voicemail. Just the soft sound of Helena breathing out a sigh and then the phone hangs up. Myka had gotten that one while she was out running two weeks ago. “How much of a coincidence is it,” Kelly had asked her shortly after she’d told her about it, “that you never have your phone on you when Helena calls?”

“I try to have my phone on me as little as possible,” Myka had told Kelly, “so it is not very coincidental at all.”

“You’re so _emo_ ,” Kelly had teased in response.

Myka holds her breath while listening to the third voice mail, this one from today. One word in, it is already too much. To hear Helena’s voice after Myka has spent so much time fabricating this lie to herself, and Myka does not doubt at all that it is a lie, about how everything about Helena has been an act? It is far too much.

On top of this sweet voice. On top of all of the crying and regret and sorrow that Myka can hear in this voice. On top of the aching and the pain and the hurt and even the courage that Myka can hear in every syllable of Helena’s speech.

This is too much.

Her voice, still soft and sad. Still straining through tears. Still accepting all of the blame.

 _“I don’t deserve you.”_ Pause. _“I never did.”_ She sniffles, she exhales. _“But I miss you,”_ she cries, _“and I’m sorry. Myka. That I finally found that thing.”_ She clears her throat. _“You know the thing that made you stop loving me.”_ And after a long pause, _“Happy Christmas to you, my love. Happier, at least, than some we’ve had.”_

She still doesn’t get it, Myka thinks. Helena. Emotional and fragile and floating just below the surface of everything Myka has ever tried to give her. Everything they have ever had together.

She still doesn’t get it, that Myka hasn’t stopped loving her.

That not even Myka believes she ever will.

***

_Myka is eighteen when a twenty-two year old Helena tells her, just below her breath as she stands, wrapped in Myka’s arms, staring out at the city before them, “London is so much warmer with you here.” Myka smiles and wraps her arms further around the girl in her reach, pulls her body closer, presses a kiss atop her crown and whispers, against her ear, “How warm is it now?” And before Helena can turn to counter that question with one of her own, Myka moves cold hands into the opening of Helena’s coat, beneath her shirt, and palms, at first, her belly and then her waist._

_Helena squeals out a laugh and squirms at that touch but Myka holds her tighter, pulls her closer, moves those cold hands further around Helena’s waist, against the warmth of Helena’s abdomen and further down, just a tiny bit further, into her jeans. Just below Helena’s hip._

_“Your hands are freezing,” Helena’s protesting but she makes no more effort to move away._

_Helena stills in Myka’s arms and reaches her hands to rest just over Myka’s, still tucked away, hidden below the lip of her jeans. They are not quite motionless, Myka’s hands. She is slowly, tenderly trailing fingers along the skin of Helena’s upper thigh. Up and then down, curling her fingers across soft skin, then palming the warmth of Helena’s thigh. Grasping gently to hear the sound of Helena’s breath as it hitches just beside her ear._

_“Brat,” Helena whispers, when Myka laughs softly and lowers her face into Helena’s hair, to press a gentle kiss against the back of her neck._

_“Georgie,” Myka whispers in return, pressing a kiss against her ear, “Merry Christmas.”_

_*_

_Myka is seventeen and Helena is a million miles away. On Christmas morning, Christmas evening in London, Helena calls the Lattimer home to wish everyone a merry Christmas. At first, she speaks to Jane and Myka’s mother. She asks for Claudia but she’s still at her brother’s place in the city. On speaker phone, she talks to Pete and Kelly, Tracy and Jeannie Jr._

_Jules disappears._

_Jules is gone for the duration of that phone call. He doesn’t return until it’s Myka’s turn to talk and even then, he keeps his distance._

_Myka doesn’t mind that he avoids Helena in this way, even when Helena is nowhere nearby. The more distance the better. Even if, at times, all of these thousands of miles plus Jeannie Jr. between him and Helena still don’t seem far enough apart._

_It doesn’t seem far at all when Helena asks if he’s there._

_“Yeah,” Myka answers, being purposely vague while they are still in the same room, “unfortunately, yes.” She is taking this moment to disappear into Pete’s room, to continue their phone conversation in private._

_Myka expects disappointment from that girl on the phone but what she gets, instead, is soft and incredulous laughter and, in an accusing tone, “_ Men _.”_

_“Yes,” Myka agrees, “men. And speaking of men, or rather, not speaking about them at all,” it makes Helena laugh, “how are you?”_

_“Cold,” is Helena’s immediate response, “freezing, in fact,” and she yawns, perhaps to prove her next point, “exhausted.”_

_Myka doesn’t keep Helena on the phone very long. Just long enough to fall into Pete’s bed and close her eyes and tuck that phone between her shoulder and her ear. Just long enough to pretend, for a moment, that Helena isn’t thousands of miles away. That this woman she grew up with and misses and loves, isn’t actually halfway across the world but lying just beside her in this bed, in this room, in this house, in this city._

_Anywhere in this country at all, in fact._

_But it isn’t enough. It never is. It is a nice try but… it isn’t nearly close enough._

_Myka’s mother is calling her from across the house and Helena tells her, “Go, I don’t want to keep you from everyone.”_

_“I don’t want everyone keeping me from you,” Myka sighs._

_“It’s a bit early in the morning for theatrics, hmm love?”_

_“Says the girl who used to sneak into my bedroom in tears before sunrise,” Myka smiles thoughtfully. Helena is quiet for several long moments before Myka hears her sigh out a soft laugh and imagines her smiling, imagines her ducking her head and bringing a hand to her face to further hide that smile as well. “I miss that girl.”_

_“Some version of that girl misses you, too,” Helena says softly, “but that girl is going to let you go so that Jane doesn’t kill her when she sees the phone bill.”_

_“I love every version of that girl. Even the one who refuses to come home,” Myka grins, playing along, “please tell her that I said that.”_

_“Even the one whose girlfriend refuses to come to London?” Helena questions laughing again and whispering, just as softly as before, “She knows,” and a slight pause, “_ I _know. I love you, too, Myka.”_

_*_

_When Myka is sixteen, she begins to wonder if there is a day that goes by in which Helena does not cry. She knows that there are good days and that there are bad days but she also knows that Helena seems to cry regardless of whether that day is good or bad. Helena finds a way and a reason and if Myka’s heart weren’t so damn susceptible to the sight of tears welling up in that girl’s eyes, falling down that girl’s cheeks, she may have worried, a lot sooner than now, about why Helena has always been so very emotional._

_But Helena has always been so very emotional and the only thing Myka truly begins to wonder, when she is sixteen and Helena twenty-one, is whether or not she herself has developed some sort of Pavlovian response of loving Helena even more than she did before with every new tear that falls down her pretty face._

_Christmas is a good day. If it hadn’t been so good, perhaps Myka would have dedicated more time to figuring this particular state of Helena’s emotions out. To figuring out this situation that was them, not quite together and not even remotely apart. Because Helena and Helena’s emotional state, are exactly what drives this relationship that isn’t quite a relationship, this relationship that definitely does not feel like it isn’t one either._

_They aren’t quite together because Helena doesn’t want them to be. They aren’t apart because Helena doesn’t want them to be that either._

_But in all of these wants of Helena’s and Helena’s state and Helena’s emotions, Myka still hasn’t figured out – still hasn’t allowed herself to become undistracted long enough to want to figure out – what the hell it is that Helena actually wants._

_They aren’t a couple and they’re still not calling the thing a thing._

_Myka is watching Helena who is sat in the reclining end of the sectional across from her in the living room with a mug of tea. Helena is fully engaged in conversation with Kelly and Pete and Jeannie Jr. when her eyes meet Myka’s and Myka can do nothing more than offer her a sleepy soft smile in return. Helena’s smile, too, is soft and sleepy. She tilts her head just a little bit to the side and then gently taps the rim of her mug to indicate to Myka that she is almost done with that tea. This also indicates to Myka that once she is done, they will find a solution for this shared exhaustion of theirs._

_Myka’s fingers are in her own hair and twirling nervously around curls, tugging occasional reminders into the back of her mind, that this is real, that she is not in fact dreaming, as Helena finishes that tea and excuses herself from the conversation to disappear into the kitchen._

_Jeannie Jr. takes this moment to notice exactly how quiet Myka has been. She signs her observations to her and it takes a moment more for Myka to realize that Jeannie Jr. is trying to get her attention before registering what is being signed to her._

_“Tired,” Myka signs with one hand in return, and, “ready to bed.”_

_Jeannie Jr. covers a laugh. Myka knows her signing is choppy. She doesn’t do it quite as often as she used to, nor does she catch the suggestiveness of her phrasing until Helena reappears by her side, moving slender fingers, with a delicate touch, into Myka’s curls, and asking in a whisper, “Are you ready for bed?”_

_Myka smirks across at Jeannie Jr. who is slightly less modest about her laughter now, and she rolls her eyes and tells that girl as that girl reads her lips, “You are your brother.”_

_“How dare you,” Jeannie Jr. says aloud, though she says it softly and eyes Pete shortly after that, as if she is underestimating her ability to control her volume and erring on the side of quiet. But Pete is not paying attention to her. Pete has spent very little of his time these past two weeks since the Christmas parade, since Myka had barged in on him and Kelly in bed together, paying attention to anyone who isn't Kelly. Least of all his sister._

_Jeannie Jr., clearly irked by this, slaps him on the leg. He blindly swats back at her while he carries on bickering with Kelly. Because they may be very much into each other and everyone may actually know about it now, but they don’t stop fighting. Even if playfully, even if they’re teasing. They carry on bickering with one another._

_Eventually, Jeannie Jr. manages to get Pete’s attention. They continue their playful argument, ignoring Helena and Myka altogether._

_Helena removes her fingers from Myka’s hair and brings her hand to rest on Myka’s shoulder and that is Myka’s cue. She isn’t sure how she learned it, if she actually learned it, or if it is Helena’s touch alone that compels her, but that is Myka’s cue and she knows it very well. She stands, Helena leads, and she follows without question._

_Together, they disappear. Even if they still aren’t together._

_Helena slips her hand into Myka’s hand and pulls her away from the living room, away from the joyful chatter and playful bickering, and into that hallway. Helena leads Myka into the guest bedroom where they stay, where they have always stayed, and where they now lie down together. Where they do what they have always done, which is almost nothing at all._

_Myka lies back onto that bed and Helena lies quietly, wordlessly, in her arms. Helena is curling up against Myka’s side, and lowering her head onto Myka’s shoulder, wrapping her arms around Myka’s waist. They are not quite together now just as they had not been the year before but something still feels so different about this year, about the new year ahead._

_Everything seems new. Kelly and Pete, Jeannie Jr. and Jules. Myka wonders if, somehow, they could be new, too. She and Helena. Even if they had always been. She wonders._

_Helena yawns and at the end of that yawn, Myka moves further onto her side, further into Helena. Myka moves her hand beneath Helena’s shirt to rest over Helena’s side, to palm the too-prominent feel of Helena’s rib cage, and urges her closer. Their foreheads come together, the tips of their noses barely touching, and Helena breathes out a sigh against Myka’s lips._

_“What’s wrong?” Myka whispers and Helena shakes her head. Myka takes in a deep, steadying breath, curling her fingers against Helena’s side and causing that girl to involuntarily draw in a deep breath as well. “Sure?” Helena nods, exhales slowly. “Okay--”_

_The word has only just escaped Myka’s thoughts, narrowly her tongue, when Helena’s lips move against hers, kissing her, moving further into her, and slightly over her. Myka adjusts the placement of her hands to accommodate. She has her hands at Helena’s waist as that girl moves to lie on top of her, moves her left leg between Myka’s legs, moves her hands slowly through Myka’s hair, her elbows resting just over Myka’s shoulders, arms cradling Myka’s head at either side._

_Helena is lying on top of Myka, leaning down into that kiss by its end, pulling only slightly away with parted lips and quickened breath. Myka smiles up at the woman above her, eyes still adjusting to the darkness, and Helena stares wide-eyed and hesitantly right back._

_Then the tears come._

_At first they are just moonlight reflecting off of moisture in Helena’s eyes. Soon after, they are slipping slowly down Helena’s cheeks, falling into Myka’s hair, against Myka’s cheeks, and eventually, as she lifts her head slightly to kiss that girl’s cheek, pressed against Myka’s lips._

_Helena rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand then, sighing, lowers her forehead to touch Myka’s again. Presses her nose to Myka’s nose. Her eyes are closed when she whispers, “I don’t usually have this sort of luck,” her eyes are open again when she lowers her head to press a quick and gentle kiss against Myka’s lips._

_“What sort of luck is that?” Myka asks, eyes falling to Helena’s lips, fingers slowly stroking their way up Helena’s sides, pulling her shirt up along the way, curling against skin and leaving a trail of goosebumps in their wake._

_“You…” Helena breathes. She lowers another kiss to Myka’s lips and this one is lingering as Helena breathes softly into it, parts momentarily to adjust the way she lies over Myka, and kisses her again. “And the thought of losing you…” Helena sighs out what sounds to Myka like an incomplete thought after that kiss. More tears fall. They fall steadily now but Helena wipes them as they come. Myka, too, reaches up to wipe away those tears, before regaining her hold over Helena’s hips._

_“I’m not going anywhere,” Myka tells her, “just so you know.” Helena smiles and moves her fingers over Myka’s forehead, to take up stray curls and move them away from her face, tuck them behind her ears. Myka moves her thumbs across Helena’s skin, tightens her hold when Helena’s body jerks, slightly sensitive to that touch. “When you come home,” Myka goes on to say, “I will be here--”_

_“I don’t even want to think about going back, about leaving you,” Helena cuts her off, falling into another kiss. She kisses Myka and when they part she echoes her earlier sentiment, completes that thought, “I can’t stop myself from thinking sometimes… about what it would be like, if I lost you. Like we lost Claire.” Helena’s sigh now is heavy and Myka pulls her arms around Helena’s torso, pulls her closer as she continues. “Sometimes I see Claire… in the hospital. Sometimes, I see you there, instead of Claire. And I can’t stop those thoughts from coming. They just do. Do you know how that feels?”_

_Myka smiles softly and nods, she lifts a hand to Helena’s cheek to wipe away more tears. She reminds her, “I am not the one who was almost in that car,” then taps Helena’s lower lip with her thumb, “I know exactly.”_

_“If I hadn’t been sick…” Helena’s voice trails off._

_“If Claudia hadn’t stayed to play…” Myka adds._

_They are quiet and watching one another for a long time when Helena presses another quick kiss to her lips._

_“The thought of losing this… of losing a chance at this, before we ever figure this thing out, if we ever figure this thing out, it makes me want it more. It makes me want it now. It sounds selfish of me but I think about it… often. Us. This.” Helena lowers her head but this time it is with some sort of guilt. She looks away from Myka and shakes her head several times before crying out softly and lowering her forehead to rest against Myka’s shoulder._

_Helena isn’t ready. That’s how far they have come together, not as a couple. Myka has been ready, has been waiting, is still waiting, even if what they have is almost as real as what they’re waiting for. Myka has been ready for this for a long time but they have come so far now that Helena is no longer ready. She is scared and timid and treading lightly around the topic of them. She has been all month. She doesn’t say why._

_Even without saying, Myka knows why. It is because Myka is sixteen years old and Helena, her best friend, the absolute love of her life, is twenty-one and cautious and still so very afraid of how much she loves her, too. But Helena isn’t ready to start this thing that is new, that is them together, and she isn’t sure when she will be. All she knows is that more time will pass, more distance will come between them, and Helena’s biggest fear, right now, regarding them? Is that they’ll never have the chance and all she will feel, for the rest of her life, is regret._

_It is the heaviest reality of all to Myka. Not that they aren’t together… but that Helena wants it, too._

_“We’ll be fine until then,” Myka says against Helena’s ear and she can feel Helena fully relaxing in her arms after she says that, “until we figure this out.” She can feel Helena nodding slowly against her shoulder. Hear her sniffling away tears, exhaling a sigh of what Myka can only hope is relief. “Even if nothing goes right, even if nothing ever feels perfect or okay… or inevitable,” Myka’s hands move up on Helena’s back, to either side of her breasts, then lower than that, and tighter around her, to soothe. She squeezes Helena softly, “we will be fine.”_

_Helena turns and presses a kiss to Myka’s cheek, another at the corner of her mouth._

_She says, “I love you, Myka,” and kisses her lips, “I just need more time. I just need to be sure... that I have a steady grip because this,” Helena lifts her head just a little to look Myka in the eye, “you… have been one of the the most important things in my life for a very long time...”_

_Myka knows that it isn’t her she’s trying to reassure. Helena is saying this solely for herself. Myka has her, in her arms, they are alone and they are together and they are as they have always been. For Myka, that is good and it is good enough, too._

_Time, she can give freely. It’s all they have ever needed. All they have ever had between them._

_Helena lowers her head back down to Myka’s shoulder and Myka feels the warmth of Helena’s breath against her neck, the slight brush of Helena’s lips over her jaw._

_That girl breathes out all of her worries again, “And the thought of losing you,” incomplete and thoughtful and refraining, Myka imagines, from voicing all of the accompanying thoughts on morbidity and finality and never getting back all of the things and time and people you’ve lost. All of the people you’ve loved._

_Who knows if they ever loved you, too._

_Myka sits up and reaches for the blanket at their feet and tugs it up. She pulls Helena closer to her, wrapping her tighter, arms around her shoulder, holding that woman against her, and pulls the blanket over them, up to their ears._

_“I love you,” Helena says again, nuzzling closer, “you deserve to know how much I do.”_

_Myka kisses the bridge of Helena’s nose and whispers, “I’m pretty sure I already know.”_

_“Goodnight,” Helena sighs, “happy Christmas.”_

_“Goodnight, Helena.”_

_*_

_Fifteen year old Myka does not see Helena for Christmas. They haven’t seen each other in a month. They haven't talked in many more than that. Myka tries not to care about it. About not seeing Helena, about not having Helena in her life. Myka tries not to think about all of the Christmases before this one, especially the Christmas just before this._

_She tells herself she’s still mad at Helena, for being how she is and doing what she’s done with whom she had done those things. For lying, most of all, by omission._ Again _._

_Myka tries to be mad but she is far from that. She is sad and she misses Helena and she wishes none of these things had ever happened. Wishes, too, that she didn’t care so much that they had._

_She is in her bedroom, resting in her bed. She is looking through photos of her and Helena from summer, when they’d spent the day on the lake. When Helena had admitted to not just loving her but being in love with her. These photos had been before that revelation and Myka, looking at these photos now, can almost see it._

_In the way Helena looks at her. In the blush of Helena’s cheeks._

_She misses that look, that shy smile. She misses the uncertainty in the way Helena touches her, in how close Helena allows herself to get to her._

_She misses everything about that woman, even if she hadn’t known everything about that woman to begin with._

_Myka sighs and tosses those photos, without a thought, onto the floor. All except the one in which they actually share a kiss. This one, Myka holds on to and, even as she turns onto her side and buries herself further into blankets and out of the cool air of her bedroom, she looks at that photo. Studies it. Remembers all of those things about Helena she misses._

_She says softly to that photo, in the dark where she tries very hard not to cry, “Merry Christmas, Helena.”_

_She closes her eyes._

_*_

_Nineteen year old Helena is climbing into the top bunk of a bed when she hands fourteen year old Myka a yellow envelope with her full name written on it. The “I”s in Ophelia and Bering are dotted with hearts._

_“What’s this?” Myka asks with a smile that is trying hard not to laugh at those hearts on those I’s as the older girl settles in next to her on that top bunk. But Helena catches on to her amusement and rolls her eyes. She bites back her smile, both amused and slightly embarrassed._

_“I could just take it back,” Helena threatens._

_“You wouldn’t,” Myka grins, beginning to carefully tear that envelope open. Helena reaches for it but Myka pulls it just out of her reach and continues to open it._

_“You don’t have to open it right this second,” Helena protests._

_“But I am,” Myka’s smile remains and she gets that envelope open and pulls the card out before Helena can try, again, to snatch the thing out of her hands. “Here, you can have your envelope back,” Myka teases, throwing the now-empty envelope at Helena._

_“Brat,” Helena says, tossing that paper over the edge of the bed and rolling onto her side, away from Myka. She sighs, Myka laughs softly and examines the Christmas card now in her hands. It is a typical Hallmark card, cheesy and heartfelt and it makes Myka want to roll her eyes but inside, Helena’s writing._

_And it’s no wonder she has turned away._

Myka Ophelia,

It isn’t our first Christmas together but it somehow feels brand new. And what you said yesterday? That is true for me, too. It is the best Christmas I have had in a long time. I am so happy to be spending it with you.

This year has been miserable but it would have been so much worse without you.

Thank you. For everything.

With love,

Helena “Georgie” Wells

_“Georgie?” Myka’s smile grows wider._

_“Hush,” Helena whispers, still turned away._

_“Helena,” Myka calls again and Helena turns to her this time, onto her right side, to face Myka._

_“Hmm?”_

_Myka smirks and moves closer to that girl, to press a kiss to the tip of her nose._

_“I love you,” Myka tells her quietly. And she means it, even despite that teasing smile still on her lips. She means it with all of her too-young heart._

_“Don’t tease--”_

_“I love you,” Myka says again, with emphasis and Helena sighs, rolls her eyes, presses her lips together tightly. “This year_ has _been miserable,” and she reaches to touch Helena’s cheek, to run her finger tenderly across her jaw, below her chin, “next year will be better.”_

_Helena’s eyes are wide and watching Myka with an expression that Myka just doesn’t have the words to say. Helena doesn’t appear to have the words, either. She just sighs and smiles and bites down on her lip as she nods her agreement._

_“I love you, Myka,” Helena whispers._

_“Merry Christmas,” Myka says just as softly in response, “_ Georgie _.”_

_*_

_Myka is thirteen and sat in the passenger seat of Helena’s car, sipping on the last of her cup of warm chicken broth as Helena pulls that car up to the front of the bookstore. Myka caps the cup onto the lid of the Thermos and is about to hand it back to Helena when the older girl shakes her head and says, “No, keep it. Finish it. I made it for you.”_

_“You made it for me?” Myka asks, “why?”_

_“Because I knew you would eat it,” Helena says, “if I made it.”_

_Myka is quiet, as she pulls that Thermos back into her lap and cradles it in her hold. She lingers, she tells Helena, “Thank you for the ride,” then turns to reach for the car door and pulls the handle, triggering the overhead light, and gathering her things._

_“Myka,” and the way Helena says her name, with some hint of urgency, while also reaching a hand out to grasp Myka’s wrist gently, causes her to still. Myka turns a worried glance on Helena and waits. Eventually Helena asks, “Is everything… okay? At home?”_

_Myka smirks and nods, “It’s fine, H.G.,” but Helena’s hand is still gently gripping her wrist and Helena’s thumb is moving slowly over it, lifting the sleeve of her own jacket just far enough to see the skin her thumb crosses. If she can see anything at all with the dim overhead light._

_“Keep the jacket on,” Helena nods, pressing her lips together tight, “until you get upstairs. I’ll get it from you later. Okay?”_

_Myka nods again but she doesn’t move because Helena’s hand is still on her wrist and Helena’s grip has given no indication of letting go. So Myka asks Helena, after she manages to find the courage, “Are_ you _okay?” and this seems to startle Helena out of some deep thought. Pulls her back into this moment, inside of this car, from some far away place that she had disappeared to._

_“I’m okay,” Helena smiles, after a while, to reassure Myka, “don’t worry about me.”_

_Myka wants to tell her that is impossible. Myka wants to tell Helena that she will always worry about her. Even if she doesn’t know why she’s worried. She can tell that there is something there that she should be worried about. But Myka is just thirteen years old and has only, in the last couple of days, started talking to Helena like a normal person. Like this. Without wanting to fall completely apart beneath her gaze._

_So Myka says nothing to Helena about her worry, about how much she worries. Instead she tells Helena, “Thank you for the soup.”_

_Finally Helena pulls her hand away from Myka’s wrist._

_“You’re welcome,” and this time, when Myka turns and is just stepping out of the car, Helena says, “Our Christmas party is tomorrow… if you want to come by.”_

_Myka turns back and ducks her head low to see Helena watching her anxiously._

_“I don’t know if my dad will let me,” Myka shrugs, “but I’ll ask anyway.”_

_“Five o’clock, my house, okay Einstein?” Helena smirks, “and you can bring the jacket.”_

_Myka nods and it is reluctant. It is almost a lie. Because she knows her dad won’t let her go. She’s not sure if it’s worth listening to him come up with a reason why. Still, she says goodnight and Helena tells her she’ll see her tomorrow and Myka is hoping and praying and wishing something as delightful as that could be true.  She is however very doubtful and it is that doubt, and maybe a deep freeze that’s set into her brain and damaged it severely, that gives her enough courage to climb back into that passenger seat._

_“I forgot something,” Myka says hesitantly._

_Helena is looking around. She is asking Myka, “What did you forget?” and she is looking everywhere over the floor where Myka sits and not at all at Myka, and it makes it that much easier for Myka to do what she has, for some reason, decided to do. She leans across the center console and presses a quick kiss to Helena’s cheek. Helena, who still isn’t paying attention to her and doesn’t seem to realize what has even happened until Myka is out of that car, saying “Merry Christmas, Helena,” and closing that car door behind her._

_Myka has never walked away from Helena, never unlocked the bookstore door, never run up those stairs so fast in her life._

_Several seconds more pass before she hears Helena’s car drive away. When Myka falls asleep that night, it is after several hours of lying wide awake in bed… thinking only of Helena and all the reasons she’s given Helena to never talk to her again._

_At first her dad says yes to the party because it’s Christmas and the day starts fine, her mother has cooked his favorite thing for breakfast. But halfway through Christmas day, one third of the way through this latest bottle of Scotch, of course, he changes his mind._

_Myka’s not so sure she could stomach seeing Helena so soon again anyway_

_*_

_Something happens when Myka is twelve. She doesn’t know what or how or why but Helena doesn’t come over to watch her and Tracy anymore. Her parents don’t go out at night like they used to. They no longer get invited to the annual Wells Christmas party._

_Somehow Myka just knows, even without her dad’s accusations, that this is all her fault._

_*_

_“I don’t like your brother,” a very soft spoken eleven year old Myka tells a grinning sixteen-year-old Helena Wells._

_“He’s not a very likable person,” Helena tells her, still smiling and running her thumb over the single tear that falls down Myka’s cheek, “but you are something else entirely, Einstein, taking the blame for a plate that Tracy broke.”_

_“I broke it…” Myka starts to say just under her breath, but she can’t manage to finish that lie with the way Helena is looking at her. All knowing and smiling and not deserving to be lied to. “She’s just a kid,” Myka shrugs, “she doesn’t know any better.”_

_Helena arches her brow and her smile falls into a smirk when she tells Myka, “_ You’re _just a kid. And I think Tracy is old enough to know better. Regardless of what your dad tells you.”_

_Myka doesn’t have anything to say to that. She’s careful not to talk about her dad. Just as careful as she is not to talk back to him. Even if that doesn’t always work. Even if anything she says to him will set him off if he is in just the right mood to be set off._

_Tonight, he is in just that right mood._

_She and Helena and Tracy, Claire and her two-year-old sister Claudia, are upstairs in Helena’s room playing a board game when Myka’s father, mingling downstairs with the rest of the adults at the party, calls up the stairs for Myka. It is loud and bellowing, it is threatening and menacing, but worst of all, even for Tracy, it is embarrassing._

_He is drunk._

_Tracy and Myka do not hesitate to get up and to move and to head toward that voice but Helena stops Myka and Tracy at the top of the stairs._

_“What is this… that I’m hearing… about you breaking things?”_

_He sounds playful now, when he asks it. He has a smile on his face. But his voice is incredulous and accusing. Myka hates this mask most of all._

_Every adult in the foyer has turned their attention to him, up to the girls, back to him. Some stand in the doorway of the kitchen. Others pretend, albeit poorly, not to notice at all._

_“It was an--”_

_“She didn’t break anything,” Helena interrupts and she is calm, when she says this. She smiles down the stairs at their father and reaches a protective arm around Myka’s shoulders._

_“Charlie tells a different story--” Myka’s dad begins, just as Charlie and his father Charles, enter into the foyer._

_“Charlie wasn’t even around when it happened,” Helena accuses, her arm tightening around Myka’s shoulder, “I broke the plate while handing it off to her. I just wasn’t paying attention.”_

_“Don’t lie for that clumsy little--” Charlie starts._

_“The plates are inconsequential, Warren,” Charles Wells interrupts his son. He tries a laugh to lighten the mood and he pats Myka’s father on the back, in an attempt to show him just how little those plates matter, “we have a million of them and we only ever use them at Christmas. We can always get more.”_

_“I hope they weren’t expensive, Charlie,” Myka’s mother tries, “we don’t mind paying you--”_

_“No, no, no,” Charles waves his hand in the air and wraps his other arm over Myka’s father’s shoulders and pulls him back toward the kitchen, “they’re worthless. If the kids break them, they’d only be doing us a favor, right Georgie? She hates doing dishes anyway,” he continues as they head to the kitchen, “she’d be happiest if we only ever ate on paper plates.”_

_Helena doesn’t say anything. When Myka looks up at her, she is still staring down at their father. Their father is still staring up at her until he turns to Myka’s mother and tells her something that they cannot hear. Charles and Warren disappear into the kitchen._

_Myka’s mother looks up at them, at the top of the stairs, as all of the other adults clear out, and she sighs and rolls her eyes and throws her hands up at her sides as if in defeat._

_“Get your coats on girls,” she tells them before heading after their father._

_In the bedroom, Claire is helping Tracy put her coat on. Helena is helping Myka with hers. Even if they are more than old enough to manage their coats on their own, Myka couldn’t focus her mind long enough to navigate the zipper. Their father is downstairs, once again, calling their names. Yelling at them to hurry up._

_Helena asks Myka quietly, buttoning her up, “Do you still have my phone number?” Myka nods._

_Of course she does. However Helena had given it to her the year before, on some scrap of paper, Myka had saved it inside of one of her journals. She had rewritten it in another just to be on the safe side. And if she’d lost them both, she’s pretty sure her mother has it listed in the rolodex._

_Helena pulls Myka aside, as Claire with Claudia and Tracy leave the bedroom, Helena is wrapping Myka’s scarf around her neck and leaning into her to whisper, “If he hurts you…” it is all she can manage to say of that sentence. “Do you understand?”_

_Myka lifts her hand to the side of her face and makes the sign for phone. It’s all the voice she can find in this moment. Helena nods in response._

_“Okay,” Helena smiles softly and it is a smile of reluctance. She walks Myka out of the room and with Tracy to the top of the stairs. They descend them together, Tracy taking Myka’s hand on the way down and whispering an apology, an actual apology, as they go._

_At the bottom of the stairs, their mother greets them with a smile. Almost as convincing as the one Helena had just left Myka with._

_“Can I take you anywhere?” is all that their father has left to say before coming back into the foyer with his coat and his hat and the car keys in hand._

_“Tell Claire and Helena thank you and Merry Christmas,” Myka’s mother urges. And they turn, both her and Tracy, to wave up at Helena and Claire, still at the top of those stairs, still looking down on them with so much worry and sympathy in their eyes._

_“Merry Christmas,” Tracy says and Myka knows exactly why when her little sister starts to cry._

_She feels guilty. It isn’t the first time. And almost every time she does this, she feels guilty. But does she say anything, at all? About who is at fault for that broken plate?_

_Myka rolls her eyes and sighs, and she knows they can’t really hear her, when she says, “Thank you and Merry Christmas, Claire… H.G.,” but they don’t say so if they can’t. Helena has very recently caught on to the consequences of that. Claire, she imagines, always knew._

_They just wave goodbye._

_In the car, Warren says, “I don’t know about that girl sometimes.”_

_Their mother says, “Helena? She’s a sweetheart, Warren, leave her alone.”_

_Their father replies, “She’s trouble,” to which their mother gasps and asks, “If she’s so much trouble, then why do you let her watch the girls?”_

_“It was your idea, Jean, to keep the girl out of more trouble,” their father argues. Their mother doesn’t have anything to say to that for a long time. But eventually she says, almost too quiet for Myka to hear, “That’s your best friend’s daughter. I can’t believe you would talk about her that way.”_

_“She’s more her mother than anything. Spoiled and entitled. And we all know how well that worked out for Charles.”_

_Again, Myka’s mother is quiet. If she wants to protest that statement, she doesn’t. She keeps her mouth shut._

_“I doubt she’s even his. Knowing Margaret.”_

_“She looks just like him!” their mother finally speaks up._

_For some reason this makes their dad laugh. He laughs and he shakes his head and mostly ignores their mother’s protests. He tells her, as if Tracy isn’t still crying in the backseat, as if Myka isn’t even there at all, “It’s no wonder she’s so attached to Myka. They must be kindred spirits. For all I know, they could be sisters.”_

_Myka knows what the word kindred means and she knows what spirits are but Myka, at eleven years old, doesn’t understand what her father means when he calls Helena and Myka kindred spirits. When he says they could be sisters. She likes to think that he means they are good friends, that they get along well, that they are familiar with one another and share common interests. But Myka knows her father too well to believe that whatever comparison he means to draw between Helena and Myka is anything good. It is probably everything bad._

_Myka has a hard time finding anything bad or wrong or not good about Helena. And Myka has an even harder time trying to understand how Helena could, in any way, be as worthless to Uncle Charles as Myka has felt to her own father for most of her life._

_Their dad is too tired and drunk to do anything but lecture them all, including their mother, the short drive home. He sends them straight to bed._

_Tracy doesn’t stop crying until she falls asleep and the very next morning, she tells their dad that she was the one who broke that plate._

_He just pats her head and clears his throat and says, “Okay, Emma.”_

_He has absolutely nothing to say to Myka at all._

_*_

_Myka is ten when Helena tries to paint her finger nails and toe nails and Myka accidentally knocks that nail polish over because she has big feet and long arms and she’s clumsy and (she has told Helena all of this before) she’s just plain bad luck._

_Purple glitter nail polish is setting into the carpeting in Helena’s bedroom and Tracy is threatening to tattle, one year old Claudia is mocking that threat quite adorably, but Claire and Helena are laughing, so Myka can’t help but laugh, too._

_“Hey,” Helena eventually calms down and says to Claire, “how come Jeannie’s parents don’t come to our Christmas party? We invite them every year.”_

_Myka is quiet, furrowing her brows in thought, when Tracy pipes up and says, “Their dad died in a fire!”_

_“Oh,” Helena says softly and she looks to Myka but Myka just shakes her head and lowers it, to stare at the floor. Helena must look to Claire then because Claire tells her, “Three years ago. He was a fire fighter and the place collapsed. They pulled him out but…”_

_“He died,” Tracy finishes._

_“Shut up, Trace,” Myka says swatting at her sister from where she sits on Helena’s bedroom floor just beside her._

_“What? He did,” she argues and says to Helena, “they only have a mom now. That’s Mama Jane.”_

_“A little compassion, Tracy,” Helena says in that hushed voice of hers. Tracy rolls her eyes but sulks quietly to herself. Myka can feel Helena watching her and she turns just slightly to meet her gaze. A sympathetic expression greets hers. Helena says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”_

_Myka shrugs and that is all she has to say about it then._

_Later, when Tracy and Claire are in the study playing on the computer, and Myka is sat on Helena’s bed with a sleeping Claudia in her arms and a sleepy Helena by her side, she says, “It happened near Christmas.”_

_Helena’s tired eyes open at the sudden break in the silence and she turns to Myka and waits._

_“We used to have Christmas together, when we were little, but then… everything happened. And now we have Christmas here,” Myka shrugs again. “Where there’s plenty of alcohol to make up for it.”_

_Helena remains quiet and, with the threat of an awkward silence looming, Myka adjusts how she sits and sets Claudia on that bed just between them. She is about to excuse herself, to get some water, to check on Tracy, to use the restroom, anything at all, when Helena reaches across that sleeping child to grasp her left wrist._

_Helena doesn’t look at Myka. She says nothing. But Helena sits up and holds out her other hand, palm up, in wait. Myka doesn’t have to wonder what that means, she already knows. She gives Helena her other hand and Helena grasps that wrist, too. She turns Myka’s hands, first palms up, next palms down. She moves, only slightly, the long sleeves of Myka’s Christmas dress, further up on her arms. She runs her thumbs over Myka’s wrists, squeezes them with a tenderness that is not quite on par with her intent._

_And Myka knows, very well, what that girl’s intention is. Even at ten years old, she knows. She is waiting for a reaction, a reflex, a wince. She’s waiting for Myka to pull away, to give her any indication of pain at all. But Myka’s wrists don’t hurt. Not this year. Not like last year. And it has been a while, not as long as Helena would like, but long enough to have healed._

_After a while, Helena sighs and lets go of Myka’s wrists, turns away from her on the bed, and lowers her head into her hands._

_Myka wants to tell Helena everything. She wants to tell Helena anything. But Myka can’t find the words to say and by the time she thinks she is close to having the courage to open up, Myka’s father is drunk and exhausted. He is ready to go home. So they leave and he complains about all of Uncle Charles’ rich friends the whole way back. He calls Helena a spoiled brat. He complains, mostly, about the clothes she wears. How inappropriate they are for her age._

_Myka doesn’t know what that has to do with anything but she’s worried, for Helena, and all of the bad things her dad has to say about her._

_*_

_Myka isn’t crying. She, in fact, is trying very hard not to cry._

_She is nine years old, her little sister Tracy is seven, and for the second year in a row, they are spending Christmas evening with their Uncle Charles. With his daughter Helena and her best friend Claire. And after seven years of spending Christmas with Pete and Jeannie and Pete’s mom and dad, this new thing, that is swiftly replacing that old and broken tradition, has taken some getting used to. But Myka doesn’t mind trying to get used to it, mostly because of Helena. Myka likes Helena. Helena, for some reason, seems to like Myka. Even despite her tears._

_Myka is not the only one who is upset tonight._

_Upstairs in Helena’s room (Myka and Tracy go immediately up there when they arrive, now that they know exactly where to go), Claire is rocking a very fussy baby Claudia. Myka hears, just as she and Tracy enter Helena’s bedroom, “When is Myka getting here?” and when Claire sees Myka, her face lights up. She sighs aloud and says, “Finally!”_

_Helena is side-eyeing Claire with a quiet sort of judgment as she greets both Myka and Tracy. They narrowly have time to remove their coats, to reveal matching Christmas dresses, before Claire is passing that six-month-old baby off to Myka. And rejoicing in her newfound freedom._

_“Claire,” Helena begins what sounds like chastising, “honestly.”_

_Myka smiles, when that baby is in her arms and those too-thin arms of hers are wrapping around that chubby baby as securely as they can. Helena, still by Myka’s side, helps her support Claudia’s weight and gestures for her to sit on the bed._

_“She’s got it,” Claire says, waving Helena’s concerns off, “she’s the baby whisperer,” and right on cue, as Myka settles onto Helena’s bed, Claudia stops crying. Wide and curious eyes are looking up at Myka. A toothless smile begins to form. A chubby hand is reaching for thick curls._

_“Hi,” Myka smiles and she stands Claudia up. Helena, sat beside her, has a protective hand at the baby’s back. Myka’s cheeks burn hot and red when she looks at Helena only to find Helena looking back at her. She is smiling at Myka like the proud older sister that Myka sometimes thinks Helena longs to be._

_“I’ll be out of a job soon,” Helena teases and Myka laughs softly, pulling a now-yawning Claudia back into her arms and cradling her close. Myka thinks that it must be the way she holds Claudia when the baby nuzzles sleepily against her arm, that makes Helena notice and then ask, “What happened to your wrist?”_

_Myka instinctively turns her wrists. She says very softly, “Nothing,” and lowers her head. She trains her gaze down on the small child in her arms and she tries to remember what it was like being this small. She wonders if being that small and helpless, as if she isn’t still very much both of those things, made the people around her smile like Claudia makes Helena smile. She tries to remember when they stopped smiling, as much as they used to, around her. Myka becomes so caught up in her thoughts about her past, about being little, about how very much she cannot remember, that she almost forgets that Helena is watching her, that Helena is no doubt waiting for some sort of conversation… until Helena’s hand is on her wrist._

_“Just leave her alone, Helena,” Claire says, rolling her eyes and lying down on the floor with a magazine._

_Helena, ignoring Claire’s request, tugs Myka’s hand slightly away from its embrace around Claudia, still yawning, still valiantly fighting off her sleep. Helena turns Myka’s wrist, so that her palm is facing up, and she runs her thumb over several small dark bruises that dot her skin._

_“Did you get hurt at school?”_

_Myka shakes her head._

_“At home?”_

_“Helena,” Claire says again, looking over her shoulder at where Myka and Helena sit. The look that Helena gives Claire in return makes that other girl scoff and roll her eyes._

_“You’re only making me more suspicious,” Helena quips._

_Claire turns quickly back to her magazine. Helena turns back to Myka._

_“Myka?”_

_She says nothing and shrugs._

_Helena wraps her hand around Myka’s wrist in such a way that the pads of every one of her fingers falls just short of every one of those small bruises. She does the same thing with Myka’s other hand, careful not to disrupt Myka’s hold on baby Claudia, whose eyes are finally beginning to close. Helena stills, her hands wrapped with care around Myka’s wrists. It is an unexpected touch, that soft grip with it’s gentle squeeze and it’s careful placement. The last time someone held Myka’s wrists that way, it had not been as soft a grip. It had not been just a gentle squeeze._

_Helena’s eyes meet Myka’s but she doesn’t ask again. Myka, even at nine years old, can see that Helena just knows. That something about the way Myka is looking at her is giving all of it away and that absolutely nothing good could possibly come of Helena knowing all that Myka doesn’t say._

_Myka can hear it, when Helena swallows. She can feel that older girl’s temperature rising in the growing warmth of those hands wrapped around her wrists, in the way they begin to perspire. And for all that Myka knows, hours could have passed before Helena finally lets go of Myka’s arms and quietly, without another word, disappears out of her bedroom door._

_After a while, Claire sits up facing Myka and bows her head. She tells Myka, “You hair has gotten really long,” to which Myka only nods while reaching up to pull a sleeping Claudia’s fingers out of her curls._

_Tracy is the quietest Myka has heard of her in a long time. Distracting herself, as usual, by looking through Helena’s makeup._

_When Helena finally returns, she is as quiet as when she left. When she finally speaks, it is softly and it is to Tracy, to say, “How about some gloss?”_

_Tracy’s face lights up._

_Myka lowers her head again. Now Helena, like all of these people in her life that used to smile at how small and how helpless Myka used to be… no longer smile. They hardly look at Myka at all._

_It isn’t very late when the party starts winding down. Claire’s family has already left, even Charlie has already locked himself in his room. Myka is two-hundred pages into a book she picked up from Helena’s night stand and Tracy is passed out on the bed in a puddle of her own drool. Helena has been cleaning up her room, coming and going. She, at one point, brings Myka a plate of food, but doesn’t say much to her after that. When Myka hits page 212, Helena’s hand appears between the pages of the book, pressing a yellow Post-It note onto it._

_Myka looks up at her and she is still not smiling. She is the most serious that Myka has ever seen her in the year that Myka has known her._

_Helena says, “Your parents are getting ready to leave,” and gestures back down to that note in the book that Myka reads, “my phone number. Okay? If you need anything or… if you just want to talk.”_

_Myka nods._

_“You can take the book, too,” Helena sighs, “I’ve already read it two times.”_

_Myka clears her throat, reaching to push her glasses up on her nose, and she is speaking for the first time in over an hour when she says, “I’ve read it five… and a half… times.”_

_Helena arches a brow and finally she smiles. She asks Myka to help wake Tracy up. She helps them both with their coats and when they are bundled up once more, she tucks that book, with Helena’s phone number still hidden inside of it, under Myka’s arm and leads them downstairs, to meet with their parents._

_Their mother tells Helena, “I hope they weren’t any trouble for you,” and Helena smiles and shakes her head. She tells their mother, “They were perfect, as always. I’m not even sure Myka knows the meaning of mischief.”_

_“I know the meaning of mischief,” Myka says looking up at Helena with furrowed brows. And Helena laughs, leaning close to Myka to say, “I know you know what it means, Einstein. I’m just not sure you know how to do it.”_

_Helena tussles Myka’s hair and gently squeezes her cheek._

_“Tell Helena thank you, girls,” their mother directs._

_Tracy yawns out a sleepy, “Thank you, H,” and Myka adds quietly, “thank you, H.G.”_

_“My pleasure, as always,” Helena hugs Tracy, then hugs Myka, too, “and merry Christmas to you both.”_

_*_

_Myka is eight and Tracy is six when, for the very first time, they are at the house of their father’s good friend who has recently moved to town from Europe. And Myka has a lot of feelings about a lot of things that she cannot properly sort through because so much has happened in the past two years that all she wants, and all that she wants to do, is force everything to return to normal._

_She wants to have Christmas at Pete’s house again. She wants Pete’s dad to be alive again. She wants his mom to be happy again. She wants both of their moms to talk again._

_Myka wants to go back in time to the nights that ruined everything. Not just that night of the fire but the following month, when everything was crazy and everyone was mad and hurt and hurting each other the best way the could possibly think to hurt anyone else._

_Myka wants to be home with her best friend, teaming up against her annoying little sister. Myka wants to be at Pete’s house groaning about how bored she is while he tries to play whatever brand new Nintendo games he’d received for Christmas that year._

_And Myka wants, selfishly above so many other things, her hair to grow back to the length it used to be. Especially on the left side, where all of the damage had been done._

_But these things, every last one of them, including the length of her hair, are inconsequential when Helena Wells, the daughter of her father’s friend, is by her side, smiling, introducing herself, and running her fingers through Myka’s too short curls._

_“And what’s your name?” Helena is asking Myka, not at all for the first time but for the first time, Myka comprehends that she is being asked a question._

_“Myka,” she swallows hard and frowns, for no reason at all._

_“Myka,” Helena says softly with a smile, “I have always loved that name. I hear you like to read, Myka. In fact, I have heard you are very smart.”_

_Myka shrugs shyly and forces that frown further into place, she realizes, to stop herself from smiling._

_“Well, I just happen to have a lot of books. Maybe if we look really hard, we can find one that you haven’t already read,” this makes Myka finally let loose her smile and she giggles at the thought of Helena owning a book that she hasn’t ready. Unless Helena owns books that Myka’s father doesn’t allow in the bookstore. Then that is an entirely different thing and, at the thought of it, Myka’s smile grows wider. Helena, still smiling, says, “what do you say, Einstein?”_

_Myka is all warm cheeks and delight, trying hard to bite back her grin, when Helena steps in-between her and her sister, reaching for their hands, and leads them both up the stairs._

_“Do you have anything that’s not books for us_ not _nerds?” Tracy asks, as Helena leads them down the hall and toward her bedroom, laughing softly along the way._

_“You know, you should be nice to your big sister,” Helena smiles, patting the top of Tracy’s head, “you may need her one day.”_

_Myka, for some reason, highly doubts that._

***

Kelly has tears in her eyes and Myka doesn’t know what to do with that.

When Kelly is done talking to Pete and says her goodbyes and leaves the game room, wanders back into the kitchen, she has tears in her eyes and she is shaking her head and waving off Myka, Claudia, and the mothers. She is waving away all of their concerns.

“He bought us tickets to Italy,” she eventually says, and to clarify, “this fool, who can barely balance a checkbook, saved up enough money to buy us both tickets… to meet up in Italy this Spring.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Sam asks, frozen with concern, although fear might be a more accurate description of Sam’s emotions around Kelly. Especially when she narrows her eyes on him, seated at the kitchen table, just behind Myka. Myka mimics that look when she glances over her shoulder but turns and nods. She is grinning and pulling Kelly into a hug, a very big hug, and whispers into her ear, “What a sap, you are.”

“Shut up,” Kelly says wiping her tears and pushing Myka away. “Of all people…” but Kelly doesn’t finish that sentence. She shakes her head and pushes Myka further away, telling her, once again, to shut up.

***

Everyone is in the dining room preparing Christmas Eve dinner when Myka, lingering alone between the kitchen and the living room, pulls out her phone again. Toggles to that out-of-country telephone number again. The one that keeps calling her. The one that keeps leaving messages on her voice mail.

It’s Christmas, is what she tells herself. They always talk on Christmas. Except for those two years where they did not talk at all. Myka doesn’t want to add another year like that to those two that came before. Regardless of what happened between them, regardless of how mad Helena makes her when she is near. Myka has already accomplished what she needed to accomplish, with regard to their relationship.

They are no longer together. She has her space. She is free of Helena’s… unsure wants and needs and emotions. And that fact, alone, has made all of the difference in the world… about how she feels about Helena. About how she feels about the idea of Helena being with someone else. About how she tries not to think about that idea because it isn’t her problem anymore. It isn’t the root or the base or the bulk of their relationship anymore.

Myka concedes, they can be friends. They should be friends. As long as she doesn’t care about all of those things that Helena does with her personal life. They can _do this_.

As she hits the send button on her phone, the doorbell rings. They aren’t expecting anyone else and for a second, for one very tiny minuscule tenth of a second, Myka holds her breath at the mere idea that it could be her.

But she is in Brazil. Obviously. She had just called home from that far-away place.

Claudia is racing out of the dining room with Jean and Jane on her tail. Everyone else is not very far behind.

“We aren’t expecting anyone else,” Jane says curiously, perhaps questioning, as she looks back at Jean.

“Claudia, honey, you can’t just open the door to whoever--” Jean begins but Claudia already has the door open, swinging wide, Kelly catches it before it slams into the wall.

“Abigail?”

When Myka hears the name from Jane’s mouth, she immediately hangs up the phone, mid-ring, and heads further into the living room, where everyone has crowded.

“Abigail,” Myka echoes at the smiling image of her ex-girlfriend, her once-friend… and not just smiling but _grinning_ , in the doorway. And not just Abigail but the entire Cho family.

“Well, don’t just stand in the doorway, Claudia, let them inside,” Jane smiles, stepping closer to Claudia and gently scooting her out of the way. “Hey!”

The Chos flood in. First Abigail and the twins, followed by their oldest brother Michael. Their mother and father just after him. Kevin is behind them and, by his side… there is Tracy.

The room falls quiet. The greetings gives way to stunned silence.

Tracy’s head is bowed when she steps inside, when Claudia moves in behind them and the only sound that breaks the quiet is the sound of the door slamming home.

“It’s freezing!” is Claudia’s explanation, when everyone turns to her, startled by that sound.

Then Myka’s mother says, “Tracy,” and her sister looks up. She looks up at their mother, she looks at Jane, too, she even lends a momentary glance with what Myka’s sure is a small smile, in Myka’s direction.

“Merry Christmas, mom,” Tracy says softly, straightening, and moving further into the house now. “I’m sorry. I hope… you don’t mind--”

“Oh,will you just stop that already and give your mother a hug,” Jane teases. And that is it. Just like that. Months of silence and anger and feeling like this family was slowly falling apart and never going to put itself back together again, just slips away, with boisterous laughter, out of that window.

Jane and Jean are still embracing Tracy, in tears, kissing her cheeks, threatening not to let go, when Abigail, now very near to Myka, smiles and says, “Hello, stranger.”

Myka tilts her head and arches a brow in that girl’s direction, still adorably smaller than her… still smiling through it all.

“Abi Mei Cho,” Myka says suspiciously and turns to Abigail fully now, “how did you--”

“Honestly, Myka, between my mother and I, who do you think is most capable of convincing Tracy to come home for Christmas?”

Myka just nods and smiles. She wraps an arm around Abigail’s shoulder and pulls her in close, presses a quick kiss to her forehead and whispers, into her ear, “Thank you anyway.”

Abigail shrugs, “I’m not the one who had to live with her and my brother in the same house,” and she winks, leaning ever so slightly into Myka’s hold. They carry on quiet conversation but it only lasts long enough for Tracy to escape the tearful reunion with their mother and Jane. Abigail moves slightly away when Tracy comes to stand in front of Myka, at first with her head low, and then making eye contact with an expression so serious that Myka’s smile, everything good she feels about this moment, slips slowly away.

“Tracy, I’m sorry. I never should have--”

“Sister,” Tracy says softly, cutting her off and waving that apology away, “it’s okay. I deserved it. We’re okay but…” Myka arches her brow slightly, “…we need to talk,” Tracy sighs, moving her hands through hair, longer than what Myka remembers, as she looks away. She turns her gaze, now annoyed and _trying_ , back on Myka. “It’s about your dad.”

***

Myka doesn’t know why she let Kelly drag her to a party on New Years Eve. She doesn’t know why Kelly _wants_ to drag her to a party on New Years Eve. Myka guesses that it’s to fill in the void that’s been left behind by both of their closest friends. Pete. Helena. She’s just not sure if that void, that feeling of being left behind, is more prominent in her or in Kelly. She doesn’t know, exactly, which of the two of them this is for. So, Myka let’s Kelly drag her to this New Years Eve party. Kurt and Sam just happen to be there, too, but both Kurt and Sam are actually holding a conversation with girls and Myka decided, long before now, that she was going to have as little as possible to do _that_.

Just before midnight, Kelly is distracted with conversation by some girl she knows from work. Myka takes the opportunity to disappear through the crowd, to slip out of a door and into the backyard of whoever’s house they are at in Helena’s old neighborhood.

As the countdown to midnight begins, Myka finds a quiet corner on a couch in the open garage. Everyone who had been in there now heads into the house, they are counting down the last twenty seconds of the old year along the way.

Myka nestles herself into that couch and pulls out her phone. She has finally resigned herself to just making this happen. No hesitations. No second guesses.

Just above the cheering, that echoes from the house when the clock turns to midnight, the barely audible voice of a sleepy Helena Wells answers the phone. The first thing out of her mouth is Myka’s name and it sends a wave of warmth through Myka’s entire being. The next thing sounds panicked.

“Love, what’s wrong?”

At first Myka says nothing. She is reeling from the very real sound of Helena’s voice, alive and well and still wanting to call her all of these intimate things. Myka thinks, for a second, that she doesn’t know a reality in which Helena never _wanted_ to call her these things. And at the end of that thought, Myka says, “Nothing’s wrong,” and falls quiet once again.

“It’s four in the morning,” Helena yawns but she sounds wide awake, “and you’re phoning me… I assume it’s an emergency--”

“Happy new year, Helena,” Myka interrupts her with a whisper. She’s surprised that Helena hears it, the way she’s started going on trying to reason for Myka’s call. She’s surprised Helena doesn’t just hang up on her, when she actually hears that reason why. “That’s all, I just wanted to say… happy new year.”

“Oh…”

“And that I miss you,” Myka adds quickly.

“Myka--”

“And also that I’m sorry,” Myka sighs into the silence coming from the other end of that phone, “for all of the…” Myka refrains from groaning, when she hears her mother’s voice in the back of her mind and echoes, almost with her exact tone, “ _miscommunication_.”

“Is that what we’re calling it?” Helena asks with a hint of a challenge that Myka has mostly chosen to ignore.

“Yeah… well, I’m going to let you go back to sleep…”

“No, Myka,” Helena clears her throat, “I’m sorry… and don’t apologize, please. Because I’m glad you called. I just didn’t know… if we would ever…”

“Talk again?” Myka finishes that sentence for her.

“Yes,” Helena whispers, “and I miss you, too. More than you would care to know.”

“I don’t want to keep you, Helena…”

“Well, that…” Helena puffs out a soft laugh, “ _that_ I already knew.”

“ _Helena_ …”

“ _Myka_ … tell me something I don’t know?” It sounds nothing like a challenge now. It sounds more like a plea. Soft spoken and hopeful. Holding on to this moment and not wanting to let any bit of it go.

Myka’s laugh is incredulous as she tugs her coat closed and curls further into that couch and away from the cold.

“Please?”

“Something you don’t know?” Myka questions, thoughtfully, and she is hesitant to say it because she thinks where they stand, right now, is perfectly fine. Even if Myka doesn’t feel fine about how far apart they are. Physically… emotionally. Even if Myka is still just a little it off… she is not quite as off as she was before.

She’s hesitant to bring them back to that place where they were, just before they were together. When everything was lingering and unspoken and just on the cusp of being the one thing Myka had always wanted in her life. She’s hesitant to say anything that will blur the lines between them together and them… not together. But she is only as hesitant as her mind will allow reasoning for.

Myka is running out of reasons to tell herself why she’s better off this way.

“You don’t know,” Myka is hesitant, only long enough to swallow back a sudden wave of nausea, and to convince her mouth to say the words she only ever learned to say because of Helena, “that I still love you.”

Helena falls quiet again. Myka can hear her breathing through the phone.

“No matter how many times I have told you,” Myka breathes, feeling oddly relieved, “that I always will.”

Helena’s breathing is the only thing Myka hears until people start flooding out of that house and heading back toward the garage.

“Helena--”

“But it’s a different kind of love now,” Helena says softly and Myka can hear the smile in that girl’s voice, “right? Ophelia?” Myka smiles wide, too.

“Yeah,” Myka says bringing her hand to her mouth to cover her laugh, she is simultaneously wiping away tears, “it is very different, Georgie.”


	25. You Have Only One Daughter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Spring 2004. Myka 20, Helena 24. And Tracy needs help with their father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Have decided to post chapters willy nilly (no longer by age) because it's going to take me way too many thousands of words to get through 20 & 24 and nobody wants to wait another three months a new chapter. Not even me.

“I wanted so badly to hit you back.”

“So why didn’t you?”

Tracy shakes her head, her eyes drifting away from Myka and to some place in thought. She gives a half-hearted shrug before pulling her lips into a frown that reminds Myka so much of the mother they share, of the way their mother used to frown when Myka had been snatched up, cornered, and lectured by their father. It is the exact expression that would take over their mother’s face when she didn’t know what to do, or when she ran out of things to say to their father, to distract him from his anger or, in Myka’s opinion, excuse all of that anger away.

Tracy is sat there thoughtfully wearing their mother’s frown, looking like an exact replica of the only thing Myka has ever really had in common with her.

“I have asked myself that same question a million times since then. Why didn’t I just slap you back?” and Tracy’s eyes meet Myka’s again when she adds, confidently, “I could take you.”

Myka grins, “Maybe.”

Tracy smiles at that, for only a second, and even Tracy’s smile, half-hearted and not really trying, is a ghost of their mother’s. It is a ghost of Tracy’s father, too, from what Myka can tell. From what little Myka could make out of the image her mother had eventually shown her of Tracy’s father. Jack Secord, young and mostly happy... alive and mostly well.

“But I know why,” Tracy says as her eyes drift down to her lap, to where her hands are restless as she nervously smooths her thumbs over the cuticles of her fingernails. Tracy sighs when she looks back up at Myka and it sounds taxing. It sounds absolutely defeated. “We both know why, right?”

Myka has some idea, as to why Tracy wouldn’t retaliate against her. The words “porcelain doll” come to mind and Myka tries not to let that get to her. The idea that she is weak and fragile and one short fall away from shattering into pieces. Even if it were true, even if it still is, Myka tries very hard not to let that get to her.

“I already took your father away from you, Myka.” Tracy allows her eyes to meet Myka’s again, and this look is new and unfamiliar. Myka imagines, for just a moment, that she is sitting beside the stranger who fathered her sister. And it fits, somehow.

It is strange and wild, to see her sister in this way. As someone else. As part of something else, other than this family. Something that no longer exists and hasn’t existed for most of their lives while simultaneously just beginning to exist in their minds. Something they will never truly know, that Tracy will never have the chance to truly understand.

Tracy rolls her eyes up to the ceiling and says, reaching into the bag that sits at her side, “I really didn’t think there was anything I could possibly do to hurt you anymore than that.”

Suddenly she has transformed back into their mother. Not the version of their mother that is helpless and unsure or scared and alone, but the version of their mother that exists now. Strong and determined. Sometimes hilarious. Falling in love all over again. Filled with concern for the people around her and just barely confident enough to stand up for their happiness.

Tracy pulls a large manila envelope from her bag with Myka's name on it and holds it out to her.

“He insisted.”

***

Myka hasn’t driven Helena’s car since they broke up, and even though they’ve spoken since then, just once or twice in the three months since New Years, Myka has been perfectly content driving her mother’s car to school and back. Her mother has been perfectly content with Myka driving her car to school and back.

“It’s newer and it’s safer,” are just some of the reasons her mother had given her, “it is far more reliable for your commute and the last thing I need,” her mother had made this argument, too, “is for you to be stuck, broken down, on the side of the road, in the middle of the night.”

“In the middle of nowhere,” Jane had added, playing on Myka’s mother’s worries, hyping her up. Myka’s mother could only agree with that point, even if Jane had meant it as a tease. But Myka had had no complaints. She wanted very little to do with Helena’s car. She wanted even less to do with Helena Wells.

Or so she has been telling herself, on what seems like a daily basis.

Four months post break-up, however, Myka’s mother was calling her, telling her to bring her car back and come get Helena’s car.

“Get it fixed or get a new one,” her mother had said to her, when they’d traded cars again a week ago. “I know how much you hate commitment,” and Myka groaned and moaned, threw her head back and rolled her eyes at that dig because her mother _so_ loved to dig, “but we just can’t afford the maintenance costs of yet another lemon.”

“It’s a _Honda_ , Mom,” had been Myka’s only rebuttal. As if that fact alone would stop the thing from making whatever that noise was that it was beginning to make whenever she’d turn the engine.

It’s not that Myka did not completely understand where her mother was coming from. It’s that Myka could hear, in her mother’s tone, that it was mostly Jane talking. That wherever this forwardness had come from and however this confidence had manifested itself in her mostly timid and still trying-very-hard-to-be-good-at-this mother, the seed had been planted by Jane. She could practically hear Jane’s speech, see Jane’s unwavering stance, and feel the pressure of Jane’s accusing gaze in the way her mother spoke to her.

Jane’s overdramatic tale was one of the great financial burden placed upon two under-appreciated monarchs with six heirs between them. Five, she would say, were in college. Even though one’s college was paid for by the military, one already had her undergraduate degree, another was paying for grad school all on her own, the fourth still had a semester left of high school, and the fifth, also graduated, was not even really their kid. The sixth child would be in college soon, too. But Jane’s fairytale definition of _soon_ seemed to span almost an entire decade because child number six, only half in their custody, was just on the cusp of turning eleven years old.

Myka had heard her fair share of that lecture. She was not interested in hearing it once again. So for the past week, Myka has, quite reluctantly, been driving Helena’s car. Reflecting on all of the conversations they’d had within it. Remembering all of the times they’d escaped into it, from out of the cold and rain and occasional snow. Trying hard to forget the things they’d, at one point very long ago, _almost_ done… and at another point, not quite as long ago, _definitely_ accomplished.

But a week on, the car has proven it is entirely against her.

***

Myka is in the parking lot behind the bookstore, standing in front of the car with the hood up and staring at its innards with perplexity when Sam walks up on her, startling her when he speaks.

“I don’t think staring at it with your Jedi mind tricks,” Myka jumps and turns to Sam, almost ready to fight, and he is laughing as he concludes that sentence, “is going to fix it.”

“Goddamnit, Sam,” Myka sighs, reaching to sock Sam in his arm but missing when he pulls just slightly away.

“You’re always so jumpy,” he smirks.

“You’re always sneaking up on me,” Myka retorts, and it’s almost a whine. It sounds pathetic, even to her, as she speaks it and so, to make up for this, she swings in Sam’s direction once more. This time her balled up fist makes contact with his arm.

The contact, half-hearted and mostly playful, does nothing more than make Sam laugh louder. Myka turns back toward the car and sighs her defeat at the tangle of plastic and metal bits before them. Because Myka knows a lot and she knows a lot about a lot of things but Myka does not know cars. Not nearly as well as this particular car’s owner knows cars.  And Pete isn't around to talk her through any of this.

“If Helena were here, she could probably fix this thing with Jedi mind tricks. She could take one look at this and know exactly what’s wrong with it,” Myka smirks, waving her hand aimlessly over the engine.

***

Myka’s imagining a time, almost three years ago, when Helena had been home and asked Myka how long it had been since the last oil change.

Myka had responded in her usual way. Head back. Low groan.

“This is why,” Helena had said, and she sounded more serious than not, “we cannot have nice things.”

“I have you,” Myka had told her in response, a mischievous grin immediately taking over that previously burdened look, “ _that’s_ nice.”

But Myka’s adorableness, and she’d known this for a while, could only get her so far. Ever since then, Helena made sure to remind her to have the oil changed. She’d shown her how to check the oil levels, where to put the anti-freeze, how to replace the windshield wiper fluid and the actual wipers, too.

“They make mechanics for this stuff,” Myka had reminded Helena, when she’d once had the nerve to change out her own headlights. “You don’t even like doing dishes.”

“I do dishes!” had been Helena’s only rebuttal.

***

“They make mechanics for this stuff,” Myka finds herself echoing and when she turns to Sam, the look that he’s giving her is one hundred percent Helena’s look. Arched brow, arms crossed. Even his hip sort of juts out just so.

Myka wants to slap that hip back into place but her friendship with Sam has not yet elevated to that level of comfort. To a level where she’s confident their touching, outside of hitting and slapping and socking and the occasional one-armed hug, won’t translate into something other than just platonic touching. Something other than just pals. Something that doesn’t have the slightest hint of a chance of being anything more than _that_.

“Fine,” Myka finally says beneath the weight of Sam’s judgmental Helena-gaze and throwing her hands into the air. She steps out of the way and allows Sam the space he needs to figure out what’s going on.

“What’s it doing?”

“It just clicks when I try to turn it on.”

Sam is no Jedi. It takes him more than just a glance. But even then… more than just a glance equates to one turn of the engine. One attempted turn, several clicks, and an unsuccessful start.

“Your alternator's gone out,” he announces, emerging from the driver’s seat with little to-do.

“Well, can you fix it?”

“Definitely not.”

“What good are you then?” Myka questions, closing the hood of the car.

“My dad was only ever sober long enough to teach me how to spot the problems,” Sam smirks just before forcing a soft laugh, “as with everything else in our lives, he was too drunk to fix them.”

“Right,” Myka sighs. It is an almost familiar feeling. Myka could almost relate. If her father had ever had the decency to show her anything. If he’d ever started anything that Myka might feel the loss of a lack of follow-through on, Myka could probably relate. But there hadn’t been many promises in her childhood. Certainly none made by her father.

And if he’d ever had the nerve to make one, she’s not sure even the tiniest version of her would believe anything he had to say.

“That’s the difference between you and me, Sam,” Myka’s thoughts, come suddenly alive, are leaving her mouth before she even knows what she intends to say. Before she thinks any further about how the thing she is trying to say might negatively impact Sam.  

Before she realizes how much she actually cares if it does.

So when Sam looks at her, perplexed and quiet and waiting for her to continue, all Myka can do is smile and shake the thought away. She says, instead, “Forget it. Let’s go grab some lunch and catch a movie before you start crying all over everything.”

But internally and quietly, all to herself, Myka is thinking of the word hope.

Hope is the difference between Sam and Myka. Between Sam’s childhood and Myka’s childhood. Between what Sam’s father had given him, even if just a glimmer of it, and what Myka’s father had not given her even one tiny bit of.

_Hope._

There is only one person in this entire world who had ever given a young Myka hope and that person, in the end, had packed all of that hope away and taken it with her to London.

***

There’s something about the way Sam eats his french fries and Myka has yet to determine whether she finds this particular thing intriguing or annoying. Whatever it is, it catches her attention every time they eat at the diner, every time he orders a basket of fries. Every time he eats them, two at a time. Dipping one in ketchup, dipping the other in ranch, and putting both of those dipped ends into his mouth at once.

Myka doesn’t know if she’s annoyed, she only knows that she has noticed this, that she has watched him eat every two fries he has pulled from that basket in this way, and that this isn’t the first time she has done so. It isn’t the first time she’s thought this much about it either.

Another thought comes to her, when Sam has finished chewing these latest two fries and swallows them, takes a sip of his water, and clears his throat before speaking.

Sam chews with his mouth closed.

“What?” he asks her, as if _he_ is the one annoyed, and she doesn’t realize how odd she finds this practice to be until she quietly reminds herself that Pete has definitely destroyed her impression of how guys in their age group are expected to act.

“ _What_?” Myka counters defensively because she knows she is staring and she knows she’s been caught staring and she knows, even better than she knows Helena, that she’ll have to punch Sam at least five times to undo the damage she’s done by staring at him while he eats. Or she could just be honest... “I hate the way you eat fries.”

Sam is non-plussed, chewing the dipped ends of another pair of fries and simultaneously dipping the newly bitten ends into one cup of ranch and one cup of ketchup, sat side-by-side on the table just in front of him.

“Let’s talk about what’s _really_ bothering you,” Sam suggests after thoroughly chewing this next bite and brushing his hands free of salt, “for instance, when is Tracy coming back to the store?”

Myka sits back in that diner booth and shrugs a single shoulder. She plucks a fry up from that basket and dips it once into Sam’s ranch, a second time into Sam’s ketchup. She has already shoved the thing into her mouth by the time his affronted gasp turns into a firm and vocal protest. She is smiling rather gleefully at the damage she has done to Sam’s cup of, now mostly pink, ketchup.

“You’re a monster,” he says just beneath his breath, shaking his head in mock disgust.

“I’m not asking Tracy to come back.”

“Okay, so you’re _not_ a monster,” Sam amends, his expression turning back to one of skepticism. “I thought she was coming back after graduation?”

“If she wants to come back, she can. But she’s got college to think about and she already has enough trouble _focusing_.” Sam’s _Helena_ gaze returns, quiet and suspicious and wordlessly questioning everything Myka isn’t saying. “ _And_ she’s already been through a lot this school year, with finding out that her dad and my dad aren’t… the same… person. So… _whatever_. For once in her life, I’m giving her a break. Even if Mom doesn’t think she deserves it.”

This explanation seems to satiate Sam’s curiosity on that matter, one of many that have come up in recent months. But Sam’s curiosity, in general, Myka has found, is not so easily appeased. Especially when Myka has spent the better part of a new year avoiding certain matters and moving through life as if those certain matters in particular do not exist at all.

Leave it to Sam, Myka thinks, to dig up things that she has spent the last four months trying very hard and very unsuccessfully to forget about.

“And your dad’s manuscript? Have you read it yet?”

Myka rolls her eyes and slumps dramatically further into the booth.

“You say that as if I ever expressed an intention to read it,” Myka scoffs at both the notion of reading it and the notion of having an intention to read it. Further on the topic of _it_ , she insists, “I’ll burn it,” and she’s _very_ sure of that, “before I _ever_ read it.”

And the only other thing she is more sure of than this, is that _it_ will never ever, not even in a million years, be published.

“But you haven’t burned it _yet_ ,” Sam says, with his logic and those skeptical blue eyes and, despite his best efforts to stay as mess-free as possible, a stray drop of ranch on his shirt. Myka pushes several napkins across the table and gestures, with a slight nod, to Sam’s shirt. He gets the hint and cleans the spot thoroughly and says, “Way to look out, Bering.”

“I’m saving it for a special occasion,” Myka says, sitting straight once more and shrugging that single shoulder. “Graduation? My 21st birthday? A funeral, perhaps.”

Sam is quiet and staring for a long time before he arches his brow across at Myka and says, speaking as softly as his demeanor appears, “I hear the police academy has some really great therapists on the payroll,” Myka is already reaching for a fry and throwing it in his direction, “you should consider joining the academy with me.”

“You know for someone who eats his french fries two at a time, you sure do take forever to finish them.”

Sam shrugs and grins. He dips another two fries, simultaneously, into ranched ketchup and ranch.

***

Myka and Sam return to the bookstore after both lunch and a movie. A movie that Myka actually watches because going to the movies with Sam is not like going to the movies with Pete or Tracy or Kelly. It is nothing at all like going to the movies with Helena, not that Myka expects it to be. Sam likes to actually _watch_ the movie and Sam likes to see good movies, _new_ movies. So when Myka and Sam go to the movies, it is to the larger theater that is miles away from the bookstore and the diner and everything about this town that Myka actually loves.

Sam drives. Myka sulks. He makes her sit through Kill Bill: Volume 2. She is not impressed. Equally not impressed is Kelly, after they’ve returned to the bookstore and greeted her where she stands in her typical way, before an overworked stove in an overheated kitchen. Kelly is not impressed because she is cooking and she has made enough for at least four people but when she extends an offer for Sam to join them, he declines.

He says thank you anyway. He says he has to leave. He says goodbye. And then he goes.

“I don’t trust him,” Kelly says, vocalizing the thoughts that are clearly written across her face.

Myka laughs because at least fifteen minutes has passed since Sam left. They are sitting down, she is taking a bite of her food, and Kelly is clearly still thinking about it.

“Why not?”

“He never stays for dinner.”

“He thinks it an imposition,” Myka smiles with a slight roll of her eyes, “he’s trying to be polite.”

“Growing up, it was rude to refuse food that was offered to us,” Kelly goes on to explain. “Never ask for it but if someone offers, _never_ say no.”

“And then people discovered diabetes...” Myka says this skeptically.

“My ‘ _uelo_ chose food over his legs.”

“And where did that get him?” Myka wonders with another amused roll of her eyes because she already knows the answer to that question.

“Everything he wanted to eat, he ate.”

“Did he not die from this?”

“Yes, but he died with a belly full of delicious ass food.” The expression on Kelly’s face is perplexed. She is saying, without actually saying, this answer is obvious. Any old fool should have been able to come to that conclusion.

“That’s awful. He could have prevented that,” Myka says shaking her head and, taking another timely bite of her food.

“Death?” Kelly laughs. “Everybody dies, _Ro_ …”

Silence.

“ _Myka_ ,” Kelly corrects after several moments.

They eat in that continued silence for a while longer.

“Is it weird?” Myka asks, eventually cutting through unbearable quiet, and Kelly glances up at her expectantly, waiting for her to continue, “that we aren’t together? That we don’t really talk… as often as we used to?”

Kelly smirks and shrugs, “Why would it be weird? I wasn’t a part of your relationship.”

“I know,” Myka sighs, “but you’re her best friend, you talk to her every week, and you were with her through so much. You only know me because of her and now you have been with _me_ through so much.” Myka laughs, “You’re like some sort of… healing helper.”

“It’s the cooking,” Kelly teases. “Myka, don’t get so hung up on how things used to be. Sure, I knew Helena first but that doesn’t lessen the relationship that you and I have. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m,” Kelly looks elsewhere when she laughs softly before saying, “ _in love with_ your best friend.” Her eyes return to Myka’s, though her smile has mostly gone, when she also says, “It doesn’t change the fact that you’re in love with mine.” And she lowers her head to her plate of food and shrugs when she concludes, “Whatever way you choose to look at it, we were bound to be family.”

Kelly sighs heavily and teary eyes eventually rise to meet Myka’s.

Myka grins.

“Shut up,” Kelly tells her.

“This is so sentimental, Kelly. I’m not really sure how to process this moment,” Myka teases as Kelly rolls her eyes and quickly rubs the moisture away. “Oh gosh, she’s really going to cry.”

“Tears or no tears, _cabrona_ ,” Kelly is shaking her fist at Myka in mock threat. “ _Look_ , maybe if she were here, it would be more annoying having to deal with both of you. But she’s not here. She doesn’t think she belongs here. Especially not _now_ , so,” Kelly shrugs once more, “she can stay her ass in England for as long as it takes her to realize she’s wrong. About… _so_ many things.”

“You say that like she has a choice,” Myka is incredulous, “like her dad won’t cut her off if she doesn’t go to the perfect school.”

“ _And_? The rest of us are managing just fine without inheritances. I’m sure she can, too.”

Myka sighs, shrugs, “I suppose.”

“She could be living in the glamour that is your childhood home, sharing shifts in the bookstore and working a regular ass job like the rest of us regular ass non-rich people but no,” Kelly scoffs, “I have to fly my ass to Europe two weeks ahead of meeting Pete in Italy, so that I can slap some sense into her.”

“You’re complaining about spending a month in Europe?”

“I never said that,” Kelly muses, smiling as she takes a sip of her water.

“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Myka laughs, “and you’ll have to give Pete a big hug from me while you’re with him.”

“Oh, Myka,” and it is Kelly who laughs now, “I intend to do _far_ more than that--”

“Only the hug is from me!” Myka clarifies, cutting Kelly off by raising her voice in an attempt to drown out whatever thoughts Kelly may be on the verge of vocalizing. “Don’t even make it a kissing hug. Just the regular hug is from me.”

“All I’m saying, _cabrona_ , is that there’s going to be a lot more than hugs--”

“Oh god, please stop,” Myka stands, grabs her plate and her glass, makes as if to leave that dining area and disappear down the hallway.

“Let’s hope my birth control holds up because I’m really not in the mood to get pregnant,” Kelly goes on and now, Myka knows, she is doing this shit on purpose.  It is truly time for her to go.

“Shut up, _shut up_!” Myka calls behind her, she is in the hallway now. She is almost through her bedroom door with her plate and her glass of water and what little appetite she has left.

“But there are definitely going to be some pregnancy-inducing sort of hugs,” Kelly is yelling down the hall now, “so don’t be surprised if you’re an auntie when I come home!”

“I can’t hear you!”

Myka slams her door closed on the sound of Kelly’s cynical laughter but she sees out of her window, just as she is about to settle into the safe haven that is her bedroom (free of all provoked thoughts and memories of Pete’s bare naked red ass), Tracy pulling up in their mother’s car.

She does not look the least bit happy. She looks like she’s been crying for hours.

***

“He’s losing his mind,” Myka hears Tracy say before she’s through the door.

“I will kill Kevin,” is how Myka greets her little sister, setting her plate and her glass down on the dining table and approaching the apartment door where Kelly stands, letting Tracy in. Where Tracy just barely enters into the apartment and allows her book bag to fall to the floor.

“It’s not Kevin,” Tracy says immediately, sighing, shaking her head incredulously in Myka’s direction. “Do you _really_ think I couldn’t take Kevin down, Ophie?” At least she laughs, small and slight thought it may be. At least she calls her Ophie, annoying as _that_ may be. It had been months, it had been too long, and Myka had actually missed that godawful nickname. Even if she had always half-heartedly embraced it.

“Then _who_?” Myka questions but as she is asking it, she knows. Before she even thinks to ask it, she knows. Because the second Tracy stepped through that door, she has been scanning every bit of her little sister’s skin for signs. Of marks. Of bruises. Of anything at all that might incriminate the exact soul… or soulless, Myka thinks, might be more fitting… that has hurt her little sister.

Myka supposes Kevin as the culprit was just wishful thinking because that would be easy. Taking care of that would require nothing more than a phone call to Mrs. Cho, several threatening text messages, maybe even a slow evening drive past the Cho residence. But taking care of this other thing, the thing which is actually the problem and the person who is actually the culprit…

It requires so much more from Myka than even she believes she is willing to give.

***

“Dad is losing his mind.”

Myka’s first thought is surprisingly _not_ , “Duh.”

Myka’s first thought is what it must feel like to have a father, not your own, who has raised you so much like what a father is supposed to raise a daughter like, that when you find out you are not his… you still want to call him dad.

She doesn’t know if it’s habit because their father is the only father either of them has ever known. She doesn’t know if it’s exhaustion because Tracy is tired of being reminded that there even exists a distinction in the first place. Myka doesn’t know if it’s just plain laziness because Tracy has a tendency to settle for things and accept things as they are and embrace them at face value. Or if it’s stubbornness because Tracy has always been that way, too.

Myka doesn’t know _what_ it is but whatever it is, it makes her admire her little sister. It simultaneously makes her want to slap her sister across the face again and beg her, plead for her, to call that man who raised them both, raised Tracy more than he actually raised Myka, anything else but “dad”.

She wishes so much that Tracy could see how lucky she is to have that option.

Myka’s second thought, which she voices now, is, “Duh,” and Kelly swats her arm.

“Well, I tell you these things,” Myka says turning back to Tracy whilst absent-mindedly rubbing that sore spot on her arm, “but you either don’t listen or you don’t believe me. So which is it? Let me know so that I can say it again. Dad’s an alcoholic, Trace, and he only cares about himself.”

“Dad’s sober, Myka,” Tracy says with a pitiful shake of her head and the saddest eyes Myka has ever seen on her. Sadder, even, than the time she’d broken a dish at the Wells Christmas party, nearly a decade ago now, and let Myka take the fall, “and now he doesn’t even care about that much.”

***

Tracy visits their father on the weekends. Myka has known this for some time. She doesn’t say much about it. Tracy has always favored their father, even despite his abuses. Their father has obviously always favored Tracy, even despite her rebellions. So Tracy visits their father on the weekends, especially when Rebecca leaves town or isn’t available or can’t commit to whatever it is she and their father have going on.

But Rebecca hasn’t been back to the house in a month, their father doesn’t take care of himself now any more than when Myka lived under the same roof as him, and Tracy has been diligently picking up all of the slack.

“This all started,” Tracy tells Myka, “when he found out about Jack.”

Myka wants to say things like “who gives a fuck” and “I don’t care” and “let him dig himself into a grave so that I may dance drunkenly upon it” but she does give a fuck and she does care. She cares about her sister and she cares about how their father’s attitude, his sudden lack of appreciation for even Tracy’s presence in his life, is affecting her little sister’s attitude. Because there had been days Tracy hadn’t gone to school. And there had been concerned calls, from Mrs. Cho and teachers and even Mrs. Frederic, to Myka’s mother about Tracy’s grades slipping, about her falling asleep in class, about a shift in her attitude that was so unlike her… that went beyond being able to excuse it all away with pre-graduation anxiety or twelfth year blues or so-called Senioritis.

And now it is beginning to make sense. Now Myka can see that a big part of Tracy coming back into their lives and apologizing for disappearing and wanting to be close to their mother and Myka and all of their family again is, in party, because their father has started pushing her away. Now Myka can see that Tracy’s recent demeanor towards and lack of interest in school is because Tracy is trying to earn her way back into that man’s good graces.

Although Myka cannot, for the life of her, understand _why_.

“Kevin and I tried taking dad to lunch,” Tracy explains this as Kelly is setting a glass of water and a plate of food down in front of her, where she now sits at the dining table. “He’s been locked up in his house all month. He doesn’t go anywhere. He doesn’t do anything but sleep and when he isn’t sleeping, he writes. And when he isn’t writing he’s sleeping again. I just wanted him to get out into the sunshine, eat a real meal…”

So Tracy and Kevin take him to lunch and Tracy already knows it isn’t the greatest idea because his walls are up and he’s not saying much but when he does speak, it’s rude or dismissive or unnecessarily morbid. And if it isn’t any one of those things, then it’s him asking Tracy if his daughter read the thing that he had tasked her to get Myka to read. And he says it just like that, “Did my daughter ever read the manuscript?”

“I tell him, ‘I’m your daughter, too, Dad,’ just like that. I don’t know any other father than him, Myka. He is my dad, he is the only dad I have ever had, and he just… shrugs and turns away and says in that grumpy racist grandpa way that he’s always had about him, ‘Jack is rolling over in his grave.’”

Myka rolls her eyes at the thought because she can envision it well. She can see his exact movements in a situation like this. Guarded and defensive but lacking the liquid courage to actually do anything other than complain about it underneath his breath, though he says it just loud enough for everyone at the table to hear.

Myka wants to say again to her little sister, “I told you so. I _told_ you,” but her sister is crying.

 _Tracy_ … is crying.

“Emma,” Myka says softly and she scoots her chair closer and pulls Tracy into her and wraps her arms tight around her, presses her cheek to Tracy’s cheek, and Tracy just cries even more, “you have a whole family here that was made much more functional by that man’s removal from it.  Don't you ever ask yourself _why_ that is?”

Tracy says again, through quiet sobs and gasps of air, “But he is the only dad I have ever had, Myka, and he has been doing an okay job of it,” she sniffles and sits up and wipes at her eyes, Myka wipes at her eyes, too. “Even after he found out it was me and not you. Even after that, he was better. He still gave a shit. But now that it’s Jack… _just_ because it’s Jack. I don’t even know who Jack is, Myka. He didn’t raise me. He didn’t even try. He _died_ giving up on me.”

“Tracy,” Myka sighs and she wipes away more of Tracy’s tears, “I wish… that I had anything at all to say to you, to make this better for you. To make this feeling hurt a little less. But Dad, he’s… has always … will _always_ … only care about himself and about what he wants. Drunk or sober, Jack or no. He thinks he can decide when he wants to be a father. He thinks he can choose who he wants to be a father to, as if parenthood is something you can just turn off when you get tired of dealing with your kids. Or when you feel like going out to have a drink--”

“That’s not true. He was fine before he found out. He was fine before it was Jack. Why can’t he be fine now? Why can’t he just be the same dad that he was before he knew? What does it matter that it was him?”

Tracy’s questions, her cries, they come at a mile a minute. Every question she asks, in one form or another, Myka hears herself asking. Not now because she doesn’t care anymore. But when she did care, when she was younger. When she was seven and ten. Twelve and fourteen. Myka hears all of those younger versions of herself asking these very same questions. They had been asking those questions for years and none of these questions, not a single one of them, had a logical answer. Not that she could find. Not that she cared to know.

“How can you just turn off… loving your daughter,” and that, Myka thinks, is the biggest question of all. She’d asked herself so many times. She sometimes imagined herself asking her father that question, too. How… do you just turn that off? “How do you turn off loving a daughter you raised from birth just because of who her father is? You _can’t_. You _don’t_.”

“ _He_ can,” Myka says softly, sighing, and setting her hands over Tracy’s cheeks, “Tracy, he _did_.” Myka offers her a tight smile that is small and sympathetic, she softens her voice and she leans further into Tracy, until their foreheads are touching and she wipes more of those tears from Tracy’s cheeks, “He’s been doing it for twenty years.”

***

Myka must love her sister a lot. Both her mother and Jane tell her this after she asks to borrow one of their cars to get to and from school the following week. After she also let’s them know that she and Kelly will be dropping by Myka’s dad’s place one of those evenings to see what is going on with him that has Tracy, of all people, so upset. Both her mother and Jane also tell her that they expected nothing less from her. They know Myka. Almost too well.

Myka knows she loves her sister because as she and Kelly are driving into the city, to check up on the man she cares little to nothing about outside of whatever context he has managed to turn her little sister into an emotional worrisome mess… all Myka can see is that pitiful look on Tracy’s face. All Myka can think about is how to make that look go away. And all Myka can hear is the way Tracy tries to convince Myka that she _knows_ it isn’t Myka’s fault or obligation or duty, or even within her realm of interest, to check in on their father. But she wouldn’t ask her if it weren’t so emergent. She wouldn’t ask any of this of Myka, if Tracy thought for a second that she could handle whatever it is.  And neither Jane nor Jean has any interest in going.

Myka knows, and she knows that Tracy knows, she has come to value, far more than before, her relationship with her little sister. After everything that has happened, after everything they have been through and learned and been made to deal with… they have grown older and they have grown closer and wiser. They have come to appreciate one another in a way Myka never before thought possible. In a way that makes Myka want to avoid ever finding another reason to push her little sister, her _only_ sister, away.

***

Myka has seen her father rather sporadically since the last time he showed up, unannounced, at the bookstore. She has seen him in passing in the city, she has seen him at Tracy’s school events. She ran into him once at a bookstore near her campus, just shortly after Christmas, bickering with, or being bickered at by, Rebecca St. Claire even as he pushed her wheelchair through the aisles. Myka expects to see him once more at Tracy’s graduation at the end of the school year and with each new occurrence, she is less and less thrown by his appearance.

Myka has seen that her father has greyed significantly. She has seen that he looks older, much older, than he is, and that he appears tired all of the time. She’s seen that he’s lost weight and has given no thought to buying new clothes to accompany that weight loss, so he is swimming in what he wears. She sees that he seems smaller, that he looks fragile. That he is one fall away from breaking.

On top of the slight hunch, which she has also seen, the permanent frown, which he has always had, and how very slow he moves on a leg that hasn’t been the same since the crash (Tracy filled her in on that long ago), Myka has almost convinced herself that this man, weak and fragile and soft-spoken when he dares say anything to her at all, is not her father. That he is not the same man she grew up with. The same man who yelled and spat and grabbed and hit and swore and swatted at her, day in. Day out.

He is a stranger dressed in her father’s skin. He is some hollowed shell of the person he once was… or that he just doesn’t have the youthful strength or energy to be anymore.

This false impression of him (because Myka has also been actively convincing herself that this weakened impression, of the man she has always known to be violent and aggressive, is definitely false) is made no more better when she and Kelly arrive at his house. This image of weakness and fragility is made no more better when Kelly, taking the lead, knocks on that man’s door… when, nearly two minutes later, that door is opening… and when they are confronted not only by the reality of how much that man has changed since Myka had seen him just one month prior but by the peculiar smell that drifts out from his home.

It is not even the least bit pleasant. It is nothing like how Myka remembers it, from her first and only other visit.

“Myka--”

“No,” she cuts him off before he can even begin. It has become his customary way of greeting her and her customary way of not greeting him at all. She says, “Dad,” because she is distracted and she and Kelly both are looking beyond the small and wilted frame that has become her father and into the house and all she sees, everywhere, is trash. Crumpled up pieces of paper, newspaper, pizza boxes, plastic bags with more trash. But the bulk of these things are empty cups and drink containers from fast food restaurants.

“Why are you…” he starts but he does not finish that sentence and even the way he sounds, his voice scratchy and hoarse, as if he hasn’t spoken a word in weeks, transforms him into something other than the man Myka knows. That once-scary person that Myka has always known. This new person, the fragile one, that one that is already broken and listless, who moves like an old man… he looks at Kelly, at first quiet and observing, and then he asks, “Who is your friend?”

And Kelly, because she’s Kelly, tilts her head to the side saying, “I’m the one who’s going to put you in the hospital if you even _think_ about coming close to her,” and she points back at Myka.

Myka, in any other situation, might roll her eyes at Kelly’s over-protectiveness, her penchant for violence, her willingness to negotiate first and foremost with her fists. But today it is welcomed. Today, there is no one else Myka would rather have by her side through this than Kelly.

Having Kelly here gives her the strength to do what she needs to do. To say what she needs to say without the intimidation. Without the feeling of needing to flee with every unreadable, unpredictable move or stare or expression that her father makes in her direction. Kelly makes Myka feel like she can say anything to this man right now and there is so much that she _wants_ to say, that she has wanted to say to him for _years_. But Myka isn’t here for herself. Not today. She is here for Tracy. Kelly, too, is here for Tracy but she is also here for Myka.

It is in this moment, too, that Myka comes to understand why, when she’d asked the question of Helena those few years ago. Why Kelly? Why Kelly and not Myka?

 _This_ was why.

***

Myka doesn’t have a plan of action, despite Kelly having asked her what, exactly, she intended to do when they arrived at her dad’s place. The only thing that Myka knows is what it’s going to take to get her dad to pull his shit together, to get his head out of his ass, and start treating Tracy like the princess she has always been to him, once again. And what it’s going to take, the irony of which is not lost on her at all, is Myka’s presence.

It’s going to take Myka’s acknowledging that he exists. It’s going to take Myka going to him and telling him, straight from her own mouth, that what he is doing now is not better than what he was doing before. That this is not making him the better person that he thinks he’s become, that he always claims to be while sober.

 _This_ is not making him any different in Myka’s eyes than he has always been in the past. It is not impressive, not that she will ever be impressed by him.  It is just more of his same bullshit. More of the same manipulation. More of him trying to get exactly what he wants, when he wants it. Being exactly who he wants to be to whomever he wants, whenever he chooses.

Myka doesn’t have a plan but she is pissed off and she has Kelly and she is thinking only of her little sister trying to put up with this emotionally and physically abusive disgruntled and worthless excuse of a father… and that, to Myka, is really all the plan she needs.

It works because she has Kelly. Kelly pushes her way past Myka’s father and into his house and she pulls Myka in with her, leaving her father with little room to protest. Because he won’t tell her to get out, if he sees that she is clearly the only thing keeping Myka there to begin with. And he won’t likely challenge her in any other way, for much the same reason.

“Yikes,” Kelly says, looking around at the mess, kicking at an empty cup on the floor. Myka, too, is looking around the living room, stretching to see into the kitchen. The sink appears to have dishes stacked in it but it is not quite as messy in there as it is in the living room and around the couch, where she assumes her dad has been spending most of his time both sleeping and writing.

There is a glass bottle on the coffee table, just in front of that couch, which has no label on it but is filled with an almost clear liquid. Myka immediately reaches for it and holds it up to her nose.

“It’s ginger ale,” her dad speaks before she can determine the exact scent. Myka squints her eyes at him before arching a brow and giving him her best look of skepticism. “ _Just_ … ginger ale. If you had called… if I had some warning, I would have cleaned--”

“I’m not here to catch up,” Myka says setting the bottle back down on the table and reaching for a prescription bottle that is partially hidden beneath more stacks of paper. She examines the label which is made out to her father and says, not even looking at him, “I’m here for Tracy.”

“Did she have another seizure?” he asks, as if he is suddenly worried. Myka shakes her head, still reading the bottle, “Is your sister okay?”

“No, Warren, she’s not,” Myka turns to him and shakes that bottle of pills, “what is this?”

“I’ve had trouble sleeping… since the accident. What’s wrong with Tracy?”

“This prescription is from last week and it’s almost empty,” Myka says accusingly, ignoring his worries.

Her father is quiet for a long while before he looks away and says, in that disgruntled racist grandpa voice she’d imagined days ago during Tracy’s story, “Doctors think they know everything. I told her that dosage wasn’t helping.”

“They know medicine,” Kelly speaks and when she says it, she says it loud. It makes Myka’s father jump… or flinch or cringe, she’s not quite sure but whatever it is, it is a curiosity to Myka. To see her dad so on edge. To see her dad so startled by the harshness of Kelly’s tone. He is still on edge, when Kelly goes on to say, “That’s kind of their thing.” And Myka hands her the bottle of pills to look over, as Kelly would certainly know more about medicine than herself.

“Where’s Rebecca?”

“She left. We didn’t--”

“I can only imagine why,” Myka says cutting him off, further examining the mess that is taking over the room in which they stand.

“Maybe she got tired of cleaning up after the man who paralyzed her and orphaned a six-year-old girl,” Kelly offers, mastering that disgruntled old man tone while looking over another pill bottle she’s found on the coffee table. “Pain killers,” she says, handing that one to Myka.

“I don’t know who you think you are--”

“Concerned older sister,” Kelly interrupts with a smile, “but don’t worry, Mr. Bering. You’re not my father and I’m not your daughter. I wouldn’t want you to have a panic attack thinking you’d missed an opportunity to ruin yet another person’s childhood.”

Myka is surprised when her father chooses to ignore this statement in favor of pleading his case with her, “I know that I can never atone for all of these things I have done, Myka, but if you read the manuscript --”

“You have _one_ daughter, Warren,” Myka interrupts, turning back to her father and holding up a solitary finger. “Just one,” she repeats and her father moves to speak again, he starts to say, "Yes, I know," but she shakes her head and he instantly closes his mouth, “That daughter… is not me.”

“Myka…”

“Tracy is your daughter,” Myka continues, moving across the living room to the television console, kicking crumpled up papers across the floor along the way. She tips a cup that is perched on that console and smells its contents. More soda but if there is any alcohol in it, there is not enough for her to smell. “Tracy is the one who visits you on the weekends. Tracy is the one who brings you groceries, cooks you meals, and convinces you to leave this pigsty to see the light of day. Brings her boyfriend home for you to meet, to bond with. To, for whatever asinine reason she has, get your seal of approval, despite the fact that they’ve been dating for five whole entire centuries.”

“That boy has never been good enough--”

“ _Tracy_ ,” Myka emphasizes, cutting him off once again, “not me, is the one who cares about your fucking glucose levels and your cholesterol, and the fact that you’re more susceptible to having a third heart attack now than you have ever been before. Not me.” Myka crosses her arms in front of her. “Tracy is the one who cares about you and that goddamn manuscript. I don’t fucking care. Actually, I care as much about those things as you used to care about me. Little to none.  Or, more accurately, not at all.”

Her father says nothing. He lowers his head.

“ _Tracy_ is the daughter you always fought for,” Myka nods, stepping back over to Kelly’s side, “I’m just the daughter you always fought.”

“I thought I was fighting for both of you, Myka,” he speaks, raising his head to look upon her with sad and furrowing brows. “I was a drunk. I thought I was teaching you something… by taking control.”

“Well,” Myka’s laugh is soft and incredulous and she brings her hands together in front of her, as if in praise for this moment, for this grateful opportunity, “you definitely taught me something, _Dad_ ,” and this time she says it sarcastically, she says it in such a way that her father knows she doesn’t mean it, when she calls him dad… she says it in such a way that he knows he doesn’t deserve even that title. “You taught me to hate myself. You taught me to believe that everyone else hates me, too. You taught, or rather, you tricked me into believing that I would never be good enough for you and if I could never be good enough for you, bottom of the barrel, how could I possibly be good enough for anyone else?”

“I was wrong.”

“You were _very_ wrong.”

“I was no father to you, Myka.”

“A conclusion you’ve reached twenty years too late, Warren.”

“And yet here you stand,” he goes on, “courageous and strong-willed and determined. Still trying your damnedest, and God knows why, to set your worthless father straight. Sticking up for your baby sister, who has never stood up for you? You, Myka, are better than any sister that Tracy could ever hope to have. You are the daughter that your mother always wanted. Despite me. In spite of me?” he shrugs and not only that but he moves from where he stands, slowly and with that limp, he moves.

Myka turns a suspicious glance to Kelly who arches a brow and glances to Myka’s father before her expression turns just as suspicious as Myka’s now. When he steps closer to them, Kelly moves a protective hand in front of Myka and they step out of his path. A path that leads directly to the couch, to the center of this absolute mess that they’ve found him living in. Both literally and figuratively. He sits and rests upon it.

“You’re resilient, Myka,” her father seems to need to recover, to catch his breath, even with that little bit of movement, “and I’m sorry it took what it did, that I put you through everything I put you through, in order for that to happen,” he speaks slowly and it only serves to further weaken that image of him that has been residing at the forefront of Myka’s mind… and that only makes Myka’s guard go up. It alarms her senses. Makes her question everything she has ever hated about this man… about who he claims he no longer is… never really was, “but I’m proud of you for making it through.”

“Yeah, well,” Myka shakes her head and moves for the door, quietly touching Kelly’s arm to signal that she is ready to leave this place, and as fast as she can, “I didn’t come here to catch up. Or to talk about me. Or to hear all of your half-assed apologies.”

“I know, you came for Tracy,” he nods, “to tell me to be a better father to her.”

“Not a better father,” Myka corrects, shaking her head just before nodding, “but a father, period.  The father you always claimed to be.   _Her_  father.  Because that girl loves and adores you. She has had the privilege of having good memories of you and there’s a pretty good chance that she’s the only person left who does.”

Myka’s father watches her in silence for several long moments and Myka is training her face not to express what she is feeling in this moment. Because she is overwhelmed and tired. She is emotionally drained. She feels closed in, almost trapped, and ready to escape. She is about ready to break free of this place and the way it feels and never come back again.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you cry before.” These words, her father’s voice, the way he gazes at her, as if in awe, when he says them… are all too much for Myka. She is reaching her hands to her face, expecting to uncover a lie, but she is met with wet palms and warm cheeks. A sudden and unexplainable sinking feeling moves slowly throughout her body and into the pit of her stomach.

Suddenly she wants to throw up.

“I’m glad she isn’t yours,” Myka says in a whisper, blindly reaching for Kelly’s hand, finding the other girl’s wrist and squeezing tight. “I’m glad it was me and not her… because you don’t even deserve to be her father. And Tracy doesn’t need to stand up for me. I don’t expect her to. I don’t expect her to _have_ to stand up against her own father to protect her big sister when she shouldn’t have to stand up against her own father at all.”

Myka has no more words for her dad today. She has no more courage, no more will, strong or otherwise, and she certainly doesn’t have any more determination. She turns and she goes and she tugs Kelly along behind her.

But Kelly pulls back against that tug, for just a moment, to set those pill bottles back on the coffee table and say, to Myka’s father, “You know, you can’t abuse someone throughout their entire childhood and just waltz back into their life singing praises about how much better and stronger and wiser they are for having survived everything that _you_ put them through.”

Myka’s dad does nothing more than narrow his eyes on Kelly and tug the blanket beside him further around his small frame, growing even smaller beneath the intensity of Kelly’s glare.

“ _You_ are the bad guy, Mr. Bering,” Kelly emphasizes, stepping back and mirroring Myka’s grasp on her wrist by grasping Myka’s wrist in return, “you don’t get to be the savior, too.”

***

Two hours later, after all of this has been said and done, after Myka and Kelly have returned home and Myka has mostly recovered from the encounter and shaken off her nerves and, for good measure, cried a bit in her mother’s arms… she receives a phone call from her dad. She sends that call to voicemail and her dad leaves her a message that she doesn’t listen to for at least another day or two after that.

“You’re right. I don’t deserve to be Tracy’s father and I most certainly never deserved to be yours. I want to do better. I will _try_ to do better, Myka. Whatever it takes to atone for my actions in the past, to make you see that I am no longer… _the bad guy_. Then who knows, maybe, in my lifetime, you and Tracy and I can enjoy a lunch outing together.” There is a momentary pause and a soft, amused puff of laughter, before he adds, “You could bring your brutally honest Hispanic friend. I like her a lot.”

Myka plays the message again for Kelly, who is not the least bit impressed.

“Well, it’s certainly not the most racist thing an old white guy has said about me before.”

***

Over the next two weeks, Myka begins to regret having that talk with her dad because he does make things right with Tracy, and that’s just fine… but Tracy spends the better part of two weekends riding into the city with Mrs. Cho, staying at their dad’s house, and cleaning that pigsty he calls home. It takes that long, she tells Myka, not because there is so much mess but because their father refuses to let any of it go. The crumpled up papers, especially.

“They’re all thoughts that he’s written down, crumpled up, and tossed to the floor,” Tracy tells Myka, when she calls her once from their dad’s house. “You would think I’d found his stash of buried treasure and threatened to donate it to the Rockafellers.”

Myka can already hear his speech about rich people getting richer.

“Don’t let him take advantage of you, Trace,” Myka warns her little sister but she doesn’t want to say that he’s only doing this in an attempt to reach out to Myka, to establish the start of some sort of healing relationship with her. Even if Tracy already knows that to be the case, Myka doesn’t want to be the one saying it. “You have two months left of school and I’m letting you know, right now, that he is not worth you missing out. Not on prom or graduation… senior field trips--”

“I know,” Tracy says somewhat exasperated, “I _know_ , Myka. I’m fine. My grades are up. Cheer is over with and I have the extra time for him, I do.”

“Okay, Trace,” Myka sighs, “I just want to be sure that he is making the time for you as well. And making a real effort to be a decent human being. All right?”

“Yeah,” Tracy says softly, “I know. Thanks, Ophie.”

***

Helena calls.

It’s only the third time they’ve talked on the phone since she returned to London from Brazil in February and it already feels too soon. But Helena calls because she’s heard from Kelly about Myka’s visit to see her father and this, she feels, goes so far beyond whatever residual awkwardness they may still share from their broken relationship.

“You’re still my friend,” Helena tells Myka, and Myka has no doubt that this is true. She had not even questioned why Helena would be calling. She had assumed Kelly would tell her what happened. She knew it was only a matter of time before Helena reached out to her about it, “I still care about you, Myka. And your father, how he’s treated you your whole life, there is no excuse. He should be so lucky, that you even still speak to him… even if just for Tracy.”

“I’m surprised it took Kelly two weeks to tell you,” Myka says smiling into the phone. She is exhausted and sick of talking about, even _thinking_ about, her father. She wants to welcome the sound of Helena’s voice in her ear, even if she knows it is the last thing she needs. Thinking about Helena, about being close to Helena once again, is the absolute last thing she needs in her already complicated life. But she needs the thought of Helena far more than she needs all of these exhaustive, complicated, and conflicted thoughts on her father.

“It’s taken me two weeks to work up the nerve to call you,” Helena admits quietly, “I have partially dialed your number far too many times in these past two weeks to keep track.”

“So, what finally inspired you… to call?” Myka means to just ask this because she’s curious. She doesn’t mean for it to come out sounding as gentle as it does. As intimate as it feels.

“I just told myself,” Helena sighs heavily, laughing softly, presumably at her own self-conscious thoughts, “that things between us… couldn’t possibly get any worse than they are now. Not with just one quick phone call from a concerned friend.” Helena pauses but before Myka can think of what to say, to fill up that silence, she carries on, “Also, I’m two glasses into an embarrassingly cheap bottle of Malbec that I’m sure won’t hold for longer than a day. So…”

“Hmm,” Myka hums out a smile, “it certainly feels as if it could, though, doesn’t it? As if things could so very easily be worse… as if we have to tread carefully with and around each other.”

Helena sounds something close to defeated when she exhales slowly and softly says, “Yes. Sometimes.”

There is more silence between them but this time Myka welcomes it. She is losing herself in her thoughts, listening to Helena breathe softly. Listening to the sound of Helena’s bath water as it moves when she moves in it. Listening, too, to that woman breaking the silence when she swears just below her breath and sheepishly admits to Myka that she’s just spilled wine in her bath.

Myka smiles. She just can’t help herself. Because somewhere in this world, there exists an intelligent, gorgeous, wealthy English woman who is naked and bathing in wine, and the only other thing that woman wants to do with her time, in this very moment, is talk to Myka.

“You know, I finally get it, Helena,” Myka says, just barely speaking over Helena’s laughing at herself.

“Get what, my love?” That is an old habit, Myka thinks. Helena calling her these far too intimate things. These things Helena only ever started calling her when Helena’s love for her grew into actual love. She was fourteen years old and she still remembers the night Helena first called her _my love_. She is twenty years old now, trying very hard not to think about Helena still grasping onto their love.

So she pretends not to hear it and she’s fairly certain Helena is pretending she didn't say it.

“Kelly,” and that is all Myka says at first, “and why you needed her… back then. She is such a force to have standing by your side when you don’t know what else to do. When you don’t really have a plan…”

“Oh, Kelly,” Helena sighs and Myka can already envision her losing herself in a thought. “I cannot wait to have my Kelly back for two whole weeks.” Myka smiles. “I _am_ sorry to be taking her away from you but, even more than that, I am glad she was able to help, Myka. I'm glad she was with you when you confronted your father.”

“It’s for the best, I guess. That she gets to see Pete and make sure he’s still in one piece. And you…”

Helena laughs softly, saying, “Make sure that I, too, am in one piece?”

“Yeah,” Myka nods, though no one is around to see, “exactly.”

“I’m okay, Myka,” Helena reassures her, not for the first time this year. And, most certainly not for the first time this year, Myka silently questions Helena’s definition of “okay”. “I miss talking to you but… I’m really okay. And you?”

“Better,” Myka whispers, though she doesn’t mean to. But she catches herself slipping away into her own thoughts on everything they have been through. Everything that has brought them to this place. Until her thoughts land suddenly on Sam and she glances at her watch. Myka clears her throat and raises her voice just a bit, “Hey listen, Helena, I’m supposed to meet up with a friend for a run but um… maybe we can talk again soon? _Sooner_ … rather than later.”

“That would only require one or the other of us having enough courage to dial,” Helena teases.

“Or having enough wine?” Myka questions with a mischievous smile.

“ _Goodnight_ , Myka,” Helena says, acting affronted, and Myka just knows she is rolling those beautiful brown eyes of hers. Myka just knows she is smiling that beautiful smile.

“Enjoy your wine bath,” Myka grins, eliciting a playful grunt from that girl on the other end of the phone before saying a final goodnight.

It is the first time, in a long time, that neither of them says, “I love you.”

***

“You know, I could have gone with you, too, to your dad’s. It would have been good police training.” Sam says this as they slow to a walk from their jog and Myka is looking over at him incredulously, focusing on calming her breathing as they walk further into town at a steady pace.

“That’s what the police academy is for, Sam, if you ever actually go,” Myka eventually tells him, “The last thing I need is for you to accidentally taser my dad into having a third heart attack. Tracy would be beside herself.”

Sam is laughing and shaking his head. He asks Myka, “How is Tracy, by the way?”

“Still waiting on that man every weekend,” Myka says. “I don’t think she has done as many chores in her life as she has for him this month. He’s certainly never asked that much of her in the past.”

“Maybe she feels like she has to make it up to him?”

“Make _what_ up? She doesn’t owe him anything."  The mere idea that her father thinks Tracy owes him something is enraging to Myka.  “ _He_ owes _her_. He owes _me_.”

Myka doesn't want anything from him.

“I’ve actually been thinking about this, since we last talked about it.”

Myka rolls her eyes, “Of course you have,” but Sam ignores it, as he’s learned to do.

“So, Tracy said it all started when he found out about her dad, right?” Sam questions and Myka nods in the affirmative but keeps her head lowered, focusing on her feet as they continue their walk. “Your dad kind of fell further apart and Tracy has spent all her time and effort trying to pull him back together again. To the point where she actually came home… did everything her dad asked of her by giving you the manuscript, that you have neither read nor burned by the way,” Myka swats at him, even as he continues talking, “and when _that_ didn’t work,” Sam laughs off Myka’s weak attempts to slap him, “she came to you, of all people Bering, _you_ … for help with your dad.”

“Okay, so you’ve been paying attention, clearly. Maybe a little too closely but any moron with two eyes could figure at least that much out. So what’s your point? How does Tracy _owe my dad_ because all of that, in my opinion, amounts to more of my dad owing her.”

“Yeah, okay, sure but this is Tracy we're talking about, she's probably not thinking of it that way,” Sam shrugs, “she’s still a kid. She thinks it’s her fault that he's slipping in the first place, not just because she told him about Jack but because she kind of… _is_ Jack. She’s another man’s kid and she’s a constant reminder to your dad, who can probably see the resemblance now, wouldn’t you think? If I’m thinking it, I’m sure she’s thought of it.”

“You’re contradicting yourself, Sam,” Myka shakes her head, “you also thought of all that other stuff but Tracy isn’t thinking about _that_.”

“Will you just hear me out and stop being so difficult?”

Myka gasps, affronted. This time, when she swats at him, she gets him good. “How are you doing to be a police officer if you can’t even get your facts straight?”

“Meanwhile,” Sam continues, further ignoring Myka’s rebuttal, “your dad is trying to build some sort of actual working relationship with the kid he, you know… was a dick to, her whole life. So…”

“So Tracy blames herself. Because she is the constant reminder,” Myka sighs heavily and nods, conceding to Sam’s point of view, finding that it all somehow makes sense, even if she doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right. “This is just like when we were kids and I would take the fall for stuff she did. She’d let me, for as long as she could take it. Then she’d break down crying and confess to my dad. _Sometimes_. Only now... my dad isn’t just patting her on the head and saying, ‘Okay, Emma, go play with your dolls.’” Myka sighs again. “And he never will.”

“But Tracy’s going to be waiting for him to,” Sam concludes.

When Myka finally looks up at Sam, he is wearing a smile that is somewhere between gloating and sympathy.

“I will smack it off your face,” Myka warns him, just before he bursts into laughter. “I _hate_ when you say things that actually make sense. It drives me _nuts_.”

“I’m just doing my job, ma’am,” Sam says proudly, holding a hand to his chest, “serve and protect.”

“Gloat and be smug, sounds a little more accurate,” Myka teases as the wrist watch she wears begins to beep in alarm. “Time to run again,” she announces, restarting the timer, “ten more blissful minutes of silence, here I come.”

“You don’t fool me, Bering. I know that somewhere, beneath that cold, _rigid_ exterior,” Sam is teasing, Myka is already laughing, swatting, telling him to watch his mouth, “there is a part of you that _really_ likes me.”

They set off into a jog again, amidst their own awkward laughter. And just in time. Because Myka so hates when Sam says things that actually make sense.

She’d hate, even more, for him to see the way all of his so-called sense makes her smile.


	26. Everything's Fine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claudia goes missing, Leena and Myka catch up, Helena calls again.

Claudia goes missing.

Myka is just returning home from dropping Kelly off at the airport when she receives a call from Jane asking if Claudia is with her. Claudia is most definitely not with Myka but she does have a key, so Myka checks the store, checks the apartment, too, with Jane still on the line. Jane explains to Myka how they’re concerned because Claudia hadn’t spoken much the night before, when she’d been dropped off by her brother. She hadn’t said much before going to school either but she did acknowledge them, with a quiet nod of her head, when they’d told her they both had a meeting to attend and to just wait for them in the front office.

“Of course, she’s not in the office and, according to Steph at the front desk, she never showed up,” Jane further explains, “but one of the kids says they saw her walking off campus over an hour ago. We’re not panicking, yet, I’m sure she’s just gone to a friend’s house or something…” But Jane sounds like she’s panicking, even if Jane’s version of panicking is nowhere near Myka's mother’s level of panicking.

“She’s not here,” Myka informs her and she doesn’t miss the way Jane swears beneath her breath before saying, “I’m not mad, I’m just worried. She’s not Pete, so whatever is going on with her, to make her just walk away… well, it’s concerning. At least with Pete, I knew he was off being a numbskull.”

“Or with me,” Myka smiles.

The landline in the bookstore rings at that moment and Myka asks Jane to hold on while she answers that phone, too.

“Hi, Myka! I’m so glad I finally caught you. It’s Viv, from next door. I didn’t have your mobile number to call and--”

“Hi, Ms. Vivian,” Myka greets, “I’m sorry, I just got in and I’m just about to head out again. Is everything okay?”

“Yes, honey, everything’s fine. Well, I think,” but the woman on the phone doesn’t sound so sure of herself, “Claudia’s hair is done but you may need to come pick her up. She’s crying and she doesn’t seem ready to leave.”

“Wait, Claudia’s there?”

“Yes, you sent her over for a cut, didn’t you?”

“Hold on, Ms. Vivian,” and Myka brings her cell phone to her other ear, she asks Jane, “you didn’t schedule Claud for a hair appointment and forget about it, did you?”

“No, Myka, I think I would remember if I’d scheduled her for a hair appointment,” Jane says and Myka imagines it is with all of the sass that she can possibly muster. “And even if I had... why? Is she at Viv's?”

“Yes, she's there--”

“Oh, thank God,” Jane sighs heavily in relief and says, presumably to Myka’s mother in the background, “she’s at Viv’s getting her hair cut,” then to Myka again, “why the heck is she getting a hair cut?”

To Ms. Vivian, Myka says, “I’ll be right over to pick her up. Thank you, Ms. Vivian,” and concludes that phone conversation. To Jane, Myka says, “I’ll bring her home.”

“Stay put.  We’ll be on our way to you,” and that conversation ends, too.

***

Ms. Vivian has owned the salon next door for as long as Myka can remember so whenever Myka walks next door, Ms. Vivian greets her with a smile and a hug and an occasional kiss to her temple. She’ll tell everyone, “This is my white daughter Myka,” even though everyone already knows who Myka is, knows she is white, knows she is not actually her daughter, and have also, most of them anyway, known her for her entire life.

When Myka lived on the college campus, Ms. Vivian would tell her, whenever she saw her, “Don’t have me find out that you went to some other salon and let them ruin your hair, young lady. You’re never too far from home to return,” because only Ms. Vivian has ever cut her hair.

Except for that first time when her mother had tried cutting her hair. Or the time a four-year-old Tracy was learning to cut in preschool and snuck up behind her with training scissors. Or that other time the doctors were forced to shave it off so they could put her stitches in.

After _those_ disasters, only Ms. Vivian had ever cut her hair.

But Ms. Vivian is more than just a friendly neighbor and a familiar face. She has been an ever-present staple of humor and racial cognizance in Myka’s life who, as Jane once told Myka, is fueled by Myka’s father’s own past prejudice and ignorant statements toward her. Myka’s mother had also said, “I could tell you one million stories in which Viv has made your father physically recoil just by mentioning her _blackness_.” And the way Myka’s mother says _blackness_ makes _her_ want to physically recoil because it just doesn’t sound the same coming from her as it does from Ms. Viv.

Still, all that Myka could think to say about _all of that_ , at the time, was, “Great, not only is my father an abusive asshole but he’s also a racist.”

Jane had quickly corrected, “Abusive racist asshole _alcoholic_ ,” and raised, in mock toast, the glass of wine she’d been drinking at the time.

***

Ms. Vivian meets Myka just outside of the salon and this meeting is not much different from any other. Myka gets her smile, her hug, that kiss on her temple. But the smile, after that, slips quickly away and Ms. Vivian’s expression turns a bit more serious when she lowers her voice and says, “I think Claudia’s thinking about her mother.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s just a little teary,” Ms. Vivian nods and gives Myka a sympathetic smile, “Bernadette is inside talking to her right now.”

With a hand against Myka’s back, Ms. Vivian leads her inside the salon, past familiar faces that offer more sympathetic smiles before turning their eyes, mostly red and teary and all at once looking in the same direction. Myka sees Bernadette, Mrs. King, leaning down just in front of where Claudia sits in a salon chair.  Claudia's hair is cut shorter than she’s ever seen it before, to just above her ears, and her head is lowered.  She's staring, almost angrily, down at her own lap. Her hands are gripping the arms of the chair. There are tears falling down red cheeks and against the smock she still wears.

“You have every right and reason to be upset, Claudia,” Myka can hear Mrs. King saying softly to her, “just know that you’re welcome here anytime.”

Claudia doesn’t speak but she nods. She wipes at her eyes with the back of her wrist and tries hard, Myka can _see_ that she's trying, not to whimper.

“Claud,” Myka speaks carefully upon approaching them.

Mrs. King stands straight and sets her hand over Claudia’s on the chair. She tells Myka, “She’s just thinking about her mama,” Mrs. King nods, “and feeling just a little bit bad about it. But we’ve talked a bit about grieving, right Claudia? That no one expects you to forget about your family. No one wants you to forget about them.”

“Josh does,” Claudia’s voice says quietly, trembling. She doesn’t look up but Myka’s eyes meet Mrs. King’s questioning gaze and she tells her, “Claudia’s older brother,” in a soft whisper before asking Claudia what she means by that.

But Claudia is done for now. She doesn’t want to talk about that and Myka will be the last person on this planet to challenge Claudia’s ability to remain speech free.

“It’s okay,” Myka says, “you don’t have to say anything. Let’s just get you home. Mom and Jane are really worried.”

Claudia doesn’t move.

She closes her eyes tight as more tears fall over her cheeks and she grips that chair tighter.

“She can stay for a little while, if she wants,” Ms. Vivian says quietly and Myka turns to her and shakes her head just slightly.

"Thank you, Mrs. King, but I really should get her home."

Myka turns back to Claudia and steps into that space just in front of Claudia as Mrs. King steps aside.

Myka leans close to Claudia and, with both hands on tiny cheeks, wet and warm from all of this crying, she wipes away tears. She says, softly, “We should go on another trip. Just you and me,” and this gets Claudia’s attention. She looks up and blinks and wipes at the tears that fall down her chin. Myka smiles and lowers her hands to the seat of that chair, to rest at either side of Claudia’s lap, and she adds, “Maybe a road trip.”

“Your car is a piece of junk,” Claudia says quietly, “we wouldn’t make it across state lines.” This makes Myka laugh. It makes everyone within ear shot laugh, too, but it ends quickly when Claudia closes her eyes tight and lowers her head again. “I don’t want to be in a car for that long.”

“You're right,” Myka sighs, “what was I thinking? We’re better off flying.”

“You hate flying.”

“But I love flying with you.”

“Because I’m adorable and attract all the cute lady flight attendants.”

Myka’s smile is wide now, “That’s _our_ secret.”

“She’s _your_ mom.”

Myka doesn’t know what Claudia means when she says that, seemingly out of nowhere. She looks quizzically at the young girl and Claudia seems to settle for taking pity on her lack of understanding.

“You said _Mom_ and Jane but she’s _your_ mom. She’s not _my_ mom.”

“Oh. I… I’m sorry, Claud. I didn’t mean--”

“It’s okay,” Claudia whispers. “I love Ms. Jeannie and I love Ms. Jane, and I want to be their daughter more than I want to be my brother’s sister. But… they’re not my mom. I already have a mom.”

Myka nods in affirmation, “You’re very right, Pip. You do. And more and more, I can see so much of her in you.” Myka wipes away more of Claudia’s tears and offers another gentle smile. “And speaking of, _my_ mom and Jane are headed over right now.”

“Are they mad? That I left the school?”

“They’re not mad,” Myka says, giving Claudia, what she hopes is, a comforting smile, “they were just a little worried. They didn’t understand why you walked away. But I think they’ll understand now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“I’m still sorry.”

Myka leans in close to Claudia and sets her forehead against the younger girl’s forehead, brings her hands back to Claudia’s cheeks and wipes away all of those tears. “Let’s go wash up this adorable, lady-flight-attendant attention-getting face.”

Claudia nods and Myka sets a soft kiss to her nose. Ms. Vivian moves in close to remove Claudia’s smock and places a kiss on top of her head.

“How much was her cut, Ms. Vivian?”

“Don’t worry about it, Myka,” the older woman smiles, waving her off, “Claudia gets all of her cuts free of charge,” and to Claudia she says, “and you can come back anytime you want, baby girl. You don’t need to have a haircut just to visit us.”

“Thank you, Ms. Viv,” Myka tells her, taking Claudia’s hand as she moves out of that seat.

“Thank you, Ms. Viv,” Claudia echoes.

***

When they are just outside of the salon doors, Myka asks Claudia, “A pixie cut, hmm?”

“My mom would never let me cut my hair this short,” Claudia explains and when she looks up at Myka, she adds, “I thought it might just make her mad enough to come back and ground me.”

Myka doesn’t know how to respond to that, not without fighting back tears, but she is opening her mouth up to say anything at all to Claudia, to try and make this hurt less for her, when the salon door comes swinging open. Out of it, Mrs. King with a soft smile and calling Myka’s name. Myka, saved, says, “The door’s unlocked, Pip, why don’t you go wash your face and rest for a bit.”

Claudia nods and says goodbye to Mrs. King.  She goes without protest.

“I know she’s been through hell,” Mrs. King begins to speak as Claudia disappears into the bookstore, as Myka turns to face her, “and I _know_ your mothers are dealing with a lot right now, Myka… but if Claudia ever wants to talk,” Mrs. King holds up a business card, “about _anything_. If there is anyway that I can help,” Myka takes the card, “have Jane call me. I always time for Claudia.”

“Pete used to see you,” Myka says with sudden understanding, upon examining that card, “I can’t believe I never realized… Giselle used to bake him cookies? He always said it was the only reason he agreed to go.” Myka’s laughing softly, examining that business card, and looking curiously back up at Mrs. King.

“That's right, he did. After the fire,” Mrs. King nods, “and Giselle Imani? No, that child couldn’t bake to save a life. He was probably referring to my daughter Nikki.”

It was so long ago.  It is one of those early memories, the ones that has been compromised.  That are vague and foggy.  That Myka can hardly remember.

“I’ll… give this to Jane. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. I know they’ve been talking about it for a while. So thank you, Mrs. King.”

“That goes for you as well, Myka,” Mrs. King speaks up before Myka can turn to go, “if you ever need to talk,” she gestures at the card, “I will always have time for you.”

Myka doesn’t know how to respond to that either. She nods and smiles and asks, for no reason at all, because she doesn’t really want or need to know, “How _is_ Giselle?”

“Good,” Mrs. King smiles, nods, and that is all she has to say about that.  She seems to know how awkward this moment is for Myka.  Myka has a feeling her bringing up Giselle has made Mrs. King feel awkward, too.  Thought she doesn't know why.  

She says thank you again and goodbye, Mrs. King leaves her with another small smile and disappears back into the salon.

At that very moment, Myka’s mother and Jane are pulling up in front of the bookstore.

***

“What was she thinking, leaving without telling either of us anything.”

“I’m glad she’s okay but that girl is in need of a serious sit-down.”

They start out fired up, Jane and Jean.

Myka can hear them fussing before they’re even out of the car. She is standing with her arms crossed, just beneath the awning of the bookstore entry way, and when they approach her, still bickering, she shakes her head. They fall quiet… but only long enough to look at one another curiously and then back to Myka.

“ _Myka_ ,” her mother begins to protest.

“Well, where is she? Is she all right?” Jane is frustrated.

“She’s upset. It’s about her mom. You both need to _calm down_. Also, she’s chopped all of her hair off but it looks really nice so don’t freak out when you see her. And _calm down_.”

“We’re calm!” they say in unison, not at all calmly.

“I swear to God, Myka,” her mother starts, pushing gently past her, “I can’t wait for you to have children of your own.”

“ _Right_?” Jane chimes in, following behind Myka’s mother, “she thinks she has gray hair now. Just you wait, young lady.”

“This is exactly why I’m _not_ having kids,” Myka calls up the stairs after them as they go, “I can barely handle any of the adults in my life.”

"Well if it isn't you, it'll be Tracy," Jane calls back, "and don't you think for one second we're going to help you babysit whatever hellion she produces."

Myka knows, by the way her mother laughs, that her groan could be heard from a mile away.

***

“Bishop died,” is what Claudia says when the mothers, much more calm now that they’ve seen the evidence of her safety and relative good health, question her. And this is how it all started.

Bishop, Claudia’s old dog, had been living with her brother and Ingrid in the city. Because he had been Josh’s old dog, too, there was very little Ingrid could do to protest taking him in after the accident. So Bishop had been at Josh’s place all this time and he had also been Claudia’s anchor, or something like that, she says. That dog had been in the family almost six years longer than she’d been alive and now…

“He was just too old and Josh had to put him down,” Claudia explains, “but he did it last week when I wasn’t even there, and he didn’t tell me so I didn’t even get to say goodbye. Then he left him at the vet to be _disposed_ of, he didn’t even bring him home, so we could bury him at the cemetery with everyone else.”

This spiraled into Claudia getting upset. Ingrid telling Claudia she shouldn’t be so upset over a dog. Claudia yelling at Ingrid, telling her if she’s too cold-hearted to understand loving people, she’d never understand loving Bishop. Josh, apparently, tries to defend Claudia until Ingrid turns on the waterworks and then Josh is telling Claudia that she needs to grow up.

“I’m ten now, he says, I’m old enough to understand how death works. I told him I understand that dogs don’t un-die. That people don’t un-die, either. So what does my being ten have to do with how I feel about our dead mom and dad, and our dead sister? I’ll be fifteen and twenty and fifty and seventy-two, and I’ll still feel the same way because they’ll still be dead.

“He said it was four years ago. It’s not going to un-happen, so I just need to get over the fact that it did happen and accept that I’m going to be fifteen and twenty and fifty and _especially_ seventy-two without them.

“He said if I even live _that_ long.”

Jane is already off of the couch. She is reaching for her purse and simultaneously into that purse for her car keys. She is through the front door so fast, she doesn’t stop to close it.

“Jane, _where_ \--”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, Jean!”

She is down the stairs and five seconds later, the front door to the bookstore slams closed.

There is a long moment of silence after the sound of Jane’s car pulling away at a high rate of speed. Claudia’s tears are falling but she is quiet. She looks between Myka and Myka’s mother. Myka’s mother is still staring wide-eyed at the door that Jane has left wide open.

Myka takes in a deep and steady breath. She asks, after moments more of silence, “Should I be calling the police?”

Her mother looks at her suddenly and Myka expects that look to be upset, for even suggesting she would need to, as if Jane would _ever_ … but that look on her mom’s face is absolutely frightened. Her mother’s mouth falls slightly open.

“Call Josh,” she tells Myka, collecting herself after a while, “tell him he’s got about thirty minutes to come up with a really good reason why Jane shouldn’t beat him to within an inch of his life.”

***

Jane has a really good reason not to beat Josh to within an inch of his life. She has the best, in fact.

Claudia Donovan.

The drive calmed her down, Myka later finds out from her mother. When she’d arrived at Josh’s place, Ingrid had been the only one there. And Ingrid’s only saving grace, after not only threatening to call the cops on Jane but threatening, too, to take Claudia away from their home, was that she is apparently pregnant.

That is at least, what Jane assumes when Josh, soon after, arrives at the house and Ingrid, feigning a medical emergency, tells the responding paramedics that the stress must be too much for her and her unborn child.

This is news to everyone but it is especially news to Claudia who says they hadn’t said anything about it to her but it explains why they recently moved her into a different room in the house.

Jane, having no energy or inclination to deal with Ingrid’s theatrics, tells Joshua that the next time he thinks about getting into an argument with a ten-year-old, he should try leaving out any bits that might easily be misinterpreted as death threats. Joshua Donovan swears upon his life that he did not mean for it to come across that way and Jane tells him whatever way he intended it, he shouldn’t have said everything he did to a ten-year-old who is only four years gone from losing her entire family.

“Not her entire family,” Myka’s mother says are Josh’s parting words to Jane. And Jane’s final response to Joshua, before he gets in his car to follow the ambulance that leaves with his wife, is a message that Myka's sure he won’t soon forget...

“The only ones worth missing.”

***

“I hope she miscarries,” Claudia says, not nearly as quiet as she thinks she does.

“That’s not even remotely funny or appropriate,” Myka tells her, never turning away from the book she reads. Not wanting Claudia to see exactly how alarming Myka has found her comment, nor how casually she says it, to be.

It’s been almost a week since they found out and Myka knows Claudia has been quietly stewing over the news of Ingrid’s pregnancy ever since. She knows that Claudia will eventually have questions and Myka knows many of those questions she will not have the answer to. But she doesn’t expect _this_ , even if morbidity had recently been the topic of many of the conversations Claudia was interested in these days, she doesn’t expect this level of disdain.

The impending sass to follow, however, she does expect. She anticipates it, even. She is slightly more prepared and equipped to handle it.

“I wasn’t trying to be remotely funny or appropriate,” Claudia says angrily, and she’s glaring straight ahead at the television, with the closed captioning on and the volume too low to be heard, when Myka finally turns to look at her.

“I figured as much by the adorable scowl on your face,” Myka attempts a light-hearted tease, to ease any chance of this conversation heading into a direction far too profound for all of the festivities that Myka has planned for this Saturday evening.

They are seated side by side on the living room couch in Myka’s apartment. They are waiting for company to arrive. Sam and Kurt, Tracy and Kevin, too. Not really _company_ , as they aren’t strangers to this place, but guests for the night. Myka wishes Kelly were home to make the apartment more presentable for the gathering, to make the food more presentable, too. But mostly she wishes Kelly were around to settle the steady sound of ticking that Myka is sure she’s heard coming from the tiny little red-haired time bomb of pre-teen angst that is seated beside her.

Kelly has always been so much better at calming Claudia, talking to Claudia, getting to the root of whatever is happening inside of Claudia's head. Bringing her back from whatever ledge she has saw fit to walk out onto. Kelly has always been that way with everyone. Myka’s beginning to think that Kelly’s right about her willingness and ability to heal so many people around her. And while Kelly’s cooking is phenomenal, she’s not sure it’s entirely to blame because wouldn’t that be taking the power away from Kelly? Wouldn’t that reduce Kelly to something less than what she truly is?  Whatever she is.

An angel, perhaps. Myka only thinks this because of how often Claudia is fed stories about her family being angels and how often she tells Kelly she doesn’t believe in angels. And how ironic would it be that the one person in her life, telling her she didn’t have to believe, telling her every comforting thing she needed to hear, was actually an angel?

But Myka doesn’t believe in angels either. Even if she did, the so-called angelic one (Myka laughs about that to herself) isn’t even here.

Kelly’s still in London with Helena and they, together, are having the time of their lives. Myka has received mid-day drunk calls from them, informing her of exactly that.  So Myka hasn’t wanted to worry either of them with news of what’s going on at home. Not with Claudia. Not with Tracy. Not even with Helena’s stupid piece of shit car.

“The child can’t help who it’s born to,” Myka says quietly, “besides, you’ll be its aunt. It won’t be all bad, right?”

Claudia sighs but she doesn’t say anything. She reaches for the remote and turns the volume up on the television.

***

“Thank you for bringing Todd.”

“I figured Claudia could use the company,” Sam shrugs.

They are in the kitchen, readying a buffet style arrangement of foods along the kitchen counter.

“I should have just ordered pizza,” Myka sighs.

“I know I’m no Kelly but this is fine. It’ll work,” Sam says nodding and turning a reassuring smile in Myka’s direction. “Besides, it’s just us anyway, right? No one to impress.” On cue, Kurt reaches between both Myka and Sam to steal a chip and dip it into a bowl of salsa.

“Pardon,” he says smiling, and it is charming, before walking back into the living room to sit with Claudia and Todd.

“Should I have given her time out?”

“For the miscarriage thing?”

Myka’s quiet, nodding.

“Well, first of all, she’s ten. I think she’s out grown timeouts.”

“I don’t want her to think she can just say whatever she wants to without consequence but I don’t know how to discipline kids,” Myka shrugs, throwing her hands in the air. “I mean, not properly anyway. And it’s not like she’s _bad_ , she’s just overstepping and this is exactly why I’m not having any kids. I’ll just screw them up.”

“Talking,” Sam nods, “usually works with Todd. On the rare occasion he does something wrong. Claudia’s kind of the same way, right?”

“Talking,” Myka scoffs. “Parents don’t _talk_ to their kids.”

Sam looks at Myka quietly until she turns to him. He nods and says, “My dad wasn’t much of a parent either. He never talked to me. Not even when I was in trouble. He’d just lock me in my room until my mom came home.”

Myka is twisting her lips to the side and lowering her head and thinking about all of the things that she and Sam have in common, have always had in common. Asking herself why they ever stopped talking. But she answers her own thoughts with an internal reminder that _this_ is exactly why.

They have _too much_ in common. They are constant reminders to each other of how normal their childhoods appeared to them and how _not_ normal they actually were.  How isolated they both are in those experiences.

Myka says, “When I was seven, I realized that standard bedroom doors have the lock on the inside but I couldn’t figure out how or why mine was on the outside.”

Sam laughs softly at this because it is another reminder of their shared past.

“I took it apart and turned it around,” Myka knows she is smiling wide. She can feel the grin pulling at her lips. Even as her mind takes her back to that time, in this very apartment, when she’d dared to slam the door closed on her father and stayed, locked in on the other side, and more scared than she could have recalled then, for almost an entire day. “My bladder was my downfall.”

“Same,” Sam laughs openly now, “Mom was livid.”

“Yeah,” Myka is on longer smiling when she clears her throat. “My dad was, too.”

Instinctively, she reaches her hand to her head, fingers into curls, and when the tips of those fingers find that slight dip, the scarring of tissue where hair doesn’t really grow anymore, so many of those memories come rushing back to her. But it takes one single touch to pull her back. Sam is gently touching the back of Myka’s palm and it instantly breaks her away from her thoughts.

She doesn’t mean to but she jerks her hand away, turns away from him, and busies her fingers by further arranging the platter of snacks before her. But her true savior in this moment is Tracy, late as usual - or right on time - with an arm full of beverages and Kevin trailing just behind her.

Myka says a silent prayer of thanks to whoever may be listening before turning back to Sam, a very quiet Sam who is still, for some reason, watching her with a slight raise of his brow. She smiles and clears her throat and does the only thing she can think of to do, to break the tension.

She backhands him on the arm.

“I don’t have time for your sentimental gazes right now, Martino. Go help Tracy before she drops everything.”

Sam cracks a smile.

“You had me worried for a second there.”

***

“I brought Leena.”

Myka can see that Leena is here. They have already said hello. There was a tight hug, a small kiss on Myka’s cheek, a gentle squeezing of hands. And that smile.

Myka is _very_ aware that Leena is here.

“I’m sorry about that, too.”

Tracy is whispering and Myka isn’t exactly sure why she’s whispering. They are in Tracy’s very much unused bedroom, in Tracy’s bedroom closet. They are looking for their old board games. They’re somewhere up at the top. Myka distinctly remembers putting those old board games somewhere at the top of Tracy’s closet, when she’d finally gotten around to cleaning Tracy’s room. When she’d finally gotten around to convincing herself that Tracy wasn’t actually planning on moving back home.

But Myka and Tracy are not within ear shot of anyone else, so Myka doesn’t know why Tracy is whispering.

“Sorry about what? Bringing her? Don’t be,” Myka whispers, too.

Now she doesn’t know why _she’s_ whispering.

Maybe Tracy knows something that she doesn’t know. About the acoustics in the apartment.  About how well you can hear someone talking in the bedroom from the living room. Maybe this is a thing that Tracy has always known and never told Myka. Myka has said a lot of things in her own bedroom that she didn’t think anyone else could hear but maybe they could and Tracy knew that but no one else bothered telling her.

Maybe this was why her dad was always yelling and screaming at her. Because he could hear absolutely everything she was saying about him.

But Myka’s pretty sure she only said the worst of those things in her head. Myka is pretty certain that her father cannot read minds.

Actually, she’s not really certain about that at all. Maybe he can. Maybe this is why he hated her so much. Maybe this is why he cares about her so much _now_?

“About ruining you for Leena,” Tracy says this while opening boxes, closing boxes, moving boxes out of the closet. Myka’s isn’t sure why she’s doing that either. She’s pretty sure she put those board games at the top of the closet, “Ruining Leena for you.”

“You didn’t ruin Leena for me,” Myka sighs and she’s still whispering and now she’s frustrated. But she isn’t sure if it’s because of Tracy, still apologetic for all of these things she didn’t do and cannot control and also looking in boxes at the bottom of the closet where Myka most certainly did not store those games, or if it’s because she still doesn’t know how far her voice carries outside of this closet. Leena is just in the living room.

What if she can hear them talking about her? The last thing Myka wants to do is hurt that woman ever again. Even if Leena says she wasn’t hurt by their… relationship? Even if Leena seems perfectly okay, Myka isn’t so sure she didn’t hurt her. But she’s also not very sure she, herself, is worth anyone’s hurt feelings. Before Helena, before their breakup, she would have said she definitely not worth anyone's hurt feelings.  But now that she's seen Helena and seen the way and how much Helena truly cares about her?  She’s not sure at all.

 _Still._  Myka says, “I’m pretty sure I ruined myself for Leena. I never should have…”

Myka doesn’t finish that sentence because she doesn’t know what to say and also because she knows exactly what she _doesn’t_ want to say.

Tracy whispers, “Leena used to love the shit out of you. I think she still kinda does. You could have had an actual relationship, if I’d ever thought to let you. You still could...”

Tracy is blaming herself but she’s also giving herself too much power. Myka wants to laugh because this is the exact thing Myka doesn’t want to do, when she thinks about Leena and about the relationship they had. She doesn’t want to say Leena is miserable without her because she knows Leena isn’t miserable without her. Myka doesn’t want Tracy to believe that she’s at fault for this, that they could have had a relationship had it not been for Tracy because they _could_ have had a relationship had it not been for _Myka_.

That much, she does know.

“I took advantage of her,” and Myka doesn’t find this hard to say at all. She has said it to herself so many times since then. She was saying it to herself even then. “That’s not to say I don’t or didn’t love Leena. I just didn’t know that I could actually love her until _after_ everything. I was so mad at Helena. Everything was about Helena. I made Leena all about Helena, even when I was telling Leena it had nothing to do with Helena.”

“How is H anyway? Have you talked to her lately?”

Myka _has_ talked to her lately. She just doesn’t want to talk _about_ her lately.

And much like her relationship with these board games, Myka is about ready to give up on finding just the right way to _be_ with Helena. That’s what she wants to tell Tracy. _I’m sick and tired of looking for something that is clearly out of my reach. Something that is so well hidden, it cannot actually be found._ Instead she says, “Helena is Helena.”

Tracy laughs and shakes her head, pulling out another box. “Honestly, that’s all you’ll ever really need to say about her.”

“I give up,” Myka says, stepping down from a box that is slowly crumbling beneath her weight, and this time she does mean the games and not Helena. “I could have sworn--”

“If you’re looking for the board games,” Claudia is calling from the doorway, just behind them, with Todd by her side, “they aren’t there anymore. Kelly took them to Jane and Jean’s a couple weeks ago for family game night.”

“Family game night?” Myka and Tracy ask simultaneously, turning their attention to Claudia who is smirking and staring down at all of the boxes they’ve pulled from the closet, trying very hard not to smile.

“You,” Claudia says, pointing a finger at Myka, “were out with Sam. And you,” Claudia turns that finger on Tracy now, “were in the city with the Chos.”

Myka turns to Tracy just as Tracy turns to Myka.

“The only two biological children they have left in town and we don’t even get an invite to family game night,” Myka scoffs.

Tracy is shaking her head, “I call bullshit.”

“Kelly laughed so hard, wine came out of her nose,” Todd says as he and Claudia burst into laughter at the memory of it.

“ _Todd_ was there,” Myka says to Tracy.

“Of course Todd was there,” Tracy says to Myka. “Of fucking course.”

“That’s your mom,” Myka says, reaching for a box to put back in the closet.

“Why is she just my mom? She’s your mom, too.” Tracy also grabs a box.

“She was technically your mom last,” Myka teases.

“But she was yours first.”

“Ladies,” Claudia calls, grabbing their attention and shaking her head in dismay once she has it, “you are better than this.”

Myka finds the softest thing within an arms reach, it’s one of Tracy’s old stuffed animals, and she throws it in Claudia’s and Todd’s direction.

They run away laughing.

Tracy turns back a to Myka and says, still whispering for some reason, “Mom is Claudia’s now.”

Myka responds, “She could definitely be _our_ little sister.”

***

“You could still work,” Tracy says from across the table when Leena has excused herself for the restroom.

“Who could still work?” Kevin asks.

“Please refrain from engaging with the meddler.”

“Myka and Leena,” Sam interjects knowingly. _Somehow_.

Myka glares at him sideways, sat back in his chair and smiling smugly. She follows that glare up with a swat to his arm.

“Oh,” Kevin arches a brow, he looks to Tracy, “could they?”

Tracy swats Kevin now. She says, “ _Definitely_.”

“I’m not dating Leena,” Myka sighs, “I like her too much to do that to her.”

“Oh, here we go,” Tracy rolls her eyes. “Will you shut up with that self-loathing bullshit.”

“She likes _Helena_ too much to do that to her.”

Myka swats Sam again.

“You’ve been single for over half a year, Ophie,” Tracy is whispering again and this time Myka is thankful for that whisper, “and if you’re waiting for H to gather some sense and bring her ass back to town, you’re going to be waiting for a very long time.”

“Why are we even talking about this?” Myka asks harshly. “She’s right there, Trace.” Myka gestures toward the hallway bathroom.

“I just worry about you sometimes,” Tracy says, lowering her eyes to the playing cards that rest before her on the table, “that’s all.”

“You sound like, Mom,” Myka laughs, “worse than that, you sound like Mom when she sounds like Jane.”

Tracy reaches for a chip in the bowl that is at the center of the table. She chucks it across the table at Myka.

“Brat,” Myka accuses.

The bathroom door opens and everyone falls quiet again.

When Leena returns, she stills just behind her chair. She doesn’t sit but looks around the table, at everyone sat around it, not making eye contact with her.  She says, to everyone, “You guys are not slick at all. What are you up to?”

“Oh nothing,” Tracy begins to smile. Myka knows exactly what _oh nothing_ precedes and she will have none of it.

“Hey Leena,” Myka smiles, standing, pushing her chair back, and stepping closer to Leena, “can I steal you for a minute?”

Leena glares at her with some suspicion but says, with reluctance, “Sure but I’m bringing my cards with me.” She turns an accusing glare on everyone else at the table and holds up an accusing finger to match.

Myka smiles, she closes the short distance between them, setting her hand gently against Leena’s back and leading her into the hallway.  Back toward her bedroom.

“We’ll be right back,” Myka calls over her shoulder.

“Sure you will,” she hears Sam say just below his breath.

Myka makes a mental note to slap him when she returns.

***

In her bedroom, Myka is sat on the bed and watching Leena who still stands and she moves, from one wall to the next, exploring all of Myka's things.

Leena is moving from place to place, looking at photos on the wall, framed photos on the dresser. She is letting her fingers glide across the top of Myka’s desk, over the keys of Myka’s laptop, and to the photo that leans just against Myka’s desk lamp.

She takes up that photo and holds it in both of her hands. Myka sees that she smiles when she looks at it. Myka isn’t sure why she does but she isn’t surprised that she does either. And the smile is genuine, it is not forced or false, Leena is not even the least bit put off by the image in her hands. Of Helena in Brazil, with Natalia and Analisa, the two little girls she’d lived with, that reminded her so much of Myka and Tracy.

“How long was she there?”

“Um,” Myka is only slightly cognizant of what Leena means to ask when she asks that question. Helena. In Brazil. Of course Leena knew she was there, too, but Myka has had to remind herself on more than one occasion that they, too, are friends. Even _now_.  And Leena has always taken such great care with her friends. So the question, like that smile, is unexpected but it is not at all surprising. “A little over two months?” Myka nods. “Something like that.”

Leena smirks and she sets that photo back into place and turns completely around, expectant and cheery and smiling that beautiful knowing smile of hers at Myka.

“So, what did you want to talk about, Myka?” her voice, soft and caring, makes Myka want to melt into a puddle where she sits. It’s a different kind of soft and a different kind of caring from Helena but it is beautiful, all the same. Leena, Myka thinks, and quite often, is so beautiful.

Looking at her makes everything she needs to say a bit more easy. And simultaneously so very difficult.

“I’m sorry,” Myka says.

Leena takes a step closer, still with that soft smile gracing her lips and with a slight roll of her eyes, and asks, “Why are you sorry _now_?”

“For last year and everything that happened between us,” Myka shrugs, “everything that could have happened and didn’t happen. I don’t know, Leena. I’m just really sorry about it. Much more sorry now than I ever was before… and I’m sorry about that, too.”

Leena sighs and she is still smiling, though that smile has softened, when she steps closer to Myka and clasps her own hands together. Leena says, “Can I be completely honest with you about something?”

“Anything, Leena,” Myka nods.

Leena takes a seat beside Myka on the bed and moves her hands, still clasped, between her knees. She looks straight ahead and that smile grows for just a moment before it softens again.

“I jumped ship on you,” Leena says softly, turning to Myka, and now her smile is more like a playful grimace, “I feel like I should apologize to you because you and Tracy, you and Helena? That was never _the_ problem. It was just the tip of the iceberg.”

“There’s an iceberg,” Myka says feigning exasperation. Of course there is an iceberg, she tells herself, there is an entire underwater continent of ice below the very surface of her existence.

This is not _news_.

Leena sighs again and turns to face Myka. She sets her hand over Myka’s arm and grasps gently, she lets her hand slide down Myka’s arm to then grasp the back of Myka’s hand. Leena is lowering her head, biting her lip, looking back up at Myka with something like sympathy. Something else that’s a little bit like bashfulness. And with another thing that looks a lot like love.

“Myka, I love you, you know that, right?”

Myka knows it.

But Myka doesn’t know what this feeling is, that lifts her heart and tightens her chest, all at once. That makes her feel hopeful and hopeless and in fear of everything else Leena has to say next.

“And I mean that as your friend but I mean it as something just a little bit more than that, too. You’re beautiful and smart and you can be the sweetest person at times…”

“I’m sensing a rather large _but_ on the horizon,” Myka laughs.

“ _But_ ,” Leena continues, squeezing Myka’s hand, “other times, you spiral. You get this idea in your head that you’re worthless and _nothing_ and it just grows and grows and it eventually manifests itself into something that I don’t have the experience to help you through. I’m just not equipped...”

Myka is quiet.

“Tracy, of course, has the experience. She's your sister.  She always seems to know exactly what to do to bring you back… to make you stop thinking about how much you hate yourself and think, instead, about how much you actually just hate your dad. She also has this ability to distract you by reminding you how much you love _other_ things.  Other _people_.”

“Leena--”

“I’m talking about _Helena_ , Myka. If Tracy couldn’t pull you out of whatever mood you were falling into, she’d call Helena. And Helena would drop everything for you. Helena _dropped_ everything for you and I don’t know how many times she did but she did. And I--”

“Are we talking about the same Helena...”

“Yes,” Leena laughs incredulously and she nudges Myka gently, her arm against Myka’s arm. She squeezes Myka’s hand again. “The very same Helena that loved you, the Helena that was _in_ love with you and would probably drop a newborn baby just to make things better for you."

"That's morbid."

Leena is laughing and her chastising and her smile is too sweet for all of these things that she's saying to even be true, "Even if it meant making things worse for herself, Myka.  Helena would drop _everything.”_

“And when did Helena, _my_ Helena, ever drop anything to make things better for me? That’s not to say she _didn’t_ make things better for me but what did she ever give up for it?”

“You and Tracy really don’t talk do you?”

“I would never _ask_  Helena to do that.”

“You wouldn’t have to ask her, Myka. She would never make it your decision.”

Myka falls quiet.

“Do you remember when you and Helena hadn’t talked for something like a year and she just suddenly showed up in the bookstore?”

“It was less than half of a year.”

“ _Tracy_ did that,” Leena emphasizes. “Tracy called Helena. Tracy called Helena knowing that Helena did not want to come back to town because you two were at odds, because she didn’t think you’d want to see her, because even if you _had_ wanted to see her, her dad was selling the house.  She had no real place to stay and she certainly didn’t want to stay _here_ , in this apartment. But she stayed anyway. For _you_ , Myka.”

Leena goes quiet and Myka must think this is the moment that it’s all supposed to make sense to her, this is the moment that she should be hit with the realization of what Leena is trying to say. But all that Myka can think about is how little she understands about this conversation. About how little this conversation has to do with her and Leena. About why Leena, of all people, is defending all of these things that Helena has apparently said or done and never talked to Myka about because constant _miscommunication_ was... _is_ their greatest foe.

Why is Leena making Helena’s life with her sound like such a sacrifice? Helena had never given up anything to be with Myka. If anything, Myka had given up everything to be with Helena. She’d let go of everything, including having Helena close, just to _be_ with Helena. An ocean away. Several thousand miles apart. But still, somehow, together.

They gave up everything in exchange fro each other.  And for three years after that, they truly believed that was all they ever needed.

They were wrong.

“You said _loved_.” Myka turns to look at Leena and she knows her eyes are watering. She can feel the sting of tears. She doesn’t know why she feels like crying. She’s just tired. And tired of talking about Helena. Tired of thinking about that part of her life. A life she has walked away from.  So she doesn't know what this hurts. “Helena _loved_ me.”

Leena is squeezing Myka’s hand again and turning, leaning… their foreheads are not quite touching. She bites down on her bottom lip and the sigh she exhales is damaging to Myka's resolve. She can feel the warmth of Leena’s breath against her cheek. It sends a chill down her spine.

“I didn’t mean to,” Leena whispers.

She must have meant to and she must know why she means to. She already seems to know so much about Helena that not even Myka knows. She’s already said so much about Helena, when Myka had not meant to talk about Helena at all, that Myka cannot even begin to fathom what any of it means.

Helena not wanting to come home. Helena coming home anyway. Helena staying. Helena staying for Myka.

She stayed so many nights that summer. She had practically moved in. Why hadn’t she wanted to?  Myka's pretty sure she wanted to.

“I think I missed your point,” Myka says softly and she knows her voice is small but it needn’t be big right now. Leena is so very close. Almost close enough to taste. And despite all of the talk, all of the confusion, Myka wants so very much to taste this girl.

“I could never do what Helena did…or _does_ for you, Myka,” Leena says softly, lifting her free hand to tug at a coil of Myka’s hair, to push that curl just out of Myka’s face, “drop everything, say all of the right things to bring you back,” Leena brings her hand to just below Myka’s chin, “to make life better. To make… everything that ever happened to you… _better_ now.”

“You’re talking about my dad,” Myka realizes, her newly formed smile disbelieving, newly formed tears just beginning to fall, “and this unfortunate person I’ve become because of him--”

“You are not unfortunate.”

“But I’m unmanageable? Because I’m just like him?”

Leena let’s her hand fall back into her own lap.

“Myka, that isn’t even close to what this conversation is about.”

“Is that what Helena says about me? Is that what made it so hard for her? To be here?  Because I'm like him?”

Myka knows she is pushing, that she is leaping to assumptions about a conversation she’s not entirely sure she understands. But she _wants_ to understand it. She wants Leena to say exactly what she means and the only way Myka knows how to get her to do that, is to make her mad. Make her upset. Force her to react.

But Leena doesn’t get mad. Not now. Not ever. Not that Myka knows of anyway.

Leena does not get mad at Myka. What she does is cups Myka’s cheek and sets her thumb over Myka’s lips and watches her, silently, until Myka is quiet and calm and breathing steady once more. Until Myka is looking straight at her, into her eyes, down at her lips, up to her eyes again.

Leena leans in close, she sweeps her thumb across Myka’s lips, across teary cheeks, and she brushes Myka’s tears away. She sighs and then she hesitates, Myka can clearly see the hesitation, but then she smiles, _that_ smile, and presses, very gently and slowly, her lips to Myka’s.

Myka is reeling into another time and space and several other places because this kiss reminds her of the year before. The hellish one. It reminds her of the sinking feeling she _used_ to have when Leena would kiss her, when it was nice and it was good but in the back of her mind, she’d always be thinking of Helena. Myka is reeling because she doesn’t feel that sinking feeling anymore. This kiss isn’t _just_ good anymore. She is no longer thinking about Helena.

Myka inhales deeply through her nose, into this simple kiss, and exhales slowly. She can feel herself relaxing. She can feel herself leaning further into the press of Leena’s hand over her cheek.

And suddenly she feels so exhausted. She feels… out of place. And now she does think of Helena. She wants Helena home. She wants to talk to Helena. To find out all of the things that Helena has not been telling her. She wants to not give a damn about all of those things either, she wants things to be the way they used to be. And she wants Kelly home because Kelly always knows what to do and say, she always has the right words. Myka supposes Kelly, too, is one of her keepers. Like Tracy. Like Helena. Like Leena cannot be.

She only supposes this because she can remember feeling on the edge, spiraling, about to crash to the ground. She can remember so many times she has been very close to giving up on trying, so close to walking away, and Kelly had been there to snap her back into reality, to slap some sense into her. Not quite as literally as she had to Tracy but well enough.

Myka starts to wonder if she is Tracy’s keeper, too.

“Spiraling,” Leena whispers, an affectionate gaze on Myka, who only now registers that their kiss ended seconds ago, “and I’m not as strong as you, Myka. I haven’t survived what you have survived. I don’t think I could pick you back up again. Not like Helena knows how.”

“I would never ask that of you.”

Leena nods and whispers, “I know.” She lowers her hand down to grasp Myka’s, “that’s exactly why we could never work out, Myka. I _need_  you to ask me to. I want to know what’s going on in your head so much of the time and you are _always_ in your head. I want to tell you what’s going on in mind but you… have rarely been well-equipped for that type of relationship.

“I have to force it out of you and I don’t want to force you to do something you don’t want to. I can’t just look at you and know when you need something. I can’t read through all of the things you’re saying, like Tracy does, and know when you’re about to implode, when I need to… intervene. Or _how_.

“I couldn’t possibly love you more than Helena _loves_ you, even if she is on a completely different continent. Myka, I don’t even want to try to live up to that.”

“So you’ve just taken it upon yourself to decide who and what is best for me?   You can’t live up to Helena, so why try? I’m only ever supposed to be with Helena--”

“What was best for _me_ ,” Leena interrupts, “was to not spend my senior year of high school investing in a relationship that would go nowhere. _That_ is why casual worked for us.” Leena lowers her eyes to Myka’s lap, where their hands are grasping tightly onto each other’s once again. “That is why you don't owe me an apology.”

***

Myka apologizes again because she’s tired of thinking and talking and making sense of whatever Leena has been trying to say and she supposes this, her unwillingness to talk about it, is exactly the problem. She wants to say Leena doesn’t know her but Leena knows her very well. She wants to say Leena doesn’t know Helena but Leena knows Helena quite well, too. And without asking, Leena tells Myka, “You two don’t talk. It makes you strangely perfect for one another.”

To which Myka says, “I am tired of people telling me that Helena and I were meant to be together. I told myself that same thing for so many years that I believed it without ever questioning it. Now I can’t convince myself that it isn’t true when I know it can’t be.”

There is a lot of quiet between them after that until, eventually, Leena leans in closer and kisses her, just a quick kiss, and apologizes. Leena moves her hand into Myka’s hand, she moves further back onto Myka’s bed, lies down and pulls Myka with her. Myka goes without question. Rests her head over Leena’s shoulder. Wraps her arm around Leena's waist, her hand around in Leena’s.

They change the subject. They make very small talk. How is school? When’s graduation? Are you coming to graduation? When are you moving? Where in California are you going? But Myka is so very tired. She is over it all. At some point she falls asleep and she doesn’t know or care how long.

***

There is a knock at the door.

“Tracy says stop making out because she’s ready to go,” and it’s Claudia delivering a message that Myka almost doesn’t hear, that her brain doesn’t entirely register. Not, at least, until Leena is kissing her forehead and pushing away curls, kissing her cheek and moving her thumb across the corner of Myka’s mouth.

“I’m sorry,” Myka smiles because, of course, she’s drooling.

“You apologize a lot,” Leena whispers, arching a brow, leaning in close.

Myka’s smile grows.

“Sorry,” she whispers back.

Leena is rolling her eyes, softly laughing her way into another kiss.

***

“So?”

Myka glares at her sister because she already knows where this is leading.

“Are you and Leena--”

“No.”

“No?”

“ _No_.”

“You disappear into your room for a whole hour, abandoning your house guests and worse, your sister, for a no?”

“No, Trace. Leena and I are just friends.”

Tracy rolls her eyes, “ _Right_.”

“We didn’t _do_ anything.”

Tracy looks at her skeptically, as if Myka would have any problem admitting to her sister if something had happened between her and Leena. Myka would have no problem with that at all. Myka almost wishes something had.

But that night had come and gone. Leena had gone home with Tracy and only one day later, Tracy has come back for no other apparent reason than to interrogate her.

“We dozed off,” Tracy’s skeptical expression remains steadfast, Myka continues, “why am I even trying to defend myself to you? Go home to your boyfriend. Or your _dad_.”

Tracy’s face changes instantly. It falls into a mix of curiosity and hurt before it turns less curious and more hurt.

“Low blow,” Tracy says quietly and that is all she says. When Myka glances at her sister, sitting beside her on the living room couch, Tracy's head is lowered to the magazine that sits in her lap. Myka sighs and throws her head back. She is draping her left arm over Tracy and pulling Tracy into her hold.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t meant it like that, Trace,” Myka apologizes, squeezing Tracy close and pressing a kiss into her hair. “It’s just that you’ve been spending so much time there. I’m just not used to having you home. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Tracy sits up and shakes her head, “I think he’s been drinking again.”

Myka wants to laugh but refrains, for Tracy’s sake. She tells her little sister, “I’m not sure he ever stopped drinking,” and shakes her head, releases her hold on her sister.

“All of the soda he drinks, he leaves cups everywhere. Sometimes I wonder…” Tracy allows her voice to trail off but Myka knows exactly what it is that she isn’t saying.

“Dad would never mix liquor with soda,” Myka says, “if he’s drinking, he’s got a bottle stashed somewhere.”

“I’ve looked. I haven’t found anything.”

Myka shrugs, “Then I don’t know, Trace. I don’t even--”

“Care,” Tracy finishes Myka’s sentence and shakes her head, turning back to the magazine in her lap, “I know.”

“How does he even afford that place? Does he have a job or something?”

“He teaches off and on at the community college,” Tracy shrugs, “I think he’s been writing a lot, too. I’ve seen some checks come in but I really don't pay that much attention.”

“In true Tracy form.”

“The lights stay on, the water’s still running. It’s none of my business.”

***

“I love you.”

Helena is calling again.

“I miss you.”

Myka hears, in her voice, a familiar sadness. Helena’s crying, or she had been crying. Either way, she is trying to mask it, trying not to make the sadness obvious. But Myka has heard this voice before. Sad and broken, quiet and low. She has heard this voice so many times in the past that she knows it well, when it manifests. She can recognize it almost right away. It is the very same voice that always threatens to break them both.

But this is not the voice that Helena uses when she thinks of Myka, when she’s sad about Myka and the break up and all of the things that went absolutely wrong between them. All of the things that are still so far out of place between them. This is not _that_ voice.

This is a voice that is sad for another reason. For what Myka would easily call a valid reason. Far more valid than anything that had ever gotten in-between them. Because so much had happened in their past, so much that they couldn’t let go of, even if they had let go of one another. They have always been friends. They have always been close. And they will always, no matter how hard they sometimes try to forget and no matter how much they never truly want to forget at all, they will always have these shared memories. A past.

There is far too much past for them to ever be able to ignore it.

“It has to be at least two in the morning--”

“I had a bad dream.”

Myka doesn’t need to ask what the dream is about. She _knows_. When Helena’s dreams are bad enough to share, when Helena comes to Myka immediately after she’s had that bad dream, she already knows what that dream is about.

“He can’t hurt you,” Myka says, softening her voice to a whisper, “Helena.”

Helena’s silence in the long stretch of seconds to follow, the sound of her sniffling, her eventual sigh and breathy, “I know,” are all the confirmation Myka needs to know that she does. “I was just,” Helena takes in another deep breath and her sigh comes out heavy, exasperated this time, “I tried not thinking about it, all on my own but I just--”

“Need a good distraction?"

Helena's laugh is soft, "It's pathetic, I know."

"It's not but I recall sending you the best distraction there is, not even two weeks ago--”

“I don’t want to wake her up.”

Myka smiles.

“It’s okay,” she assures Helena. She sits on her bed, falls back against it, and glances at her watch, “I have some time. I’ll distract you,” she sighs, “for a little bit.”

“Thank you,” Helena whispers.

“Always.”

***

_It’s September of 2001 and Helena’s just turned twenty-two. Myka is seventeen years old._

_“Ask me again.”_

_Helena will, with every opportunity, openly and publicly chastise Myka for driving all the way to Kansas to retrieve her. To bring her back home. But Myka knows what Helena really means to say when she tells everyone this story. Myka knows that Helena’s true intention is to let everyone know that her girlfriend drove six hours for her, when Helena was stranded in the middle of nowhere during a national crisis. Helena tells everyone and she says it as if it is the most unreasonable thing in the world for any person to do but she also says it with a disbelieving smile on her face, with an unspoken sense of pride and love and unwavering devotion._

_She kisses Myka every single time she’s finished telling the story._

_“Ask what again?”_

_“What you asked me earlier today. At the lake.”_

_She kisses Myka now, where they lie front-to-front in Myka’s bed. In_ their _bed. In their tiny on-campus studio apartment._

_“Ask me again.”_

_Myka’s hands are on Helena’s bare waist, holding on tight, keeping her close. Myka moves her hands slowly, further up and around Helena’s abdomen, to just below her breasts, until she gets the reaction she intended._

_Helena’s breathy sigh hits Myka’s lips, warm and slow. Helena bites down on her lower lip and there’s not much Myka can do to resist this urge she has to kiss her. To do so many more things to Helena than just that._

_So Myka kisses her and she moves her hands now, to palm Helena’s cheeks, to pull her in close, and keep her this close for as long as they can hold onto this moment. And when they do part, Myka moves her thumbs to wipe at fallen tears. She kisses Helena’s lower lip. She smiles._

_“Will you marry me,” Myka asks again but she knows better now, not to get her hopes up, “Helena Wells?”_

_Helena just looks at her. For the longest time, in silence, Helena just watches Myka and Myka watches Helena. Through darkness, both actual and emotional. Through all of their exhaustion and sadness and the slow bubbling up of fear and grief that arose within them both as they sat side-by-side and watched the world fall apart on a television screen before them._

_Helena watches her. She watches Helena._

_“I intend to,” Helena says softly, eventually, and she’s nodding confidently, she’s crying all over again, “one day, Myka. When we’re older,” she continues, “when we’re old and happy and have spent a lifetime together. Loving each other. Looking out for one another. Keeping each other safe from ourselves and from a world that feels like it is constantly threatening to come crashing down all around us.” Helena kisses Myka again, quickly this time, and closes her eyes, pressing their foreheads together. “I am in love with you, Myka Bering,” Helena whispers, “and I intend to keep you.”_

_Myka smiles. It is uncontrollable. Helena’s breathing is softening. Her body relaxes further against Myka’s. Myka smiles and kisses that girl’s nose and her cheek and her upper lip and eventually she gives her a proper kiss. And she just smiles and smiles and smiles until it hurts._

_She cannot help that smile._

_“I intend to keep you, too,” Myka whispers to Helena, struggling to stay awake.  Failing miserably._

_“Thank you for this distraction.”_

_Myka kisses her lips and allows hers to linger until Helena's lips still and are no longer moving against her._

_She finally falls asleep._

_“Sweet dreams,” Myka whispers, moving her hand across Helena's cheek, over her ear, and through dark tresses._

_The bad dreams don’t return. Not, at least, for a very very long time._


	27. The Dead & Dying

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kelly returns home just in time to sweep up Myka's resolve. And, by no fault of her own, Myka has severely underestimated her father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for reflections on abuse. It's all a bit of a mess. But this is the last stretch of mess before Helena's return.

Kelly is home. She’s been home for a couple of days and playing catch up with work, Myka guesses, and with her _other_ friends, with Jane and Jeannie, too. So she’s mostly been out and about while Myka’s been going to and from school but she must be in the apartment now because when Myka returns home after an early day, when she moves to the kitchen to wash her hands, there are five, no... _six_ ducklings toddling around in the sink.

Myka doesn’t suppose they snuck their way in through the back door.

“ _Kelly_?” Myka calls out curiously.

“No soap!” Kelly says, running back into the kitchen from the hallway. Myka had already been reaching for the liquid soap dispenser by the time she’d noticed the flutter of baby ducks below. She smirks and turns to Kelly with an arched brow.

“I know your grandma kept live chickens, Raquel, but this is taking your culinary prowess to a whole new level,” Myka looks back into the sink, “besides that, they don’t look very filling.”

“They’re not for eating!” Kelly shouts, appalled, and playfully slaps Myka on the arm.

Myka laughs and recoils and says, “It was just a joke! But _seriously_ , why are there baby ducks in the kitchen sink?”

“They’re playing,” Kelly says, as if that fact isn’t obvious. “I’m letting them stretch their legs before we head out for dinner.”

“Okay but that doesn’t… really explain… _why_ there are baby ducks in the sink,” Myka questions cautiously, removing her hands from over that sink and smiling down on the little yellow balls of fluff, splashing about in an inch of water below.

“I got a new job,” Kelly grins.

“Working on a farm?” Myka asks. Kelly slaps her again.

“The vet hospital, _cabrona_ ,” Kelly sighs, shaking her head, “I don’t technically start until Monday but walked over today to drop off some paperwork.”

“Awesome. Congratulations! And fitting, that we’re already going to a celebratory dinner. But the ducks--”

“The intern at the office who usually looks after them is going out of town this weekend,” Kelly explains, “so I offered to keep them.” Kelly shoos Myka away. “You can wash your hands in the bathroom.”

Myka rolls her eyes and heads into the hallway muttering just loud enough for Kelly to hear, “Now I really do live in a zoo.”

***

Kelly asks Myka, accusingly, as they are trying to figure out _where_ to eat, “How many times did you eat at the diner when I was gone?”

Myka doesn’t answer the question because she knows exactly why Kelly is asking.

“You either need to learn how to cook _real_ food or find yourself a girlfriend that does.”

“I _had_ a girlfriend that can cook,” Myka sulks and then jokingly, or not at all joking if she’s being completely honest with herself, “and then she cooked my heart. So I traded her in for a beautiful Mexican girl who can cook even better.”

Myka tilts her head and turns up her adorable smile.  The one that used to work so well on Helena.

Kelly's response is a blank stare, silent and unamused, held for the longest time before she says, “Let’s go eat at a _real_ restaurant. In the city.”

“Do you have real restaurant money?” Myka asks skeptically. “Because I don’t.”

“In fact, I do,” Kelly grins.

***

“She’s _fine,”_ Kelly offers, completely unprompted. Myka won’t even pretend not to know who they are talking about.

“I know she’s _fine_. If she wasn’t fine, she wouldn’t be in London. How’s Pete holding up?”

Kelly shrugs and lowers her head to stare down at the table, moves her attention and her fingers to a small fray in the tablecloth.

They are sat across from one another at a table in an Italian restaurant that might be a little _too_ real for Myka’s tastes and Myka's wallet.  A little too real and a little too romantic because there are candles on the table, soft lighting, gentle music playing, and _actual_ place settings, two forks and two spoons _real._  And Myka has a very strong feeling that Kelly is clinging on to her time spent in Italy with Pete for as long as she possibly can.

“I’m far more interested in a Pete update than I am a Helena update.”

“Bucket of bollocks.”

Myka glares at Kelly over the rim of her glasses. “You were only there for two weeks, don’t you start with that.”

“Says the girl who, when she came home from London, cried into a disgusting cup of unsweetened tea every morning for five days straight,” Kelly teases.

Myka scoffs.  

“It was _Helena’s_ tea,” she says just under her breath, waving the topic away. “Anyway, I asked you about Pete. Why are you deflecting?”

“He’d be better off home.  And I'm not deflecting, I'm just...” she pouts and shrugs.  She doesn't finish the thought.

Myka twists her lips to the side, lowering her own eyes to the table, and nods. She says, insistently, “I know.”

“The word marriage made its debut,” and Kelly’s eyes rise to meet Myka’s again, just in time to catch Myka’s wide-eyed expression, she’s sure, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard Pete say it before.”

“I have,” Myka smirks, “in such phrases as, ‘marriage is a prison sentence’ or ‘the only type of marriage I would ever consider begins with the word sister and ends with the word wives’ and, my all time favorite, ‘they just need to give marriage to gays already, there’s literally nothing sacred about it’.”

Kelly is laughing and lowering her head. She sighs out Pete’s name and when she looks up again, back at Myka, there are actual tears in her eyes. Myka knows they are not tears of laughter. She knows that they are the too rare tears of Kelly allowing her emotions to show through. Even if just momentarily.

Myka jokes, very softly, as Kelly quickly wipes those tears away, “You really did come back pregnant didn’t you?” And Kelly is back to laughing again. “So, was it a proposal?”

“No,” Kelly shakes her head, “not even that. Which,” she sniffles and lowers her hands, “to be quite honest, is more of a relief than I ever expected. We’re not ready. I think it’s too soon. I think we’re too young.”

“You and Helena have that in common. _Thinking,_ I mean.”

“Helena and I have talked a lot about it in the past. I think the assumed improbability of it ever happening to _us_ made it a popular topic of conversation,” Kelly clears her throat and moves her hands into her lap, “at any rate, he wasn’t planning to ask. They had a close call with an IED the week before we met up and it was only out of sheer luck that no one was hurt. Everything that happened just got him to thinking about us… marriage. His life and our lives. Our relationship and the future.”

“And his conclusion?”

“ _We_ concluded… that marriage isn’t the answer to all of that. We can’t just get married now because there’s a chance we won’t be able to in the future. The benefit doesn’t outweigh the consequence at this point, of rushing into something we're not ready for.”

“Right,” Myka sighs.

“And I don’t know that I want to give _death_ , or our fear of it, that much thought or credit right now.”

“You sound just like Helena,” Myka smirks. “It was just after 9/11 that we’d talked about it. When there was a slight chance that I could have lost her.”

There are several moments of quiet. Kelly is watching Myka. Myka is avoiding noticing that she is until Kelly clears her throat and shakes her head, getting Myka’s attention once more.

She says, “Just ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Whatever you’re not asking me about Helena.”

Myka sighs and shakes her head. She turns away from Kelly and rests her chin in the palm of her hand. She’s trying to appear as if she knows nothing about what Kelly is insinuating. She is failing miserably but she refuses to admit that or take this conversation anywhere near there.

She hasn’t had the time to talk to Kelly since she returned home. She knows better, _now_ she knows better, than to make that time all about Helena. Even if Kelly pushes it that direction.

She tells Kelly, “I don’t need to know anything.”

“Obviously you don’t _need_ to know,” Kelly says with a roll of her eyes, “but you _want_ to.”

Myka sighs once again and, at first, she folds her arms together and sits back in her chair. Then she is reaching a hand to the water glass that sits before her. She is absent-mindedly wiping away at the condensation that pools on the outside of that glass. She runs her fingers over her napkin to wipe the water from her fingertips.

She tries very hard to ignore the fact that Kelly is still staring at her expectantly.

“She’s not dating anyone.”

“How unfortunate for her.”

“So we’re back to pretending like we don’t care about Helena?”

“I didn’t say I don’t care,” Myka argues. Kelly just arches her brow in response and Myka slumps back into her seat. “I really just don’t want to talk about Helena right now.”

Kelly doesn’t press it. She changes the topic, “Maggie is an interesting character.”

“Did she hit on you, too?”

“After our first meeting, that girl would hardly come anywhere near me,” Kelly smiles, “she’s persistent, though.”

“I don’t even want to know.”

“Your moms told me about what happened with Claudia.”

Myka laughs softly, “You don’t even know the half of it.”  Myka never bothered to tell them about the miscarriage comment.

“So Ingrid’s pregnant?” Myka nods and Kelly sighs, staring off into a distance, somewhere across the restaurant as waiters move around tables, delivering food, taking orders, refilling glasses. She says, “Sometimes I worry about the way her brother dismisses her. The way he allows Ingrid to talk to her. I wonder how that’s going to change once they have a kid of their own.”

“Not for the better,” Myka offers, “if it changes at all.”

Kelly shakes her head again and says, “No. Not for the better. And I didn’t understand, until recently, why they won’t just let the moms have custody of her. If they don't care enough about her, why do they keep her?”

“Their hatred of lesbians? Their love for Sunday dresses?”

Kelly rolls her eyes and says, “The money,” to which Myka arches a brow and Kelly responds, “from the insurance companies, the house, her parents investments. It’s all supposed to go to Claudia and Jane’s listed as the beneficiary until she’s eighteen.”

“Seriously?” Myka pulls a face, it’s confusion and thoughtfulness. Suddenly a lot of things are beginning to make sense, “I had no idea.”

“I had no idea until Helena told me. I guess her dad’s personal attorney is handling everything for them.”

“Why wouldn’t they tell me?”

“Why wouldn’t they tell any of us?” Kelly counters.

“Does Claudia know?”

Kelly shakes her head.

“More of Helena’s secrets,” Myka sighs.

“Don’t blame her.”

“Well, she knew--”

“She only knows because I mentioned the attorney’s name, after having heard Jane talking to him a couple months back. She just happened to recognize it and asked her dad. Don’t blame Helena.”

“I’m just--”

The food arrives and Myka holds her thoughts until everything is set before them. Until the waiter has refilled their waters and left them to their meals.

“You’re just what?”

“Done,” Myka shakes her head and glances at Kelly in time to find that skeptical look moving into her expression. She clarifies, “I mean to say that I’m done talking about it but I am also done trying to figure her out. Everything she knows and never says. Everything she claims to not want me to know for my own well-being. All I want to do is talk. All I want is for her to trust that I am capable of taking care of myself _and_ her. To understand that I’m not scared or helpless or eleven anymore.”

Myka takes a bite of her food. Kelly finishes chewing hers.

“I have heard more than my fair share of evidence of Helena’s understanding that you are no longer eleven, _Romeo._ More than my share."

Myka, in the month or so that Kelly had been gone, has missed her, and all of her smart ass remarks,  _so very much_.

***

“Two boxes came today,” Sam tells Myka.

She’s moving behind the counter of the book store, throwing her book bag down and stretching. Arms up, back arching.  After sitting in class for hours, driving another hour to get home, she’s ready to sit. She’s ready to relax. But she knows that once she does, she won’t want to do anything else for the rest of the day.  

Except think about things and people she should definitely not be thinking about.

“Let’s go for a run,” she suggests. “I’ll ask Kelly if she can close the store tonight.”

“And the boxes?” Sam questions.

“They can wait.”

Helena’s dad has had them sent twice a month for close to five years. Unreleased, expectant best sellers, and everyone in town knows exactly where to go to get them.

“Probably just a popular release,” Myka adds, looking over the return address on both of those boxes, “last year he sent five boxes of Harry Potter’s Order of the Phoenix.” Both boxes had definitely come from the very same company. “They were all gone in one day. I’ll go through them when I get back.”

“Whatever you say, boss,” Sam smirks.

Myka eyes Sam suspiciously. She really hopes that look on her face reads as suspicion. Because in her mind, she isn’t thinking suspicious. She’s thinking he’s let his hair grow way too long and she’s tired of the way he just lets it fall in his face. And he’s gotten a bit thicker, in his arms, his chest, his abdomen. She’s sure that shirt he’s wearing is way too small for him and now she’s _sure_ the look she’s giving him really is suspicion.

It feels a bit too much like something else, something completely opposite of that.

“You don’t think that shirt’s getting a little tight, Martino?”

It doesn’t come out sounding as insulting as she would have liked. She knows this because Sam arches a brow. His smirk turns into a smile. Myka shakes her head and waves that question away but it's way too late for that.

"Since when do you concern yourself with the tightness of my shirts?"

“ _Never mind_ ,” she says, her voice a rising and annoyed.  It comes out like a groan.  She's moving, she's turning, she's walking away, “Let me just go change. I’ll be right back."

She does her very best to ignore that obnoxious smile as she heads for the stairs, and the way he shakes his head and chuckles his amusement as he watches her go.

Blue eyes are boring, she tries to convince herself while taking the steps.

Somewhere in the back of her head, a tiny rebellious voice declares, “Not _those_ blue eyes.”

“Helena George Wells,” Myka says, just softly and to herself. And it works. She’s not thinking about Sam anymore. But she isn’t sure what she's thinking about now is any better.

***

They’re running through a residential neighborhood when a familiar face, a familiar  _girl_ face, standing in a yard just a couple houses ahead of them, calls out Sam’s name. He pretends not to notice, Myka can tell that he’s only pretending, because he’s looking away and he’s got that look on his face, his cheeks are red, he bites down on his lip.

And sure, his cheeks could just be red because of all of the running, because they’re at the very end of the current twenty-minute sprint, but Myka highly doubts that. She doubts it because she can hear the girl calling, clear as day, and there’s no way Sam cannot hear that girl calling. She’s saying his name. She’s saying it in a particular sort of way.

Myka doubts it, especially, because she knows that face that Sam is making. And when they finally slow to a walk, and they walk up on that girl, Myka predicts the next thing happening before it even happens; Sam’s hand is immediately on the back of his neck, rubbing away some non-existent ache.

She’s trying hard not to feel affronted. Cast aside. _Replaced_.

She shakes her head accusingly at him, when they come to a stop just in front of the girl.  Sam pretends not to see.

He finally tells the girl hello. The girl is practically swooning in response.

Myka rolls her eyes.

Her name is Allison, Myka realizes. Not because Sam has the decency or coherency to introduce them but because she remembers her from high school. The girl only offers Myka a side-glance, a soft smile, and a rather dismissive “hey”.

 _Hey?_ Myka’s thinking. _You walk onto my running path, interrupt my jog with my friend and all that you can manage is hey?_    But of course she doesn’t say any of this out loud.

And then it hits her. Because it isn't her running path.  It isn't the route _she_ chose.

She side-eyes Sam. He’s still rubbing his neck. His cheeks are even more red but he manages to ask the girl how she’s doing, she barely manages a response. Myka crosses her arms.  She ponders throwing herself into the street but there is no traffic to be seen, to free her from this torturous encounter.

This is the very last time she’ll let Sam plot their jogging course.

***

“Did you really need an audience for your passive aggressive stalking?”

Sam looks defeated.

“I guess so,” he says, “I told you, you’re better at talking to women than I am.”

“That’s probably because I don’t think of every woman I meet as the future mother of my children,” Myka smiles cheekily back at Sam, still red-cheeked and still not acknowledging her teasing, while she leads the way into the bookstore. “Can you help me with these boxes before you head out?”

He's too quiet.

She doesn’t even have to see his face to know he’s on the brink of a smart ass response. Two decades of experience, a lifetime spent with _Pete,_ have not been kind to Sam’s efforts at smart ass responses. The lingering silence alone gives that smirk away long before she ever turns around to face it.

“You want me to help you lift a heavy box?” _Here we go_ , she thinks. “At the risk of emasculating you?”

“I basically just asked a girl out, on your behalf, and you think _my_ masculinity is what’s in question here?”

“Ouch.”

“And why is it that masculinity, not femininity, is synonymous with strength?” Sam has no answer for that. Not because he doesn’t have anything to say, Myka’s sure, but because he finally knows better than to say it out loud. “Stay in your lane, Martino.  Better yet, pull over and get into the passenger seat because I’m taking the wheel. You obviously don’t know how to drive.”

“Double ouch.” Sam pouts. Myka grins. “I thought we were friends now, Bunny.”

She punches his arm.  He doesn’t even fake pained.  Can she at least get a courtesy arm grab?

She suddenly misses Pete a lot.

“Check yourself before you wreck yourself,” she tells Sam, pointing an accusing finger at him.

“Okay, calm down, Ice Cube.”

***

Myka is holding a picture she knows very well.

It is her family, if you could have called them a family back then. It is her father, young, her mother, much younger. He, her father, is in slacks and a dated, literally dated, cotton shirt promoting the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. She, her mother, is in a loosely fitted sun dress like the so many she used to wear, back when she wore dresses.

Myka is six years old, or seven. She can’t remember exactly but however old she is, it is before the incident. It is before the bottle over her head and the shaving of her hair; the loss of so many of the memories, good and bad, from previous years. Myka is six or seven and Tracy is four or five. They are standing side-by-side, each with one arm wrapped around the other’s shoulder.

The image is distorted. It’s blurred. She can barely make out their faces. A stranger wouldn’t know the difference. But the clothes are their clothes, the hair is all their hair. The way they’d always been, as a family, is all theirs, too. Myka’s mother and father stand slightly apart, not touching. Tracy stands in front of their father, Myka stands in front of their mother.

Nobody is actually smiling.

And over her father’s eyes is drawn, in thick black ink, one line.

Myka knows this picture well. She knows it well now. She knew it well when she was just a kid with a permanent black marker drawing that thick black line that covers those eyes.  

They had, once, been glaring in her direction. So she'd fixed it. Made the photo better.

Myka just can’t, for the life of her, figure out why this picture, _her_ picture, her family, and her father’s name just below it, are on the cover of a book. One hundred books or more.

Two boxes full. All the same book. All with her father’s name on it.

All sent to her bookstore with purpose, care of Helena’s father.

***

“My Daughters’ Fathers?  What an awful title.”

Helena couldn’t make out the image of the book when Myka had text it to her. Too small, too pixelated but she refuses to allow Helena to upgrade her flip phone to a smart phone. She will continue refusing to allow Helena to upgrade her anything to anything else. Not her laptop to a better laptop. Not her car to a better car.

 _Especially_ now.

It’s probably four o’clock in the morning where Helena is but Myka doesn’t have the patience to check the time. All she knows is that it’s dark, Helena is half-asleep, and her eyes are barely open but they are rarely ever open anyway, even when she is wide awake. Helena had yawned the second the call initiated and told her, “You broke our pact to never call one another at three in the morning,” to which Myka responded, “That was a condition of our relationship, which was broken long before tonight.”

Helena didn’t bother hiding her pout. Myka pretended not to notice.

Myka held up a copy of that book to her webcam and Helena, a tank-topped display of godliness on her laptop screen, had squinted even more just to read the title upon it. Then she rubbed at her eyes, reached for her glasses, put them on her face. Myka pushed away, and pushed very hard and very far, that falling feeling she always feels when her body and her heart and her traitorous brain try convincing her she still loves this woman. That she’s still _in love with_ this woman.

These are not things that Myka needs to be reminded of. She knows she is. She’s still trying very hard to pretend as if she’s not. These are not feelings that Myka needs to remember.

 _Now_ is not the time.

“Please tell me you didn’t know about this.”

Helena didn’t know about _this_. That’s what she says to Myka. She knew about the manuscript and she vaguely remembers her father talking about Myka’s father owning up to something that had to do with his writing? But Helena has no idea about _this_ or if this was _that_. Not the slightest clue.

Myka is about to break.

Her face feels hot. Her blood pressure, no doubt, rising. She can feel her pulse pounding in her neck, just below her jaw, and in her face, at her temples.  Her head feels like it's swelling. She takes in a deep breath, she exhales slowly. And it isn’t until she’s done that a few times, until she’s closed her eyes, breathed, and regained some of her focus, that she hears Helena directing her to do so. Soft voice, a whisper.

Helena has been saying, “Just breathe, Myka,” and now that Myka _is_ she hears the slightly less audible, “that’s my girl.”

Myka is taken back to a place and time when she is almost old enough for Helena, where Helena has never been too old for her. She’s mad, she’s angry, she’s _infuriated_ and at the same time she’s scared out of her mind. She’s clutching to the chain link fence in the dugout on the softball diamond at the high school she’d since left far behind.

Helena is standing just beside her, speaking softly, telling her to breathe, turning Myka to face her. She’s putting her arms, at first, on Myka’s waist. Next, on Myka’s shoulders. Over Myka’s chest.

She’s close. She moves in closer. Myka would bring her closer than that, if she could move, too.

It wasn’t the last time Myka had been enraged, had wanted to let go and lose all of her control. It certainly wasn’t the last time Myka had been on the edge of breaking. But it was the first time Helena had been there for her like that. That close and wanting to be closer. Trying hard, Myka’s sure of it now, not to be any closer than that.

Myka still thinks about that moment. More fallout from realizing the world isn’t entirely on her side. She still thinks about how different the end of her freshman year of high school could have been, if Abigail hadn’t found her, found _them_ , and forced them to let go.

Abigail hadn’t actually forced them apart but she’d appeared like a wedge in-between them. A wedge both Helena and Myka had welcomed again and again, for fear of holding on, even if they’d always been reluctant to let go. And Myka likes to imagine it, every now and then and especially now (though she likes this timing a lot less), what could have happened had they not. What definitely would have happened, had they never.

“Ophelia?” This voice is not in her imagination. It is before her, breathy and concerned, dressed in a worried expression and accompanied by the familiar pulling of eyebrows as Helena watches her, steady and waiting. For what, Myka doesn’t know. And then she says, “I can come home,” and she says it so simply, so easily. As if she’s just up the street. As if she’d only been away for a little while. As if Myka hadn’t been asking that of her for three or four years or more. As if Helena actually wanted it. As if _this place_ is actually her home.

How long had it been? And _now_?

“If you need me to--”

“Don’t call me that,” Myka says softly, rubbing at her eyes. It’s still early in the evening but she’s exhausted. She’s ready for bed. She shakes her head and sighs and, without ever looking at Helena, without any real emotion in her voice at all, tells her, “You’re already home, Helena.”

She’s falling into that feeling and trying very hard not to. She will push and push and keep on pushing until she’s sure, until she’s one hundred percent positive, that Helena knows she no longer cares about her _in that way_.

Even if she still really cares about her, it’s the only way _this_ is ever going to work.

“I’m sorry,” Helena whispers and Myka looks up at her now, “I’ll talk to my father. I’ll call you later, after I figure out,” Helena shrugs and rolls her eyes, and Myka is willfully ignoring the glisten of unfalling tears just at their edges, “ _exactly_ what he was thinking.”

“You do that, Helena,” Myka says and she’s purposely trying to sound more demanding than grateful. She’s molding her expression into something more angry than sad, less forgiving than she is usually capable. “And while you’re at it, please tell him thanks but no thanks on any future boxes of books that he feels inclined to send my way.”

“Myka--” but Myka is trying to get a point across.

She says, “Sleep well, Helena,” and she slams her laptop closed.

There's a cracking sound.  It makes her wince, for only a second, before she sighs and just walks away.  If it broke in the process, _great_. She won’t care. If it didn’t (she hopes it didn't) well, that would be okay, too.

***

Myka is in the car, speeding into the city.

Tracy had called her, sobbing and nearly incoherent, but she’d said the word “book”, a word that Myka has rarely ever heard from her sister in a way not meant to sound _demeaning_ , and Myka didn’t really need to know anymore than that.

Sam is sat quietly in the passenger seat, clutching onto the handle of the car door and harder still when Myka just narrowly catches yellow lights.

Myka hadn’t at first known what to do, so she’d called Sam. He didn’t answer. She’d sent him a series of text messages to which he responded by showing back up at the bookstore, hair still wet from his abandoned shower, face still red from their earlier run.  Or from talking to Allison, she's not sure she cares all that much anymore.

“I couldn’t tell from your messages,” he told her upon his arrival, upon seeing that she was with Kelly and relatively okay, “if you were going to throw yourself or your dad out of a second-story window. I figured I’d better just get here.”

Kelly is in the backseat, finally opening the yellow envelope with the manuscript that’s been hidden below the driver’s seat for going on half of a year.

She had walked through the front door just as Myka was sending the last of her text messages to Sam. Just as Myka was gathering up her things to head back into the city. Myka, without saying much, had handed Kelly the book and summarized the phone call she’d just had with her sister.

Kelly dropped everything. Literally dropped bags of groceries onto the kitchen floor and said, “I’m going with you.”

And now Myka is halfway to her father’s place in the city, without a plan. Again. But she has Kelly and she has Sam and she has a strong will to protect her little sister.  She's certain that will be good enough.

Helena is calling her phone, according to Sam.

She tells him to send the call straight to voicemail.

***

Tracy is outside. She’s no longer crying. She just looks upset, annoyed. When Myka pulls up, Tracy tries to get into the car, as if they’re just going to _leave_ , but they all get out. Sam taking Tracy’s bag from her, Kelly coming around to wrap a protective arm over her shoulder, to ask if she's okay. Tracy nods.

“Did he touch you?” is Myka’s first question.

“Even if he had the strength, Myka,” Tracy starts but doesn’t finish that thought, “you brought a posse?” Myka narrows her eyes on her sister, rounds the front of her car, parked in her father’s driveway, and heads toward the front door. “Let’s just go,” Tracy insists.

“No,” Myka calls back, over her shoulder, and that’s all she has to say about that.

***

It takes nine very loud, very aggressive knocks for Warren to open up the door. He then opens up his mouth but before he can say her name, as she’s sure he intends to do, Myka tells him, “Stop.”

She has a copy of the book in one hand. She holds it up. And she looks at him. Her mouth is falling open, as if she’s going to speak. She’s _trying_ to speak but nothing is coming out, she’s got nothing to say. She doesn’t know what _to_ say. So she moves. She steps toward her father, somehow smaller than her now. Shorter and thinner and no longer the menacing man he once used to be.

There is no longer any question about the genuineness of his frailty. Her father is gone. The man who stands in his place is weak. He is no longer the same. He is the elongated shadow of a man who long ago walked away from everything he should have loved and into a setting sun.

But he is still the one who walked away. Myka will never give him credit for trying to come back. She’s certain about that.

She holds the book out and says, “You have no right to my life.”

“I’m your father--” he tries.

“You’re a sperm donor," she reminds him.

He’s quiet.

“You signed your rights to my life away the _first_ time you tried to kill me.”

“It wasn't--”

“ _You_?” Myka concludes that sentence for him. “So I’ve heard.” A million times. Then Myka breathes, maybe for the first time since she arrived, and she gets the scent of it. Alcohol. All over him. She knows that smell too well. “Or maybe it _was_ you after all…”

She doesn’t want to stick around to find out. She already feels sick to her stomach at the scent of it. It’s too familiar. It’s too alarming. She’s ready to turn around and run but he tries to talk, to keep her there.  She can't help wanting to know what excuses he has for her today.

“All I want, all I have ever wanted, is my daughter. _My_ daughter.”

“You had her, Warren,” Myka says, pointing back at Tracy, “you should have appreciated her while you did.”

He remains silent.

Myka looks back to Tracy, still standing close to Kelly, Sam at her other side but standing slightly in front of them, watching Myka.  Ready to act. She turns to face her father once more, looks down at the book still in her hands. She feels herself getting warm again. Her face flushing again. The anger rising, her blood pressure right along with it.

“ _You’re_ the bad guy.” Myka looks up at her father, his brows furrowing, pout settling further into an already unsettled expression. Myka holds the book up for her father to see. “You broke this family,” she tells him and lowers her hands to her sides, “and for what? So you could write about it? So that you could profit from our misery? Has this all just been some sick experiment for you, Warren? Did you ever intend to live a happy life? To have happy children? A happy wife? For a book? That nobody wants to read?”

“You haven’t read it--”

“No,” Myka cuts him off. “And I never will.”

Myka lets the book fall to the ground and turns to walk away.

“I did this for you,” Warren calls and Myka stops, she turns, “for both of you. You and your sister.”

Myka shakes her head. “No, Warren,” she says, pointing at the book, lying face-up on her father’s walkway, “you did that for yourself.”

Myka walks away.

***

Sam drives everyone home and Myka thinks it’s probably for the best. Her hands are still shaking.

Kelly is sat in the passenger seat now, still mulling through pages of the manuscript. Occasionally making statements about it, reading lines here and there, only loud enough for Sam to hear.

Sam responds to her. He is incredulous. Annoyed by what he hears. He actually laughs when Kelly cracks a joke. Myka thinks it odd, that this is the thing that gets the two of them to hold a conversation. But it also makes sense. Despite the tone of what happened, these are two of her closest friends, the few she has left, coming together over a shared interest, something they very much have in common. A thing that not even Myka could imagine doing all alone.

Confronting problems. Head on. And Myka has so very many of them.

Myka is sat in the back seat with Tracy beside her as she begins to recount the events of the evening. She starts with, “You were right, Ophie,” as she wipes away her own tears. Myka rests a comforting hand over her sister’s arm and grasps gently.

“About what?” Myka asks.

“He’s still drinking,” Tracy says angrily and she sighs, “or he’s started up again. I’m not sure if he had been before but he definitely was tonight because he wanted to fight and yell about everything. Whatever I cleaned, he destroyed. Whatever dish I washed, he broke.  So, congratulations on knowing your dad.”

“I don’t care that I was right. If he touched you..."

"He didn't."

"So then what happened?”

“I saw the book. It came in the mail today and I knew that photo right away,” Tracy goes on, “That’s _the_ photo. The one he saw before he went on a drunken rampage and tried throwing you down the stairs. I don’t know if it was the book or the picture that got to me most but I told him he had no right and that made him go off. Screaming at me, screaming about you. About that night, about how ungrateful you’ve always been, how spoiled I am. About how hard he _tries_ , has always tried,  _still_ tries.”

“Your dad tried to throw you down the stairs,” Sam questions from the front seat, "the _wooden_ stairs at the bookstore?"

 _Because carpeted stairs would have been so much nicer,_  But Myka keeps her sarcastic comments to herself.  She understands what he is trying to say.

Myka catches his concerned gaze in the rear view mirror and holds it only long enough for him to understand that she has no intention of elaborating. He already knows about that night. Almost the whole entire town knows at least something, one thing, real or made up, about that night. They know Myka went to the hospital because of her father, they know her father did, too. Or they know her father had a rage-induced heart attack and fell down the stairs. Some people think they know Myka tried jumping out of a second story window.

Myka rolls her eyes and breaks her gaze away from Sam’s as he averts all of his attention to pulling the car onto the freeway and merging into traffic.

“All of this was over a photo?” Kelly asks, never looking up, her eyes still on the stack of paper that rests in her lap.

“Myka blacked dad’s eyes out. She hid the photo in a book in her room for the longest time and thought no one knew about it,” Tracy looks at Myka now, “but I found it and showed it to Dad. I was little and I was stupid. And all of it, everything that happened that night, is absolutely my fault. He was belligerent, he tried dragging her down into the bookstore.”

“ _Tracy_.” Myka doesn’t want to hear this. Doesn’t think Sam and Kelly do or should either.

“He would always drag you down into the bookstore but to make you work down there all day, too?” Tracy shook her head, “It never made any sense to me.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but him,” Myka sighs, turning away.

“He pulled her by her arms then pushed her out of the apartment door. She almost fell down the stairs, Mom screaming and pulling him away the whole time. Pete was there punching him, grabbing at Myka. I was there, too, but I was useless. Crying in the corner.”

“Nobody wants to hear this story,” Myka says softly.

“I want to hear it,” Sam says, his gaze in the rear view mirror again, “if you don’t mind?”

“I definitely want to hear it,” Kelly adds.

Myka shakes her head but glances at Tracy who waits, suddenly quiet, until Myka rolls her eyes and looks away again in defeat.

“He cracked a bottle over my head.”

“ _What_?” Sam and Kelly question in unison.

“Pete managed to get Myka away but Dad cornered them in the kitchen. He just reached over to the counter, grabbed the bottle he’d been drinking out of and…” Tracy stalls. She bites down on her lower lip for a beat before sighing.

“Lights out, Myka,” she says of herself, forcing a small smirk for Tracy’s sake.

Tracy doesn’t laugh. She doesn’t even bat an eyelash. She’s staring at Myka as if she’s looking at the ghost of her own father and she doesn’t look away for several more seconds. And then she just continues telling the story.

“Pete was like eight years old and still managed to shove him out of the door and down the stairs,” Tracy adds. “Dad had a heart attack or he went into cardiac arrest before he ever hit the bottom.”

"The doctors never really got their story straight.  Either way, they used it to excuse everything that happened."

“God, this makes so much sense now,” Kelly says softly, turning in her seat to look back at Tracy and then Myka, “Pete got really pissed off when I told him we went to see your dad. I mean, I knew he hated him for everything he did but I never knew… _that_.”

“Pete fought with the paramedics for helping my dad first,” Myka adds with a growing smile at the thought of it, “or that is, at least, what I’ve heard.”

“It’s true, he did. He wasn’t allowed at our place after that,” Tracy offers, “and Mom and Jane’s friendship was never the same after that.”

“It was already bad when Mr. Lattimer died,” Myka says.

“But it got worse. And so did everything else. All because of me and my, what is it that you’re always telling me, unrelenting need to please a man who doesn’t deserve any of my attention?” She says it as if she’s proud but the tears that begin falling down her cheeks give way to the weight and self-incriminating tone of her words. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Ophie.”

“Emma,” Myka says, her annoyance peaking as Tracy begins to cry, “please stop.”

Myka isn’t actually annoyed. If anything she wants to smile because how long had her sister been hanging on to this confession and trying to right this supposed wrong? And now, on the cusp of eighteen, she’s letting it all go. She thinks Myka never knew about her showing their dad that photo.

Myka always knew. Because, as always, Tracy had seen the damage of Myka in the hospital, broke down crying and confessed it to their mother. Their mother had, years later, confessed it to Myka.

Now Tracy is going on about how horrible a sister she has always been. How she’ll never be able to make it up to her. How she never has in the past. How everything she does to even try will always backfire. How their dad took advantage of her proximity to her own sister. How Helena leaving was the worst thing, out of everything, that she has ever tried to do for her.

“I don’t want to know,” is what Myka tells her sister, recalling bits of the conversation she’d had with Leena. “And Mom already told me about the photo, a long time ago. You probably don’t remember me not talking to you for three whole weeks because you never talked to me then anyway.”

Tracy apologizes.

Myka tells her to stop being sorry for something that happened a million years ago.

“I know you will never forgive Dad for that, Ophie. I don’t expect you to forgive me either.”

“You were _five_ , Trace,” and when Myka says it, she is exasperated. She is frustrated and now she _is_ annoyed. Because this isn’t just her sister being sorry for whatever she thinks she did back then, this is her sister after years of being manipulated by their father. By allowing her to believe this is all her fault because _she_ was the loved one. By letting her believe that this was all her fault because Myka’s father chose _her._ “You were five and you were tattling because that man always praised you for it,” Myka emphasizes again, and she removes her hand from Tracy’s arm to fold her own arms in front of her, “there’s nothing to forgive. Not unless you plan on writing a book about it.”

“Have you read it?” Tracy asks.

“No,” Myka shakes her head, “have you?”

“I wasn’t given a manuscript.”

"You can have mine," Myka sighs, leaning back in the seat.

She’s suddenly overwhelmed with the thought of how long it's been, since she’s been sat in the back of this car. But she pushes the thought away and brings her head rest against the seat before turning to look at her little sister.

“I’m burning it,” Myka nearly whispers.

“Not before I finish reading it, you aren’t,” Kelly calls from the front seat. “Know thy enemy.”

They carry on with their conversation, Tracy with Sam and Kelly. Myka is done talking and she is especially done talking about her father.

***

The house phone rings at three in the morning. Myka doesn’t have to look at the display to know it’s Helena calling. Payback, no doubt, for waking her up eight hours earlier.

In the dark, she reaches for the handset. She pulls it from its place and nearly drops it against her ear. Rolling onto her other side she says, through her sleep-coated voice, “You had better be dying.”

“I’m not,” Helena’s voice says, much chirpier than Myka’s, much more awake than the last time they’d spoken, “but your father is.”

“Excuse you?”

Myka isn’t sure she’d heard her correctly. She isn’t sure what she thinks she heard isn’t a joke.

“Your dad is dying, Myka,” Helena says again, though she doesn’t sound as chirpy this time and she’s speaking not quite under her breath. Definitely softer, with more care than she’d spoken with before, she adds, “and I apologize, Myka, for my insincerity in telling you this but--”

“You don’t need to apologize for that,” Myka interjects feeling suddenly protective. Especially over Helena, especially in the looming shadow of Myka’s father.  She remembers all of the looks he's ever given Helena in her presence.  He doesn't deserve her apologies or her politeness when speaking about him in conversation.

He's dying? If that's actually true, he doesn't even deserve it then.

Helena sighs and she definitely sounds more somber than before, “I assumed this would be the one book you refuse to read and I don’t blame you one bit for it. I wish I hadn’t. But I wonder if maybe you should... just to prepare yourself.”

“I’m not reading it. _You_ read it?”

“I read it.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say to that but she feels somehow betrayed by Helena's admission.

Again.

“How?”

“My father has several copies…”

“I mean, how is he dying? What’s wrong with him?”

“Cirrhosis of the liver.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh. She doesn’t mean to but it just comes out.

She says, “So he’s not dying.”

“He says he is. According to my father--”

“No, he’s _not_. If it’s even true, he’s _killing_ himself.”

“He’s an alcoholic, Myka.”

“Now you’re making excuses for him? The man is literally drinking himself to death and _you,_ Helena, are giving him a pass?”

“I’m not.”

Helena sighs now. Her exhalation is heavy.

She says again, softer this time, “I’m not. I would never make excuses for him. Especially not after reading his book.”

“They _sound_ like excuses.”

Myka is deflecting because she doesn’t know how to feel about this. About what Helena’s told her. So she’s opted to not feel anything at all. To ignore all of that, with her father, in favor of focusing all of her attention on all of this, with Helena. But Helena, she thinks – she _knows_ – is on to her. Helena won’t, so easily, allow Myka to let this go.

“Did you know that your father, under a pseudonym, was a well-known and well-published author?”

“My father,” Myka just barely holds back her disgust, “is a _drunk_ who has tried no less than two times to kill his only biological child and is now, apparently, trying to kill himself to gain her sympathy.”

Helena ignores her to say, “I have wondered for so many years how that bookstore has stayed open, how the mortgage has been paid, and how your father, alone, managed to keep that place afloat. Myka, your dad had no less than twelve novels published, thanks in part to _my_ father, under another name in the 1980s. He made more than enough money to keep your family and that bookstore going for years along the way. But he stopped writing, I’m guessing around the same time he started drinking, and the money isn’t there anymore. It hasn’t been for quite some time.”

“I would know if we had money, Helena. I wouldn’t have spent weeks walking around with taped-together glasses, being told I was too wasteful, too ungrateful. Constantly being reminded of how much easier his life would be, how much more money he could save, if I’d never been born. Not if we had money. I think I would know, Helena.”

“Myka,” Helena takes in a deep breath, “you would never know if he had never told you. You certainly would not know if it ran out before you were old enough for it to matter.” Myka rolls her eyes and Helena says, somehow just _knowing_ , “And do not roll your eyes at me. I _told_ you I would talk to my father and I did. I’m only relaying the information I was given by him and, according to him, your father coming out as whoever he used to be, which he does in this book, is a _really_ big fucking deal to a _lot_ of people.”

“ _Not_ to me.”

“You’re not listening to me, Myka.”

“I _heard_ you.”

“But are you _listening_? Because I don’t believe you’re comprehending the full weight of what I am telling you.” Helena’s voice is no longer soft. No longer sensitive or cautious or trying to ease this information upon Myka. She is speaking decisively. Her voice is firm and direct. She is using a tone that Myka hasn’t heard in a very long time. A tone that Myka has zero intention of challenging right now. “I have known you since before you were born. I have loved you, fallen in love with you, and made love _to_ you, Myka Bering. But I never knew... how little I knew about you until I read this book. There are things in there that you will never know about me until you do.”

More of Helena’s secrets. Surprise is the least present of Myka's emotions right now.

Myka is quiet. She takes in a long steady breath. Tears suddenly burning in her eyes. Her nose is threatening to run. The blood in her body seems to rush again. Her face, completely flushed and growing hot again.

It has not been a good week.

Helena turns her voice back into that careful sort of thing it was before.

“Myka, this book is not going to fly under the radar. People are going to read it.  They're going to know it’s you. And they’re going to want to talk to you about it.”

Myka says nothing and Helena sighs in all of her silence.

“I love you, Myka, and I am forever on your side. But you should consider reading the book. Not because I’m telling you to and certainly not because he deserves to have your attention. He doesn’t. You owe him _nothing_. But this is _your_ life and though the names may be different and the places somewhere else entirely, the story _is_ yours.

“You’ve always wanted answers and now you can have them. You don’t even have to talk to your father to get them.”

Myka wants answers but she doesn’t want them like this, or that’s what she’s telling herself. And she’s questioning the weight of everything Helena’s said because absolutely none of it seems real. Nothing about it makes sense while simultaneously making perfect sense. But Helena doesn’t lie to her, Helena tells her half-truths. Helena _omits_. Even if only half of this particular story were true, even if Helena left something out, there’s still enough there to make Myka’s stomach turn.

Myka turns on the bed now, to rest on her other side. She moves the phone to her other ear, closes her eyes, and heaves out another sigh.

“Goodnight, Helena,” Myka eventually says into the quiet and the dark, against only the sound of Helena’s soft breath. She’s tired, half-asleep. Her eyes are closing. She’s slipping into that peculiar place between awake and asleep, where she’s bound to say something she doesn’t truly mean. More accurately, something she truly means but doesn’t mean to say aloud.

“Think about what I’ve said,” Helena whispers, “won’t you?”

A beat of quiet takes up the space between Helena’s words and Myka’s, when she tells that older girl of hers, who _used_ to be hers, who no longer is and hasn’t been for a while, “Next, you’ll be asking for a signed copy.”

Helena responds by telling Myka, “You are as stubborn as Tracy and, in that regard, you two truly are sisters.”

“And you are as high as Charlie,” Myka says, speaking exactly those things she doesn’t mean to say aloud, “if you think I’m wasting even two seconds of my time reading a single line of anything my father has ever written.”

Myka expects to be hung up on. It would make saying goodbye, once again, a lot easier than it has been. But Helena doesn’t hang up. She exhales and Myka can almost see her shaking her head while moving not just one but two hands through long black hair. Because two hands means Myka’s gone too far. Two hands means Helena’s on the verge of running away.

But Helena doesn’t hang up or run away, not without first saying, “Sleep well, Myka,” and she waits, in silence, for anything else at all. So Myka gives her something. She tells Helena ‘thanks’ with very little inflection to be found in her voice and a ‘goodnight’ that sounds just as meaningless as the first thing.

The line goes dead. Myka returns the phone to its base. The second her head hits the pillow again, she is fast asleep.

The text message she wakes up to in the morning reads:

**_Dear Diary. One day, soon I hope, Myka and I will stop trying to hurt each other._ **

***

The day after that, Jane and Myka’s mother show up at the bookstore not at all by accident. Kelly is downstairs, unlocking the door to let them in. The only thing she tells them is, “She actually yelled at a customer,” and the only thing she does next is gesture nonchalantly toward Myka.

Myka is sat at the counter, meticulously cutting pages from one of those books. Crying and laughing. Angry and amused. She can’t explain either of these feelings, why she cries or why she laughs. All she really knows is that she feels vulnerable, exposed, and _bare_. And that her father didn’t even try.

“He refers to me as _Sophie_ ,” she says incredulously, opting not to look up at Jane or her mother, advancing slowly and cautiously toward her. She wipes away her tears with the back of her arm and the sleeve of her shirt and continues cutting into the book she has in hand. “I, for some reason, expected something more creative from him. Until Kelly finally tells me that my father is B. E. Ring. Did he even try?” She puffs out a disbelieving laugh. “And how many times have I read those books, Mom? How many times have I joked about the author’s name spelling out Bering? All you ever said was, ‘Don’t read those in front of your father.’

“I thought it was because they were young adults novels. I thought it was because they were the types of books Dad never liked keeping in the store. The type of books he always joked were beneath even me. The type of customers Dad never wanted to attract--”

“They _weren’t_ young adult novels,” her mother says softly, “not intentionally. Not when your father wrote them. And it wasn’t just that type of customer your father resented. It was that type of audience.  It was the way they were marketed and the person marketing them that way, too.”

“So you’re telling me that my Dad turned into an asshole because a bunch of kids liked his books?”

“It’s more complex than that, Myka. Your father has always been very prideful. It was offensive to his, how did he put it, honey?” Jean turns to Jane.

“Uppity-ass scholarly bullshit,” Jane supplies, though Myka’s sure that isn’t the exact quote her father used to describe himself as an academic. She just rolls her eyes and continues cutting.

“It was something small that spiraled wildly out of control. It’s a long story,” Jean adds with a sigh.

“That I know nothing about because no one in this family, or even this _town_ , knows how to talk. None of the right people, anyway. And not about the right things.”

“This one is definitely not a young adult novel,” Kelly says handing a copy of the book to Jane and adding softly, “It’s… intense. And surprisingly well written.”

“You read it?” Jane asks, arching her brow.

“Of _course_ she read it,” Myka says.

“Did _you_ read it?” Jane asks of Myka.

“Of _course_ not.”

“She needs to read it,” Kelly sighs.

“You need to _stop_ reading it.”

Kelly is glaring. “How could I not read it? This thing is flying off of the shelves.”

“I haven’t yet put it _on_ the shelves,” Myka says, still cutting. Still upset. Still not looking up.

“ _You_ haven’t,” Kelly says, sure to emphasize Myka’s lack of both authority and control. Over her bookstore. Over her life?  Myka's sure she means _all_ of it.

Jane and Jean step closer to Myka and she finally looks up at them to say, “Sam sold almost every copy yesterday and I had no idea. There was an actual line when I opened up the store this morning. And _everybody_ wants a copy.  Everybody wants a copy from _Bering and Sons_.  Everybody also wants to know why he doesn't also write about my non-existent brothers.”

“She fired Sam,” Kelly adds, turning with that tone of incredulity to Jean and Jane, “gave him all of the profit from yesterday in an envelope and told him to leave.”

“Suddenly you two are friends.  Suddenly you’re on his side?”

“There are no sides,” Kelly says exasperated, “I feel bad for the guy. He was just trying to help.”

“If I don’t need my Dad’s help to run this bookstore, I certainly don’t need _Sam’s._ And I never hired him to begin with,” Myka argues and only then does her page cutting stop. Just a beat. She’s quiet and staring. And one second later, she’s cutting away pages again. “He just… helped out.”

“For _money_ ,” Kelly concludes on her behalf.

“You want me to get you a signed copy, too?”

“ _Cabrona_ , I know where your dad lives.”

“ _Ladies_ ,” Jane speaks, though gently, sounding more annoyed than upset.

They’ve been like this most of the day.  Myka knows it's all her fault.

“Well, I handled the last freak out, so I’ll leave this one to you two.”

Kelly turns and goes and disappears up the stairs.  Myka thinks about how perfectly "freak" defines exactly who and what she is.

Jane is examining the cover of that book still and showing it to Myka’s mother. Myka’s not sure if she’s talking to her when Jane begins to speak. She says, “I saw an article in the paper this morning.  I really wanted to believe the name was just a coincidence.  I’m surprised he actually followed through with it.”

Myka laughs softly, “Of _course_ you knew about this. As often as you both get on me for my rampant _miscommunication_ \--.”

“You should just assume that I know everything from here on out,” Jane quips.

“I would like _some_ things about the past to actually stay in the past, Myka,” her mother supplies, “ _especially_ when they’re of no use to the present.”

“Tracy’s dad, for instance,” Myka smirks, focused on the book in one hand, the scissors in her other hand, the jagged line she’s cutting through page one-hundred and seventy-two, “right? No use bringing him up. No use bringing up the fact my father is an accomplished writer, hellbent on telling the entire world what an awful daughter I’ve been. How I only exist to ruin his life.”

Her mother sighs heavily, crosses her arms, and shakes her head.

“You need to take a deep breath, a couple if you have to,” Jane says and she says it in that voice, the one her own mother so often tries and fails to use, the one that is far better suited for a woman who is the single mother of _Pete_ and not so much the woman who is the single mother of _Myka_ , “and think very carefully about what you’re going to say the next time you open your mouth to speak.”

Myka stops cutting pages again and this time she makes eye contact with Jane. But she has no smart ass rebuttal. She’s mad, she isn’t stupid. She shakes her head, throws down the book she’s just cut to shreds, and picks up another one. She starts cutting that one, too.

“You guys sound like Helena,” Myka says low, still upset, focusing her attention on this new book in hand, “making excuses as if this,” she holds up the book, “fixes or changes or even comes close to rationalizing everything he put us through. _All of us_ through.” She makes sure Jane sees her when she emphasizes _all_ because it isn’t just her family and Tracy’s dad and Claudia. It’s Jane and Pete and Jeannie Jr. It’s Helena, too.

“Is this something we’re going to have to endure every six months with you, Myka?” It’s stern, when her mother says it but she seems to take pity on Myka halfway through that statement, on all of the anger and the tears that start falling down her face. Her mother changes her tone, makes it softer, understanding. She moves closer and puts her hands flat on the counter, just below where Myka cuts. “Your father has always been a powerful writer, Myka, but he long ago traded in that love for a bottle of alcohol and in all the years that we were together, he rarely ever acted like he was going to put that bottle down. He felt slighted, under appreciated. He let his ego ruin not just our family but many great friendships and what could have also been a great career.”

Myka’s mother puts her hands over Myka’s, forcing her to stop cutting. She takes the book out of Myka’s left hand. Slowly and carefully removes the scissors from Myka’s right.

“But he had good days amongst all of those bad days, Myka. And he spent every single one of them writing. He always promised to go back to it, to stop drinking, that things would be better or different or like they used to be. And for years I believed him.”

“He’s always talked about writing something better, more personal, _respectable_ ,” Jane scoffs, looking just over Myka’s mother’s shoulder, and she shakes her head. “But every time you would bring it up to him, he’d go into a fit of rage. I always knew he was full of it.”

“She never let me forget it either,” Jean says with a sigh.

“He didn’t even _try_ ,” Jane says, annoyed. “And now, suddenly,” she gestures to the book, "I guess this is it."

Myka doesn’t miss the way her mother rolls her eyes, the small smirk that graces her lips for only a second before she sighs softly. She closes her eyes for a beat and inhales. She opens them again. Myka doesn't know how her mother survived for so long with her father. Without Jane. 

“These aren’t excuses, Myka,” her mother tells her, bringing her hands to hold Myka’s wrists, “not for him anyway. They’re just… the only way I ever knew how to protect you _from_ him. The less you knew, the better it was _for_ you.”

Myka puffs out another disbelieving laugh, shaking her head. She says, “If what I got was _better_ , I don’t even want to know what bad was.” She pulls her hands from her mother’s hold and returns to her previous task of cutting up the book. “My Daughters’ Fathers,” she says, reading the title under her breath. “‘Both of My Daughters are Fatherless’ would have been a more accurate title.”

Her mother sighs heavily and, without another word, walks away from her. She walks to the stairs and up and disappears the same way Kelly had.

“Your dad is an asshole, Myka,” Jane says and Myka wants to roll her eyes.

She tells Jane, “You know it, I know it. Sometimes Mom acts like she doesn’t know it. Sometimes she acts like she has some marital obligation to defend him.”

“It’s not _him_ she’s trying to defend, Myka. It’s herself. Her _past_ self. The woman who was young and naïve but also scared out of her mind at the prospect of having to leave behind one daughter just to live on the street with the other.”

“That’s dramatic--”

“It’s the truth,” Jane cuts her off before she can even start, and she surely intended to start because Myka doesn’t believe, doesn’t even think Jane believes, a single world she is saying. Her mother on the streets, with one daughter, no doubt _her_. As much as she hated her father, as bad as he was… _is_... she’s just not sure she believes he would ever let her mom leave and leave Tracy behind.

Then again, Myka thinks, he would certainly never let her leave _with_ Tracy.

“For the longest time, she _didn’t_ understand how bad it was but trust me when I tell you... she figured it out,” Jane says and Myka stops cutting again to look up at her. Jane is still looking through the book, reading random pages, arching her brow. “In the beginning, I tried to get her to see. His selfishness. His stubbornness. His need to always be in control of everything and everyone. How his lack of control escalated something so small and meaningless to the point of ruining his career. But…” Jane looks up at Myka and shrugs, “she was stubborn, too. Kind of like you and Tracy. A _lot_ like you and Tracy, actually.

“Keeping Pete away from him, away from this place,” Jane gestures to the bookstore, “was the one thing that finally got to her--”

“Because my father cracking a bottle of whiskey over my head wasn’t a giant red flag? It took him endangering someone else’s kid to get her to realize her husband was going to eventually kill someone? Assuming he hadn’t already killed Tracy’s father.”

“Tracy’s father died in an tragic accident.”

“That _definitely_ makes it sound less ominous.” Myka truly can’t help the laugh that escapes her.

“You are infuriating sometimes, Myka.”

“I’m just tired, Jane,” Myka says this raising her voice, just a notch. Just enough to get her point across. “I’m _tired_ of listening to her make excuses for my dad. I’m tired of listening to you make excuses for _her_. I’m tired of all the secrets and the lies and I’m especially tired of my dad thinking he has a right to use something he has, apparently, _always_ resented to publicly humiliate _someone_ he has always resented. Someone he only ever claims to love in writing, twenty years too late.”

“I know you’re mad, Myka. You have every right to be because _this_ ,” Jane holds up the book again and shakes her head, “this, to me, looks like more of your father demanding your forgiveness. It looks like him using public sympathy to get it. But this is _all_ your father. Not me, not your mother. Not Kelly or Sam or Helena, either. Maybe Charles,” Jane pulls a face, opens the book up to the first page, and then nods, “ _definitely_ Charles.”

Myka exhales heavily.

“Honey, you can cut up every last book in this store but it’s not going to make you feel better and it sure as hell isn’t going to make this go away. Not these words. Not your dad. And especially not me and your mother.”

Myka drops the book and the scissors. She sits straight on the stool and looks up at Jane again. Moisture still collecting and burning at her eyes. Face flushed. Cheeks warm. _Breaking_.  But she is trying very hard not to show it.  

She _knows_ she is failing.

Her voice is low and defeated when she says, “I’m twenty now, Jane. Much too old for lectures.”

“Kelly didn’t call us over here to lecture you, she called us over here because she knew you needed the support. _That’s_ why we’re here, Myka. To support you. To help you. Your first instinct has always been to push everyone away by hurting them until they hurt as much as you do and more. To bottle up your anger and burry it. To feel sorry for yourself and wall everyone else off until you explode.

“But I have seen this far too often. I have watched you spiral out of control more times than I care to remember. Over a _woman_ , is one thing… but your father?” Jane's expression is incredulous, she shakes her head. “I know too well what your father’s words can do to you, Myka. And I love you too much to let you go through this alone.”

Jane is quiet. Taking in a deep breath. Myka doesn’t move or speak because she doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know what to do. She tries hard not to blink but she can’t even manage that and when she eventually does, more tears fall. Uncontrollably, down her face. Her heart aches and she doesn’t know what to do with the fact it isn’t aching for more Helena but for less of everything else.

Jane waits several moments before speaking again.

“I don’t want to see you hurting in silence anymore, Myka. Especially not over this.” Jane sets the book in her hands onto the counter top, over the book Myka has just cut up. “Let’s talk.”

Myka is defeated. All over again.

She slowly breaks down crying. Hands over her face, bending forward and leaning into the counter. She feels arms, Jane’s arms, wrapping around her soon after that. She begins sobbing. It’s loud and painful but it feels so very good, too. The pressure that’s been building in her chest for so long that she rarely notices anymore, is easing away – and she _definitely_ notices that. It’s easier for her to breathe now but she’s warm and overheating and Jane isn’t making it any better.

She won’t tell her to stop. She won’t push Jane away. She needs this more than she will ever open up her mouth to admit. She needs it and she knows she would never bother asking for it. So it’s fine that Jane’s there, that Myka’s burning up, that she feels like a fool, sobbing so loud that her mother and Kelly eventually come back down stairs, asking what happened.

It’s fine that this is happening and that they’re here and that they know exactly what she needs. Because there’s no way she’d ever ask for help. Not for this. Not for something so small, and so meaningless, a mere burden to the people around her.

She wouldn’t even know where to begin.

***

_“Open the book up to a random page. Read a paragraph. If you feel like you can stomach that, read another one. If that’s what you want to do, you can do it. If you feel like you no longer can, you don't have to. But try it and see how you feel about it._

_“If it gets to be too much, put it down. Curiosity, in this scenario, is not a bad thing. You aren’t a cat, Myka. You’re human. You’re woman. Intelligent, strong. And even when you don’t feel strong enough alone, you always have our strength to fall back on.”_

Myka will _never_ be too old for Jane’s lectures.

***

Myka is staring at the book sat upon her desk, beside her open laptop. She’s been staring at it for what feels like an hour but has likely only been five or ten minutes. Because it hasn’t been that long since their talk. The talk with her mother and Jane, with Kelly standing by, too. It hasn’t been long since she’d exhausted all of her tears, her voice, her energy along with it.

They’d hugged her and kissed her face and hugged her even tighter. She’d apologized to Kelly and Kelly had apologized to her. And when they’d all exhausted their words on feelings of support and talking about the future, Myka’s mother told her to try a bath. Maybe get some rest. Take a break from the store for the night. The weekend. The week. The foreseeable future.

Myka thought that a bit extreme but she would consider taking this night and the next night off.

She soaked and she thought about the idea of reading her father's book. She wants to, she doesn’t want to. But she wants to more than not.

“I’m giving him what he wants,” she’d told her mother, strangely happy to be crying in her arms.

“No,” her mother had whispered into her hair, just above that old scar, in return, “you’re not giving him anything.”

But Myka can’t shake the ounce of doubt that settles somewhere inside of her. It moves, untethered by reason, from her brain and into her heart. Sometimes, it settles at the pit of her stomach. Other times, it’s an ache in her hand as she writes or the blurring of her vision as she drives. It has resided in her, all over her, for so very long, she doesn’t know how to let it go. She only knows how to sometimes ignore it and other times let it take over entirely.

She wants to read the book but she doesn’t.

She wants to call Helena, too. Just to talk. To say she’s sorry. About everything. To reach out desperately for some remnant of their past to grasp on to.

But she doesn’t do that either.

***

“Hey.”

Myka looks up at Kelly from where she sits on the couch in the living room.

“It’s _Pedro_ ,” she says holding out her cell hone, “he wants to talk to you.”

Myka smirks and takes the phone and clears her throat and says, “I miss you, Lattimer,” into it.

“I have access to a strike drone,” is the first thing she hears him say. The three months until he’s home, after the so many months that he’s been away, are creeping and crawling by. She wants her best friend _here_.

“He isn’t worth the collateral damage.”

“How ya holding up, Mykes?”

“I’m all right,” she says, though her voice gives way to trepidation. When Pete doesn’t say anything she corrects, “ _Lost_.” This answer feels more truthful. “I’m tired and, this is going to sound really ridiculous, considering my childhood, but I wish I were a kid again. Well, maybe not a kid. Maybe fourteen, fifteen.”

“Simpler times,” Pete says softly and, “being an adult would be a lot easier if we didn’t know what it was like to be kids.”

“Exactly,” Myka smiles. “What about you? You’re still coming home in August?”

“I spend my afternoons riding around in a tank, doing outreach in a community that doesn’t want to be reached, blasting Prince for the locals, and occasionally blowing things up in the desert,” Pete teases, “don’t you worry yourself about how I’m doing. And yeah, I’m coming home in August and trying not to prematurely pack my bags. Are you going to read the book?”

“Good because I miss you. And maybe. Once I get past the urge to rip every page out the second I pick the book up, I’ll consider it.”

“That’s a good start. Hard to read a book when the pages are all out of order and, you know, on the floor. Not that there’s any order to this one, his timeline is fucked. Purposeful but fucked.”

“ _Pete_ ,” Myka sighs and her first instinct is to be offended, to feel betrayed, to question Pete as to _why_ but she thinks about all of the things she talked about, with her mother, with Jane, and with Kelly. She thinks about all of the things and people she spends so much time thinking about trying to hurt that are undeserving of her anger and frustrations and her spiraling out of control. This is definitely one of those things. Pete is definitely one of those people and he, above _all_ people, has earned a pass from her reactionary tirades. “Everyone thinks I should read it but they’re being very careful about also letting me know that I don’t have to, that I won’t like it.”

“Do you _want_ to read it?”

“I don’t,” Myka says resolutely, momentarily resolute, and then, not quite as sure of herself, not quite as audibly, “but I do.”

Pete must be smiling, he _sounds_ like he’s smiling. He says, “Mykes, you know how you do this nerd-in-a-social-situation thing where you kind of put up a front about how you truly feel about something while you gage everyone’s reactions and then cater to their expectations, regardless of whether or not that’s how you truly feel about it?”

“Um… no? I what--”

“It’s nobody’s fucking business if you want to read it and you won’t _actually_ be stabbing your ten-year-old self in the back if you do.”

“Huh…”

“Am I wrong?”

Myka blinks and shakes her head and eventually says “no” into the phone. But she’s thinking about all of the things that Jane said and all of the things that Pete’s said and now she's saying, “It took you one sentence to make the same point Jane made after two hours of conversation.”

“Don’t tell Mom. You know she hates when I do that.”

***

Tracy graduates high school and Myka’s father is there. It’s the first time she’s seen him since she confronted him about the book and he looks sober, he looks healthy. Myka isn’t sure how he accomplished all of that in two weeks but Rebecca is by his side and there’s a good chance that has something to do with it. He doesn’t look or act like a man who knows exactly how long he has left to live. If he’s even dying. Myka is still not convinced.

After the graduation, Tracy goes first to see _him_.

“It’s fine,” their mother says to Myka, before Myka goes to retrieve her, “let her say hello. He is… her dad, after all.” The little pause, the quiet sigh, the hesitation before _her dad_ , the way Myka’s mother squeezes her grasp on her shoulder and looks away, is not lost on her. Her mother, and Myka knows this from wine-induced conversations with Jane, is almost as perplexed as Myka by Tracy’s adoration for the man who is not her father. But their mother, unlike Myka, has always shown better restraint about mentioning it.

In the past, this has worked against her but today, it’s fine. It’s _okay_.

So Myka keeps her distance but she’s watching and listening from afar. As her father and Rebecca congratulate Tracy and hug her and kiss her cheeks and tell her how _proud_ they are of her, a group of older women approaches them. They have another young graduate by their side who waves at Tracy and points out Myka’s dad.

“This is him,” the graduate tells the women, and they all seem to gasp in unison.  "This is Mr. Bering."

***

Myka had shut the store down but in the days before that she’d encountered more than a handful, more than her fair share, far too many of these women.  Every single one of them the same.  Not a single one of them different.

None of them there to purchase a book, they’d already owned it, they’d read it twice or more. Middle aged and mothers, white and mostly straight and _invested_ in a story that wasn’t quite theirs to invest in.

Even after store hours, they’d catch Myka or Kelly as they were coming and going, and they’d explain, regardless of time constraints or _want_ to listen, the numerous ways in which they could relate:

“My husband was abusive…”

“He drank himself into a grave…”

“I always knew the way he treated our children was extreme…”

“This was my father…”

“My brother…”

“My Mom…”

Inevitably, like her mother, or _unlike_ her according to Jane, they would dive into their excuses::

“But the economy…”

“We weren’t the best kids…”

“I had this boyfriend he hated…”

“Money was tight…”

“She lost her job…”

“But this is how men are brought up in our society. Even we, as women, perpetuate it.”

And soon, after that, they’d forgiven it all:

“Who can stay mad forever?”

“In the end, I realized _he_ was the sad one.”

“God has a pre-planned destination for everyone, the road is not always easy to navigate.”

Then suddenly it wasn’t about them anymore. It was about Myka, about _Sophie_ , and about reading the book. About when she planned on forgiving her father. _If_ she planned on forgiving her father. Why she hadn’t _already_ forgiven her father because _this reason_ and _that reason_ and how selfish could she possibly be to a man who did his best, owned up to his worst, and all this at the very end of his life. When he was about to meet _the maker_.

The maker of what, Myka doesn’t know.

“The man is dying…”

“He wrote the most beautiful, heartfelt three-hundred paged apology…”

“That’s so much more than I ever got…”

“What happened to you wasn’t _that_ bad…”

“You were fifteen when it ended, you still have the rest of your life…”

“It’s not like he murdered your mother…”

“How selfish…”

“Maybe you’re just spoiled…”

“Is the story even true?”

Myka knows these women. Maybe they weren’t these _specific_ women but women like them.

They’d been in her store and lambasted her father and his name, his actions, his neglect and her mother’s inactions, too. They’d brought her baked goods and Bibles and baskets filled with crafted _things_ to make up for, they’d say, all the things she undoubtedly never got as a child. All the love she was deprived of in her youth.

Then they’d preached to her as they pretend to care about her, her life, her livelihood, the books on her shelves, and for as long as she could stand to sit there and politely tell them she had no religious ties. But that had only made it worse. That just made her fair game. Further in need of saving.

There seemed to be an unspoken, unified mission, Myka soon learned, by these women to insure she’d apologized to her father before he died and they were not going to let up on their attempts to make her see the light. To try and show her all of the good that could come from forgiveness. How forgiveness would make her a better, happier, and healthier person.

But righteousness so easily turned to insults disguised as compassion and concern. The so-called victims, who had one second found their lives so relatable, turned the very next second to the verbal abusers they’d resented and also forgiven. One group of women, admittedly present solely for the _thrill_ , had caused so much of a commotion that Ms. Vivian and her salon full of women with half-done hair-dos, had to not quite but almost literally chase those women away.

Myka closed the store indefinitely. She only takes book orders over the phone. And even with that, this limited contact with the public, she’s had to hang up on both readers and reporters.

***

Myka’s watching quietly and straining to listen from a distance, to these women who gush over her father, practically ignore Rebecca, and dote, adoringly, on Tracy. She’s waiting for the fallout, the righteousness, the insults and reprimanding but the conversation never strays from admiration. Not towards her father, anyway.

They use words like “powerful” and “brave”, they make jokes about investing into Kleenex. They tell him it takes a lot of courage to own up to such a sordid history and ask your daughter for forgiveness. They smile at Tracy, for a moment, and tease, curious to know if she’s “Sophie” because she’s lucky to have such a talented father. One who has seen through his own human error, who has overcome is addiction to alcohol (Myka laughs to herself), who has blessed her with a second chance at a true and loving father-daughter relationship. And to do so whilst knocking on the gates of Heaven?

Myka wants to vomit.

She straightens up, narrows her eyes, and is well-prepared to extract Tracy from the conversation, from the cusp of berating and chastising and lectures and _lessons_ , when her father suddenly looks in her direction and catches her gaze. He must, she thinks, see the fury. He must see that she’s teetering on the edge.

He tells the women, “Thank you for all of your support, ladies, but tonight is for my daughter,” and to the graduate, “congratulations and enjoy your evening with your family.”

Myka has never heard him sound so cordial. To her, it is frightening. For them, it's enough. They say good night and walk away, all smiles and laughter. As if they’d just met someone famous. Someone famous for something other than trying to destroy their family’s lives.

No insults. No chastising. No preaching. Not one negative word in that man’s direction.

And by the time Tracy has finished talking with their father and with Rebecca and has made her way to Myka, still glaring in his direction while entirely lost in her thoughts, Myka has remembered where, exactly, she left those scissors. And exactly how many books she has left in those boxes.

“You look like you want to murder him,” Tracy says as she approaches Myka and comes to a stop just beside her, “but you’d just be wasting your time.”

“And my freedom.”

Myka takes in a deep breath, blinks her eyes several times, and sighs as her father, with Rebecca, begins to leave the arena. Myka turns to her sister with a small smirk. It grows into a smile as she looks her over. She looks so grown up and mature in her cap and her gown. So far away from that pampered little tattling girl she once used to be.

Before Myka knows it, she’s grinning. _She_ is proud. She is so happy.

“I won’t kill him,” Myka says softly and she feels so much more calm now. She pulls her sister into a hug and holds her closer, tighter.

“Is that your graduation present to me?”

When they pull away, Myka is arching a brow. She asks Tracy, “Is that what you _want_?”

“I mean, I prefer money but...”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh and links her sister’s arm with hers to lead her back to where their mother sits with Jane and Claudia, with Jeannie Jr. and Jules.

“Money it is.”

***

Sam doesn’t answer when Myka calls him later that night to apologize… for everything. So she leaves him a message asking if they can talk when he’s available to talk, if he _wants_ to talk but she understands if he doesn’t want to. She doesn’t blame him because she probably wouldn’t talk to her either.

Not at first. Not for a while. She’d eventually come around.

But for all of the things they have in common in their past, there are so many more things in their present that are not alike at all. Because Sam, unlike Myka, wouldn’t waste his time, his feelings, or his care to hover around just on the outside of conflict, waiting to be forgiven by someone when he didn’t really do anything wrong.

And Sam, also unlike Myka, if he were the one doing the forgiving, wouldn’t make someone else sweat by not returning their phone call.

If Sam isn’t answering his phone it’s because he is currently indisposed or he is absolutely done.

Myka’s not sure what frightens her most: the thought of having scared off a perfectly good friend or the way this thought of losing him makes her feel so much more alone.

***

Sam is way too good for her. Myka knows it. Kelly must know it, too. Because she peeks into Myka’s room, as Myka is lying face-up in bed, staring once again at the cover of that book, to tell her, “Sam’s downstairs. I’m going to let him up when I head out.”

She is relieved. She is simultaneously frightened by her relief because it isn’t just the loss of a weight on her shoulders or the slight exhalation of her breath over another surviving friendship. There’s a skip in her heart, and a wave of something strange and distantly familiar settles deep inside of her.  

It isn’t the ounce of doubt because _this_ thing, she is very sure about.

But she keeps all of those thoughts to herself.

“I guess that’s okay,” she says, trying to conceal her relief. She’s not so sure Kelly doesn’t catch it because the other girl shakes her head and rolls her eyes as she leaves the room.

Two minutes later, there’s a light tapping at her door. She doesn’t turn but says, “Come in,” and there is Sam, fresh-faced and red-cheeked, and wearing an expression that Myka can’t read so easily. It almost looks like shame, though he has nothing to be ashamed of. When he turns slightly away from Myka’s gaze, it looks more like that same shy and awkward neck-grabbing kid she’s always kind of known.

Then he perks up, he smirks and asks, with a single nod, gesturing at what’s in Myka’s hands, “How long have you been staring at that book?”

“At least three weeks,” she sighs and teases in return, “How did you get in here?”

Sam holds up his hand to reveal a sealed white envelope, the very same envelope Myka had stuffed all of the profits from that book from that day into and given to Sam before telling him to go. Sam holds up that envelope and then tosses it on the bed, right beside where Myka is still lying on her back, resting against pillows, feeling tremendously sorry for herself.

“Bribery,” he jokes, then gesturing to the bed, “may I?”

Myka doesn’t say anything but she scoots over, picking the envelope up out of Sam’s way, and he sits, facing her, with one leg propped up on the side of the bed. They are quiet for a time and it is almost, _almost_ awkward. But Sam is watching her, resolutely. Waiting? Admiring? Though Myka doesn’t know why. (Though Myka knows exactly why.) All of his shyness is suddenly gone.

He tilts his head and smiles softly and asks, “You wanted to see me?”

“I thought you would have skipped town with the money by now,” she says quietly, setting that envelope back on the bed, just at the other side of her.

Sam laughs and asks, “Where am I going to go, and for how long, with eight-hundred dollars?”

“You must have really high travel standards,” she teases, hands idly flipping through the pages of the book she still holds, “if you can’t find something to do with eight-hundred dollars.”

“Hey,” Sam widens his eyes as if in warning but his smile remains, “when you said you wanted to talk, I didn’t think it was going to be about my standard of living.”

Myka sighs one heavy sigh. She pulls herself up into a seated position, facing Sam straight on, and mentally preparing her ego for the dive it is no doubt about to take.

“You’re right,” she says softly, followed by more silence. She lowers her head because she’s avoiding eye contact, collecting her thoughts, attempting to put some order into what it is, exactly, that she wants to say. Eventually, she looks back up at Sam and she nods and she says, “I’m sorry.”

Sam asks, “What are you sorry for?”

“ _Everything_ ,” Myka clarifies.

“I mean,” Sam laughs softly, “ _why_?”

“Because you don’t deserve to be the target of my frustrations, Sam, and I shouldn’t have… reacted the way that I did. And I know it sounds like I’m just trying to make excuses for myself about the way I treated you but I just… didn’t know what else to do or say. I didn’t know what else to think. I _still_ don’t know how to take any of this.” Myka holds up that book and drops it on the bed beside her, just over the envelope. “But I never should have taken any of it out on you. I feel awful for treating you that way, I haven’t seen you in two weeks because of it and I really…”

Sam arches a single brow and his smile grows. He asks, “You really…?” He waits.

Myka narrows her eyes on him, “You’re actually enjoying this aren’t you?”

He laughs, “I’m enjoying your inability to admit that you missed me.”

Myka reaches behind her for a pillow and brings it around in a full swing, straight into Sam’s head. He mostly blocks the contact and laughs at the attempt, forcing Myka to lower that pillow to the bed just between them.

Their arms are touching.  If Sam notices, he's doing a lot better job at pretending than the show Myka is putting on.  

He shakes his head.

“You don’t need to apologize,” Sam says, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot and I overstepped.”

“You couldn't have known that I--”

“I should have known,” he nods, his smile falling mostly away now, “and I should have been more careful. I should have asked but, at the time, I didn’t really think about the sensitive nature of everything that was happening. I didn’t truly understand the weight of it. But with everything that’s been going on… the publicity, the confrontations, you having to close the store…”

“How do you even know about all of that?”

"Kelly,” he says, smirk appearing once more, “and don’t get mad. She invited me over one day last week, while you were at school, and… she made me lunch.”

“You _finally_ ate Kelly’s food offerings?”

Sam laughs and nods, “Yeah. And realized what an idiot I’ve been because I could have been eating _that_ for over a year now.”

“Welcome to the fold, Idiot.”

Sam slips the pillow out from under Myka’s grasp and before she can register what is happening, the pillow is flying at her face. But the throw is playful, soft. Myka catches the pillow as it falls into her arms and she swings it around behind her, to put back into place.

“ _Idiot_ ,” she says slightly under her breath but they’re both smiling and sighing their laughter away.

“Look, Bering,” Sam says, his tone changing into something more calm, more serious, almost too serious for Myka to handle, “this can’t be easy.” And he looks down at his lap where his hands move idly, his too long blonde hair falling into his face and just barely hiding that hint of shy that seems to move slowly, and unsure of this moment, back into place. “I can’t even begin to imagine what, exactly, it _is_. So however it makes you feel, however you initially reacted to it, regardless of whether you or I or anyone else thinks it uncalled for, it’s fine. It’s acceptable. You will feel however it makes you feel and I'm not going to be mad at you for having an emotional reaction to what is, no doubt, a traumatic experience.”

Myka takes in a deep inhale. She lets it go very slowly. Very carefully. She is trying very hard not to feel anything at all about these words that Sam is saying, all of these thoughts that she is thinking.

“I just,” he goes on, “want to know if I can help, in any way, to make it easier… for you.”

She blinks and it’s over. She can feel the warmth of tears falling down her cheeks. Her face flushing for so many different reasons than lack of control, so many different feelings than anger. She takes in another deep breath before closing her mouth tight and finally looking away. And she’s looking away for a very long time before Sam leans into her field of vision with his smile and his blonde and his blue eyes and _his smile_.

“These people, who feel the need to seek you out and comment on your life, as if they’re doing the Lord’s Work by ensuring your father’s forgiveness? They are the _real_ idiots.”

Myka shakes her head and breathes in slowly. It’s shaky and difficult but she manages it.

“Sometimes,” she says, also somehow managing to speak, “I feel like _I’m_ the idiot. They know everything about me and they know everything about me from a perspective I can’t even fully comprehend, from a source that… I can’t even convince myself is totally unreliable.” Myka sniffles and wipes at her face, drying her own tears, rubbing her eyes. As grateful as she is for Sam’s presence, she is even more grateful that he keeps his distance. That he doesn’t try to touch her. That he doesn’t really move at all. “Maybe he knows more about me than I ever gave him credit for. Maybe my view of it isn’t what I have always thought it is. And I deserved it. And I _am_ selfish.”

Sam is shaking his head. He whispers, though Myka doesn’t think he means to, “You’re not. _Any_ of those things. Idiot or selfish or deserving of his abuse. Deserving of the attention you didn’t ask for in the first place. _He_ is those things.”

“How is this happening? How do they know? How did they even find out it was me? That I am _her_. About the store. Why would they even care to find me? Why would they even care to show up? I’m just…” Myka bites back a cry, she takes in another deep breath and shakes her head, “I’m just… so overwhelmed by people, everybody and everywhere, analyzing or wanting to analyze my life. As if it only exists in the context of this book.” Myka picks that book up again, she holds it out in front of her. “As if I only exist as a character _in_ this book and suddenly everything I do now is open to public scrunity. Everything I _don’t_ do is worthy of reprimand. By anyone. _Everyone_. For _his_ sake.”

Sam is quiet. He is looking away and down at his lap.

“The really stupid thing is that… I don’t even know what story he’s told and I’m already second guessing everything I know about my life.”

Sam lifts his head only slightly but he looks at Myka as if studying her, curiously and questioning but also cautious. As if he is thinking about his approach before he eventually settles on asking her, “Are you… thinking about reading it?” He gestures with a nod toward the book.

Myka wants to say no. Everything inside of her is telling her that she should say no. That she shouldn’t want to read it. That she should never give her father that much credit. That to do so would be treacherous, traitorous to every former and younger version of herself that ever had to deal with that man’s rage. So Myka wants to say no. She really truly does. But it isn’t the truth and Sam just… doesn’t deserve to be lied to.

“I’ve thought about it,” Myka says softly, her turn to look away now, to not make eye contact. To avoid it at all costs. “I’m _thinking_ about it. _Have been_ thinking about it… for a while. Just haven’t brought myself to actually do it,” she puffs out a soft laugh, wiping away more tears, and says, “I can’t even bring myself to open it. I don’t think I can.”

“What scares you most about it?”

“Who says that I’m scared?” Her gaze, nearly a glare, returns to Sam but he is unfazed by the front she puts up. He just stares back at her, expectantly. Quietly. Patiently. Myka sighs and gives in. Sam, least of all, deserves her lies. “I’m terrified,” she admits with a shake of her head, “and I don’t know if I’m more afraid of finding out that it’s all a lie… or that it’s all the truth. Either way, I’ll likely just end up angry or disappointed or hating myself. And I don’t want to be those things either. No more than I already am.”

“What if... I read it for you?”

“ _Everyone_ has read it, Sam. Kelly, Mom, Jane. Even _Pete_ has read it. I’ve heard all of their takes, all of their opinions on it, and I still don’t know what to think. But if you think you can do better--”

“No,” he smiles again and, somewhere in the back of Myka’s mind, deep and dark and buried away, Myka finds it charming, “I meant, read it _to_ you.” Sam reaches over to Myka’s lap and she freezes. He pauses, his smile softening, and asks, “May I…?”

For several long seconds Myka’s mind is reeling, trying to make sense of what is happening. Trying to make sense of how she feels about it because Sam is reaching for her hands but for what and why? But then she realizes _what_ when Sam looks down at her lap and her hands and the thing she still holds onto. She follows his gaze and the relief settles in, it’s the _only_ time she thinks she will ever be relieved to see that she’s holding _the book_.

Sam’s smile changes into something more amused as Myka comes to her senses and holds the book up for him to take. But he doesn’t seem to notice, not like she does, when their fingers touch, just barely, as he takes the book from her hand. The pads of his fingers lightly grazing over her knuckles makes her feel… so many _questionable_ things. So many _familiar_ things. First warmth, second falling, third that twisting in her belly she hasn't felt since... _H.G._

That ounce of doubt she’s been carrying around, deep inside of herself, moves quietly from the dark underbelly of her mind and deep, very deep, into her heart.

 _Fuck_.

“You okay, Bering?” Sam asks. Myka blinks and shakes her head. “It sounded like you said fuck.”

“I didn’t…” but she won’t even try to deny it. She shakes her head again, waves her hand in the air to brush all of these thoughts and this very moment away. “Read it, if you want to,” is what she says to sound as if she doesn’t actually care if he does. This tiny reservation, she’ll allow herself. Until she gets over whatever this thing is that she’s feeling.

Sam laughs and shrugs. He says, “All right, is it okay if I…” and he gestures to Myka’s bed, to the space just beside and behind her. She shrugs and tells him to make himself at home and then he begins to move. He stands, at first, and turns, he sits back down on Myka’s bed beside and just behind her. His back is against the headboard, he pulls his leg, just one, up and drapes it over the side of the bed. He makes himself comfortable.

Myka is… oddly comfortable, too.

She’s still staring at him curiously and waiting, though she doesn’t know what for. Waiting for him to feel awkward about this, for his cheeks to turn red, for that hand to find its way to the back of his neck? Waiting for herself to tell him no, to push him away, to feel the need to make this something less than what she… kind of hopes it is?

She waits and she waits but none of these things happens. She feels fine. And not just fine but content and safe and _right_ , too.

She feels perfectly okay.

Sam opens the book and turns to the very first page saying, “Now you’ll finally know who is crazier, me or your dad.”

“You,” she says it softly, too softly if she’s being perfectly honest, which she’s trying very hard to be on a regular basis, “without a doubt.”

“Guess that answers that question. No need to read then.” Sam closes the book.

Myka laughs softly, unsuccessfully masking her genuine amusement behind an eye roll and a soft groan of disapproval. She falls back, where she had previously been laying on the bed, into pillows just beside him, and commands, “Shut up and read the book, Martino.”

“Shut up,” he asks, “or read the book?”

“Read the book or shut up,” Myka clarifies.

He’s smiling as he turns to look down at her, clearly proud of himself for whatever he thinks he’s accomplished, and she rolls her eyes once more as he sits back on the bed, kicks off his shoes, and pulls both of his legs onto that bed with them.

He begins to read.

***

_Somehow, I’d convinced myself that she was doomed from the start. Already a girl born into this of all worlds. There was nothing that I could possibly do to make her life any worse than what she, as a woman, was destined for. There was nothing that I, a new father, could ever do to make her life any better. But somehow, I always felt slighted by her existence. Somehow, I always felt myself the victim of her conception and not as though she were the victim of being conceived._

_I was younger and, yes, I was wrong. I would eventually come to know better but “twenty years too late” she’d tell me when eventually finally came. And_ she _was right. She still is._

_I have a child but I am not her father._

***

Sam has only just finished reading the introduction when he looks down at Myka, where she lies on her back just next to him, and asks if she’s okay. Myka nods, wipes her tears, and tells him on a whisper, because she can barely bring herself to speak, “Shut up and read.”

Sam’s smile grows and, without further question, he continues reading that book.

Myka turns and curls into him, her forehead, arms, and knees resting _just fine_ against Sam’s leg. She closes her eyes and listens for as long as she can stand to.

He makes it two chapters before she falls asleep.

***

The book is real. From start to finish. From that first night Sam began reading it to her aloud to the next afternoon, when Myka finished reading it while sat beside Kelly on the couch in the living room.

The book is real and everything in it? All of that is real, too. But from her father’s perspective it seems more real than Myka and her almost unfailing memory can manage to recall.

It is weird and distancing to read herself as _Sophie_ , almost as if this story belongs to someone else entirely. It’s weird in a way that helps her remove herself from everything that happened to her. It’s weird in a way that makes her question whether or not her own life was actually lived by her.

But it is real, from start to finish and it is more, _so much more_ , than she could ever fathom knowing about her father, about her family, and even Helena. But _especially_ about herself.

***

Pete’s right, the timeline is fucked.

Myka’s dad bounces around from here to there, at first trying to make a case for all of this madness but always, resolving in the end, to take the full blame for his drunken fits of rage. Because nobody forced his hand. Nobody poured the alcohol down his throat. Nobody ruined his career but him and he was never contractually obligated to solve all of his own ego-driven problems with a bottle of whiskey and a rage chaser.

 _Sophie_ is born and he’s only slightly disappointed then because he’ll have to work extra hard to make sure she gets anywhere in life, as a girl and not a man, that isn’t pregnant in high school or married to the wrong type of guy. Though he admits, in his writing, how he came to learn just how useless and unnecessary all of these preconceived notions surrounding her sexuality would eventually be.

He jumps back to meeting _Jenn_ , introduced to him by a close friend from college named _Richard_ and that close friend from college’s wife at the time. He writes about falling in love, about so many of the things they talked about for their future, about the pregnancy that came just before marriage, and a book deal for a series of intelligent science-fiction novels he’d been working on for years.

 _Sophie_ is one and she’s all right, even if a little doomed. But his books, despite that old college friend connecting him to all of the right people, are being marketed as literature for young adults. He is insulted, he’s a scholar. He refuses to publish under his own name. He knows it isn’t very clever but people know who he is and no one would ever believe Warren, of all people, would write for _children_ , so B. E. Ring it is.

The books are popular. Her father is not. He’s fine with that and the money he makes, too. They pay off the mortgage, they buy modest cars, _Jenn_ still teaches, paying for daycare is cake. Sometimes spending money leads to fighting. Sometimes fighting leads to spending money. _Jenn_ convinces him that they need to add a bedroom to the apartment where a sitting area once existed, fix up the store, grow their family.  He's not convinced that one more child should do the trick. But they can more than afford to have another child.  They aren’t trying. They aren’t preventing, either.  

Not even two weeks after this conversation, _Jenn_ is pregnant with number two.

He wants his boy but _Ella_ shows up less than nine months later and she still manages to become the light of his life. However, something is just… _off_ and it all starts with an argument with _Jenn_. When she threatens to leave him. When she threatens to take her daughters with her. But it’s the _way_ she says it and _how_ she threatens it.

She’ll move to London and marry _Rich_. She has no romantic ties with him whatsoever, as far as Warren ever knew, she just knows that saying this about his best friend will hit her husband’s ego in just the right spot.  But he begins thinking about the past, about _Sophie's_  birthdate, about the last time they saw _Richard_.  And all of these things could definitely support what he's been thinking for a very long time.

He begins to focus on how _Sophie_ and _Ella_ look nothing alike. At first he doesn’t question it but when he does both he, in the story, and Myka, as she reads it, begin to wonder why it was _Sophie’s_ paternity he was most suspicious of. Why it was _Sophie’s_ existence he seemed to resent the most. The daughter that looked most like him.

He blames it all on _Jenn_ , without outright blaming her.

He’s a drunk already, it had been slowly building, because children and marriage and poor excuses to cover his real problems, like marketing campaigns targeting audiences he thinks are beneath his writing abilities. He doesn’t know if the drinking makes him question his wife more or if questioning his wife makes him drink more. Either way, it is his wife, not him, who is the cause of all these troubles. It is the alcohol, not him, that turns his thoughts, makes him question the loyalty of so many people in his life, and creates the monster he eventually becomes.

He thinks the drinking helps the writing but as it turns out, the drinking stops the writing entirely. He doesn’t finish his book series. He never has. His contract is dropped. The money runs out over time. But _Jenn_ has already quit her teaching job to stay home with the girls, they’ve invested a lot of their money into fixing up their building, he doesn’t do anything else for work. Not regularly. Not what he would call, even to this day, a _real_ job. But he still makes enough.

It’s the mid-90s and the bookstore has been good enough. It brings in enough people to buy groceries and pay utilities and keep all of his secret hiding spaces fully stocked. But it doesn’t fix the disdain or the occasional rage. It doesn’t alter his resentment for _Jenn_ for luring and locking him into their marriage by having _Sophie_. It doesn’t change the fact that she probably isn’t even his. And the security, both financial and familial, doesn’t last nearly as long as he would like it to.

Myka knows most of the rest of the story but it almost sickens her to read it from her father’s perspective. Between his excuses and his apologies, between all of the admittedly wrong thought processes he used to justify his abuses and all of the painfully satisfying parallels and conclusions he’s drawn about himself as a monster. Myka is almost sickened. She also feels oddly… vindicated.

He explains away his compromised perception of everything _Sophie_ does as being against him succeeding at anything he tries to do. He lays down every perpetual excuse he ever made about _Ella’s_ acting out as the product of _Sophie’s_ bad influence. _Sophie_ , inflicted by her mother’s bad influence. Her mother _Jenn_ , clearly just out to get him. Resigned to their marital fates. Loathing him despite his raising her burdensome daughter, to whom he is certain, by now, that he is not the father.

There’s a girl in the book called _Emily_ who has joined the ranks against him alongside _Sophie_ and _Jenn_. She is his best friend’s only daughter, whose mother he defines as a prostitute and for this, he makes no apology nor does he explain why. Instead, he uses it to first defend and then defeat his disdain toward _Emily_. How he would use her mother’s absence to make snide remarks against her. How he only ever held that girl up to her mother’s very dim light. How the only way to help her stay out of making trouble for her older brother and with all of the boys in town, was to give her some responsibility.

She watches the girls for he and _Jenn_ while they travel some nights into the surrounding cities to appear at conferences, unrelated to his history as a novelist, mostly related to his degree in literature. Myka knows about these conferences, she knows about _Emily_. It is the start of a new era for her, one of hope and elation and finally something _good_ to focus on. Someone nice to look up to and look at and pine over for the foreseeable future.

For her father, it brings only dread. Especially when he finds out _Emily_ is something she calls _bisexual_. When he worries about this _affliction_ spreading to his daughters. But it isn’t _Sophie_ he’s worried about _Emily_ changing, even if he does often make snide comments about it.

It’s _Ella_.

Myka actually laughs when she reads this part of the story. Kelly, who is sat beside her at the time, gives her the most bewildered look as Myka wipes tears from her eyes. And she’s not sure what is more funny, her father naming Helena as _Emily_ , her father thinking _Emily_ will turn _Ella_ away from boys, or her father dedicating a whole chapter to speaking about _Emily_ in the first place.

Kelly tells her, “You laugh now,” and that is all she says. It takes Myka two or three more pages to understand what all of the _Emily_ talk is leading to.

 _Sophie_ is twelve in the next chapter and it’s _Ella_ all over again. Young and tattling. Minding everyone’s business but her own. She’s around ten years old and Myka thinks she should have learned by now but she doesn’t. The delight of her father’s praise must be too much to resist.

 _Ella_ finds one of _Sophie’s_ journals and reads it, she goes to give it to her father. But _Jenn_ is there and she’s feeling bold, she snatches the journal from _Ella_ before her father can take it. She tells him he has no right to it, that _Sophie’s_ thoughts are her own. She says, “You can’t punish her for thinking,” but it wouldn’t be the most ridiculous thing Myka… _Sophie_ had ever been punished for.

Myka wonders if _Sophie_ is at fencing practice while all of this is happening.

Her father argues that if _the girl_ , and he calls her that, is into trouble, then he has every right to know. Not as her father, he doesn’t call himself _that_ , but as the man who has brought her up. As the man who took on the responsibility of raising her, has invested in her education, and has more than earned his right to discipline her. If she intends to continue walking around with _his_ last name.

 _Jenn_ reacts… unfavorably. There are tears and yelling and objects thrown.

But it doesn’t matter, if he reads the journal or not, because _Ella_ tells him everything. Starting at the very beginning with, “ _Sophie_ wants to kiss _Emily_.”

 _Myka_ , not _Sophie_ , is mortified because _she_ never knew.

All these years she’d been terrified about her father finding out about _her_ and she’s just now finding out he’s known since she was twelve years old. But where was the fallout? The lectures, the discipline? Where was the drunk and incoherent rage about all of the things and activities she shouldn’t be doing with all of the types of people she shouldn’t be doing them with?

Myka turns the page.

Her father intends to take it all out on _Emily_.

Not just because _Sophie wants to kiss Emily_ but because _Emily_ is older and must be encouraging _Sophie_ in this way, because _Emily_ knows better and must be teaching _Sophie_ this way of life. It isn’t that he cares about _Sophie_ but _Emily_ inherited this behavior from her mother, a woman he abhors, a woman _Emily_ never even knew, and now _Sophie_ will no doubt inherit it from _Emily_ , his words, and _Ella_ , to reach the finale of this asinine conclusion, will undoubtedly catch this thing, too.

Myka retains the urge to throw the book across the living room. Kelly hums, just beneath her breath, “ _Mm hm_.” A quiet _I told you so_.

He feels justified in luring _Emily_ to the bookstore under false pretenses. He tells her he wants to write her a check for looking after _Sophie_ for two straight weeks. Myka remembers those weeks well. She was twelve and a half, it was the first time _Ella_ almost died in her life and that time it had been a burst appendix.

 _Emily_ isn’t interested in taking Myka’s father’s money any more than he is interested in actually paying her. At this point he couldn’t even afford it and _Emily_ likely knows as much but he’s still insulted that she declines his check, even if she is just trying to be polite. Even if _he_ is just trying to accost her about simply existing.

The part of his brain that feels justified in this plan has convinced him that she thinks she’s too good for him. That his money is not good enough for her. _She_ , who is depraved and abominable, who is deviant and predatory. The spitting image of her mother, a whore who abandons her children, and her father, a greedy and prideful foreigner, not worthy or appreciative of his existence on American soil.

Myka is suddenly pressed with the need to know exactly why Charles agreed to publish this book. Even if her father is apologetic about all of these things, to Myka they are unforgivable. And she fears, as she reads, that it will only get worse. She knows, even without reading, that they will only get worse. And what makes her even more angry, the further she reads on, is the idea that anyone who also read these things would find her father deserving of her forgiveness.

After all of this? He hasn’t even mentioned the two times he tried killing her. But Myka still has at least 100 more pages to read.

Because _Emily_ is Helena, she agrees to meet Myka’s father at the bookstore. She still refuses to accept the money, even as a late birthday gift. Myka’s surprised he even remembers _when_ she was born.

Now that they are face-to-face, his rage takes over and the true reason for his asking her to come to the bookstore is made disgustingly and violently apparent to _Emily_.

He says things that are insulting, that are uncalled for but he doesn’t write in his book, specifically, what _all_ of these insults are. They are things he wholly believed, at the time, to be true. Things he knows now are not even remotely close to that. Myka begins to have a hard time picturing _Emily_ as Helena because she doesn’t go down without a fight. He insults her, she insults him back. When he accuses her of luring _Sophie_ into some unspecified state of being, she asks him if it’s anything like the way he lured _her_ into his office to lecture her about their relationship to one another. _Sophie_ is a child, she tells him, _Emily_ is seventeen, she’s _involved_ , she has a girlfriend. She has no interest in _Sophie_ outside of protecting her from _him_.

She views  _Sophie_ like a little sister.

He tries to call her a predator, he tries to say she’s grooming _Sophie_ and _Ella_ to be everything that she already is, to become everything that she wants. This must hit a particular nerve with her because she finally begins to cry. Still, she calls out his years of child abuse, she asks him what he thinks they’ll become because of _him_.

When he is absolutely done with her and her accusations, her insults, her _lies_ , as if what she had to say were the lies, he grabs her by her wrist and threatens to drag her to her father, to the police department, to the middle of nowhere, in order to teach her a lesson. She struggles and yells for only a moment before she knees him between his legs and manages to get herself free.

 _Emily_ , in this moment, sounds nothing like Helena. But how much of Helena does Myka truly know? The more time that passes, the older she gets, the more she realizes… she doesn’t know as much about Helena as she’d once believed.

But Helena doesn’t know everything about her, either. Or she hadn’t before she’d read the book.

In his pained state, Myka’s father lunges and grabs _Emily_ again and this time his grip, the one Myka knows so very well, is on both of her wrists. _Emily_ screams and it’s loud enough now for _Jenn_ , who was upstairs all this time, to finally hear. She finds them and all but beats him off of the girl. There’s a fight, between him and _Jenn_ , not physical but loud. She screams at him to find a new target, to stop picking fights with and attacking young girls. To ask himself why he chooses to take all of his anger out on _them,_ the daughters, instead of the fathers he’s actually mad at.

She means to imply that he should be mad at himself. Enraged at himself. _Attacking_ himself.

 _Jenn_ takes a distraught _Emily_ home to her father but the damage is already done.

 _Richard_ confronts Myka’s father at the bar across the street from the bookstore not even one hour later. He opens the conversation by asking, “How did I know I would find you here?” He tells him he knows _this_ can’t possibly be about _Emily_. She’s barely a teenager, still a child herself, and she hasn’t done anything wrong. What reason could he possibly have to hate her? And he _must_ hate her, to treat her the way he has. “She isn’t her mother. She doesn’t even know her mother. Why are you trying to punish _Emily_ for the things her mother did?”

“She is exactly like her mother,” Warren tells him in response, “and she wants _Sophie_ and _Ella_ to be exactly like _her_.”

“ _Emily_ looks after and loves _Sophie_ like a little sister--” Myka’s father’s drunken laughter cuts him off but _Richard_ continues speaking, he raises his voice over Warren’s. “If _Sophie_ has feelings for her, it isn’t because of anything _Emily_ has taught her and it most certainly isn’t _wrong_. It’s because _Sophie_  is a growing child, trying to figure out her place a world that has never shown her what it's like to have love and affection. And _Sophie_ doesn’t know what it’s like because _you_ , Warren, never showed her. Of _course_ she’s going to cling to the first person who gives her attention.”

“ _Like_ a little sister?” Myka’s father emphasizes drawing attention to what it is he finds so amusing.  Myka's surprised he managed to comprehend the weight of everything else _Richard_ had to say.  But even his writing still shows hints of incredulity when he responds to _Richard’s_ words, “Or is it because she _is_ her little sister?”

 _Richard_  is incredulous.  He shakes his head and throws his arms in the air in absolute defeat. He turns to leave but then he turns back.

 _Richard_ tells her dad, “I get it. I know what this is about, so let’s just be honest with each other here, Warren. Because it’s never been about _Emily_ or her mother, _my_ ex-wife.  This isn't _just_  about the woman you loved who never loved you back. It’s about _all_  of your failures. _Your_ drinking. Those goddamn books. _Your_ marriage. _Jenn’s_ affair? Children you can't even believe are your own.”

“You know me,” Myka’s father says this raising his drink, as if in toast to that, and she can picture it well. This dismissive attitude. His refusal to listen to reason. To listen to anything that isn’t his own twisted fabrication of reality.

“I’m not _Sophie’s_ father,” _Richard_ insists and Myka thinks the way her father writes Charles, too, is not familiar or believable. She wonders how this moment actually happened, if it all.  Or if it's filler for sales. “ _Jenn_ and I have never had a relationship but I don’t blame her for allowing you to believe we did, if it meant getting this far under your skin all of these years.  The way _Margaret_ is still under your skin after all of these years."

Margaret is a real name.  He doesn't change it.  That's Helena's mother.

Myka’s father doesn’t believe him but he doesn’t try to assault him either, he doesn’t get angry. Not like he did with _Emily_ , not like he typically does with _Sophie_. Myka’s father doesn’t see _Emily’s_ father as weak. He doesn’t see him as lesser than him. Incapable of protecting himself. He, _Richard_ , is a threat. A very real threat. One that Myka’s father would never challenge, knowing very well that it’s a fight he would lose.

“ _You_ are that girl’s father, Warren,” _Richard_ tells him, “whether you like it or not.”

Myka’s father only glares at him until he gives up on trying to get his message through but in the book, her father is monologuing all of his altered thoughts and conclusions on this discussion that Myka doesn't believe ever actually happened. Because Myka doesn't believe Charles ever cared that much.  Myka likens it to the villain who won’t shut up long enough to see the foreshadowing of his own demise, reaching out from just beyond the horizon.

 _Richard_ is done. He has tried in the past to help, he says, only to be made a fool and accused of so many things he has never done. He tells Myka’s father to stay away from his daughter, his _only_ daughter, and he walks away.

 _Richard_ refuses to press charges on _Emily’s_ behalf. He sweeps it all under the rug. One final good will gesture to allow Myka’s father his dignity. It sounds a lot like something actual Charles would do. Something he’d definitely done before, in another time, in another country. If _Emily_ ever sees Myka’s father out in public after that evening, she walks hastily away. Him glaring accusingly at her as she goes. He had no remorse for his intimidating her then and now he explains it all away with scotch.

 _Sophie_ loses, Myka’s father will now admit though not by his own observations, one of the only positive role models she has in her young life, for almost half of a year.

Myka recalls her mother had once described this fallout as _a little feud_ between her father and Helena’s. But this was not a little feud. This was her father getting away with ruining her life again, obliterating Helena’s self-esteem, and forever damaging her perception of their relationship to one another, right along with it.

***

Myka takes a break to breathe.

She throws the book down on the ground and gets up and walks into her bathroom and she doesn’t come out again until she’s soaked in a hot bath until the bath water goes cold. Kelly is still sitting on the couch when she returns but now, on the coffee table just before her, there are two shot glasses, that same old faithful bottle of tequila, and a bowl of cut-up limes.

“Oh no.”

“You can say no,” Kelly nods.

“I shouldn’t read a book about my alcoholic father’s alcoholic problems destroying my life while also drinking alcohol. It’s just…”

“Necessary? But there’s coke in the fridge.”

Myka sighs. She sits. She retrieves her book from the floor.

“I don’t eat sugar.”

Kelly turns a disbelieving stare on her and shakes her head, “Helena’s a sweet girl and, from what I have heard – like actually heard with my own ears – you eat her just fine.”

“You’re awful, you know that?”

Kelly smiles, shrugging a single shoulder.

Myka falls back into the couch and pulls her legs up, crossing them in front of her, raising that book up and preparing herself to read again. But another sigh escapes her as she lets the book fall immediately back into her lap and turns to Kelly with curiosity, with questioning.

It takes her a moment to gather her thoughts.

“Helena has always been terrified of our age gap.”

Kelly gives Myka a silent but knowing look.

“And all this time, I thought she was just being overly cautious or… that it had something to do with her relationship with Jules. That really weird thing she had with Vanessa?  Or, she really just didn’t have any interest in being with me, period. Basically every excuse I could possibly find to justify… _why_.”

Kelly arches her brow and shrugs. She still says nothing.

“Only to find out that it was all _him_ ,” Myka gestures to the book and she can feel herself growing angrier just thinking about it, “he accuses her of influencing me, _grooming_ me, turning me… and into what? And in the same breath, he accuses her of being my sister, her father of being _my_ father, and then _assaults_ her,” Myka takes in a deep breath and she can feel the tears before they ever begin to fall. “It couldn’t have possibly been more than ten minutes between the first insult and the last. In less than _ten minutes_ , he becomes the driving force behind almost every major insecurity that Helena has ever had in her life, that has made her doubt herself, her love for me, our relationship. Everything that has _ever_ kept us apart.

“And he thinks writing a book about it, _apologizing_ , is going to make it all better.”

Myka’s closing her eyes, her tears are falling. She’s breathing slowly through her nose. Trying not to let this feeling of rage, that reminds her far too much of how she is sometimes just like her father, get to her. She breathes and she focuses on that breathing and she tries very hard to remember Helena’s smile. Helena’s laugh. Helena’s face when she brings her _home_.

Myka breathes in deeply and she sighs and when she opens her eyes once again, when she turns back to Kelly just to further ground herself to _this_ reality, she is met with a sympathetic gaze.

Kelly already knows all of this. She’d likely known it before she’d ever read the book. But having read both that and the manuscript, and weeks ahead of Myka, she's certain that Kelly knows it. She knows it very well.

Myka finally knows it, too.

“Fine. One shot,” she tells Kelly who shrugs, as if it makes no difference to her. Myka pulls her cell phone out of her back pocket and hands it to the other girl. She adds, “And don’t let me call Helena.”

“Done.”

***

The timeline is fucked because he’s nearly reached the present but then he jumps back, finally, to that night with the bottle and the stairs and how he almost killed his seven-year-old daughter, how he was almost killed _by_ an eight-year-old boy. How he never blamed _Jacob_ for doing what he did but certainly kept his distance from him as he grew older and taller and bigger and stronger.

 _Jacob_ is there again, eight years later. They’re in the bookstore and her father is sitting on top of _Sophie’s_ chest. His hands, when his vision clears, are near-to crushing her throat. Not around her neck but pushing straight down. He “doesn’t remember” everything about that night, least of all the words he says to her but he does remember, quite vividly, being dragged out of the bookstore by a sixteen-year-old _Jacob_. He remembers being thrown to the ground. He remembers Jacob sitting on top of _his_ chest. Several police officers having to pull him off.

And then nothing for several hours after. He had completely blacked out.

The timeline is fucked because he jumps forward and right into how easily he managed the paternity testing, the technology far more accessible than it used to be. _Ella_ accidentally brings _Sophie’s_ brush instead of her own, when she visits him over a weekend, and that is what triggers the idea to do the test. He collects _Sophie’s_ hair from it and, just to have a match, he manages a hair from _Ella_ , too.

Finding out _Sophie_ is truly his daughter does not shock him by this point; however, finding out _Ella_ is not his daughter is not a thing for which he could have ever prepared.

He holds on to those test results for a very long time.

There is some hint of determination to turn his life around. He goes to weekly meetings for alcoholics, his sponsor is an old friend named _Rebecca,_ whose name apparently doesn’t need changing in order to protect her privacy. But it is not long after this when the accident happens and his recollection of it is dim, at best.

One second they are talking in the car. The next second, for him, is a blur of chest pain, of losing control, a jarring impact, the sound of metal scraping, a car horn that doesn’t let up, and the pain in his chest miraculously disappearing. But at what cost?

He blacks out again.

After that, he hears screaming. A young girl. The word agony could not and will never do those screams justice, and for as long as they last, the short time that they do, Myka’s father only imagines those screams as coming from _Sophie_.

Eventually they stop, not for death or relief of pain but a brain injury that, he later finds out, renders that young girl beyond waking. _Beyond_ saving.

There’s an apology of sorts to Claudia, whose name he neither uses nor makes up. He just refers to her as both _the child_ and _an innocent, young victim_ who didn’t deserve to lose her family at the precious age of six years old.

He draws an unnerving parallel between _the child’s_ lost childhood being a direct and violent result of _Sophie’s_ lost childhood and Myka wants to roll her eyes. The alcohol is making her less tolerant. These events are not the same in cause or effect, _Sophie_ wasn’t orphaned, regardless of how hard he tried. And it’s his blatant disregard for the lives around him, not an unforeseen irony or the butterfly effect, that killed that child’s family.

Myka is almost to the end when _Ella_ finds out and eventually tells him who her real father is. It first drives him to the very edge of his sanity, he takes pills instead of drinking, he sleeps all day instead of thinking. And next, drives him to doing something creative.   He is motivated now, he is determined.

He’ll complete the manuscript. His 300-paged apology.

The present, when he writes it, reads so much like an illusion of happiness, a false comfort that he’s just settled into for the sake of feeling grounded. _Ella_ has grown and she’d forgiven him long ago, though he’s not entirely sure she’d ever felt slighted by him to begin with and not even _he_ can understand why that is.

He’s almost let _Sophie_ go, at least that’s what he tells himself and everyone he writes for, because he doesn’t really try any longer to reach out to her. He conveniently omits, from writing, all of the many times he had.

He plans to give her this manuscript, this apology, her name in his will, and that is all. He’ll be done. He’ll leave her alone to live her life, to the end of his and for many years beyond that.  He will give her, in his death, so much more than what he had to offer her in his life.

He will go to his grave, and soon for all of his vices, without her forgiveness. Without the expectation that he deserves it.

 _If_ she reads the book, he can only hope for the best reaction. If she doesn’t read the book? That is the answer he most expects to receive. The only answer he was ever going to receive. The one answer he truly deserves and the thing he had always demanded from her the most.

 _Silence_.

***

 _If writing this book for my eldest daughter, the girl – now a woman – who reads every book she can possibly get her hands on, is the only way to tell her that I’m sorry, that I regret and loathe everything I did to her and the people she loves, that I wish I could go back in time, all the way to the beginning, and start over, do better,_ be _better for her sake? Then here’s to hoping she gets her hands on this book.  Here's to hoping she, one day, reads it._

_Bottoms up._

***

He comes every year now, to the graveyard, and Myka doesn’t know why. She _knows_ why, she just doesn’t understand why. But he keeps his distance, that’s all that really matters. Hidden in the shade of a tree about a hundred yards away. He doesn’t bother coming any closer. He never tries to talk to anyone. He always leaves just before the ceremony ends. He’s always gone by the time they make it back to their cars.

Myka stands with Claudia, holding Claudia’s hand, beside Abigail, with the twins, and they are just in front of the grave sites. Jane and Jeannie, Kelly and Jeannie Jr., Tracy and Kevin and the rest of the Chos are all there, too. Several other people stand nearby, both new faces and old faces. Friends and other people who were practically family.  No Joshua.  No Ingrid.

It has been this way every year for four years, on this day in June.

Claudia is the first to put down flowers at every grave. Her father’s, her mother’s, and finally Claire’s. And this time, when she reclaims Myka’s hand, when Mr. Cho finishes saying the words that he says every year with just a hint of a difference to accommodate the passing of time, she tugs at Myka’s hand until Myka bends to just her height.

Claudia shakes her head and whispers, “I want to go now.”

Myka doesn’t question it. She doesn’t ask Claudia why because she doesn’t need to have a reason, Myka’s already sure she wouldn’t answer. Myka, without question, silently signals her mother and Jane, Kelly, Tracy, and Jeannie Jr. All five of them acknowledge her with a single nod and, as everyone else pays their respects, they begin to quietly say goodbye to the Chos, they walk back to their cars.

***

“Hey!”

Myka’s father hadn’t quite made it to his car before they’d caught up to him, not intentionally. Not, at least, to Myka’s knowledge. So when Claudia calls out to him, it throws everyone off guard. Everyone stops and Myka reaches out for Claudia’s shoulder, to halt her, to hold her back, but she’s tiny and spry.  She seems determined, too. She ducks her shoulder away from Myka’s touch, and she walks swiftly and deliberately, toward Myka’s father who must be pretending not to hear her at all. Who must not believe Claudia is actually talking to _him_.

She says, “Mr. Bering!”

Myka calls, stern but also soft, “ _Claudia_ ,” and she isn’t the only one. But they remain stopped, her and the mothers, Kelly, Tracy, and Jeannie Jr., too. They all freeze and watch Claudia as she runs up to Warren.

He turns, Myka’s father, confused and close to startled. He is near belly-to-face with a tiny Donavon and from where Myka’s standing, he looks very scared. Claudia, though small, can sometimes be intimidating. And Myka’s father isn’t exactly the man he used to be. The man who took all of his anger out on little girls, on teenage girls, and on their mothers. He is weak and frail, he looks worse again, more so than he did at Tracy’s graduation. Myka has no doubt that Claudia, tiny as she is, could knock him over with one solitary blow.  Two if she were feeling particularly sympathetic.

He seems to grow smaller the longer Claudia stares up at him in silence.

“Is it true,” she asks, “what you wrote? Are you really dying?”

Of course, Myka thinks as she sighs and rolls her eyes and shakes her head, even _Claudia_ has read that book.

Warren nods and for a while that’s all he does but then he clears his throat, he says, “From the moment we are born, we begin to die.”

When Claudia responds she doesn’t sound upset, she just says, “Some of us just have a shorter shelf life, right?” Myka’s father nods at this. He almost smiles. He must want to, at seeing Claudia so close, so much older. Myka’s not so sure he’d ever really paid attention to her before.

“You are a very intelligent young lady,” he tells her and he looks up at Myka, “you remind me a lot of my daughter, when she was your age.”

“Do you mean Myka, your real daughter, or Tracy?”

“From the mouths of babes,” Myka hears Jane saying softly from just behind her.

Myka’s father just says, “Both of them,” and sighs, adjusts the way he’s standing. To take the pressure off of his injured leg.

Myka bites down on her her tongue.

There are no less than one million words she has been saving up for this man, since she’d finished reading that book. No less than one thousand different feelings and thoughts and emotions she has had to work through to fully understand the depth of how her father’s writings have made her feel, have changed her life. And the irony of her life being changed by the story of her life as told by the man who has always forced change upon her… is not at all lost on Myka either.

Claudia lends a momentary glance behind her, in Myka’s direction, and the expression on her face is as determined as the walk she’d done to get to this place. Without a word to Myka, Claudia turns back to Myka’s father and she is reaching into her pocket, she is pulling out an envelope, folded in half. She holds it, looks down at it. She seems to ponder over its existence for a while before she steps forward, closer to Myka’s father, just two steps and then she stops.

“I know you didn’t do it on purpose,” Claudia says softly, still examining that envelope that is in her hands, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I wish you hadn’t done it.”

Myka’s father lowers his head. It looks something like shame but Myka has never really seen that look on him before. Not like this. Not this genuine.

“I don’t believe in angels or ghosts,” Claudia continues and she looks up at Myka’s father, he looks up at her, “I’m not so sure I believe in life after death at all but… just in case.” Claudia holds up that envelope and Myka’s father doesn’t immediately take it. He looks and he waits. Until Claudia says, “Could you maybe take this with you? And give it to my mom... if you see her?”

Warren’s eyes immediately rise to Myka’s, to Myka’s mother, to Jane and Tracy. He must not get the comforting response he’s looking for when he looks to all of them. Myka herself only shrugs, arches a brow, and looks away. By the time she glances back, her father’s eyes are on Claudia once again.

“Miss Donavon,” he begins but Claudia just waves that envelope. She stretches her arm and holds it higher. She urges him to take it.

He eventually does.

“I know you can’t physically take it with you,” Claudia says this while stepping back, lowering her head, bringing her hand to her mouth to bite on the nails of her fingers, “but you can read it and maybe, if you memorize it, if you get to wherever you’re going… whenever you’re going.”

Myka’s brain fills in the word _hell_. Even if she doesn’t believe in it, if he were going anywhere, she’s certain it wouldn’t be any place near Claudia’s family.

Warren nods. Somber and defeated. He says, “I can do that for you,” and looks down on the envelope, “it’s the least that I can do.”

Claudia nods and sighs out, “Thanks,” and she turns to walk away. But she stops, halfway back to Myka, and turns back to Myka’s father. She says, “For the record, I don’t believe in reincarnation either but if it’s real then… maybe next time… you can try to do a little better?”

He nods again and says, “I can do that for you, too.”

Claudia shakes her head and replies, “Not for me,” and she looks back to Myka, to Jane, to Myka’s mother, to Tracy, Kelly, and Jeannie Jr. She smiles and she nods, looking somehow much older than her ten years, and far more at peace than she has in recent weeks.  She turns back to Myka’s father and says, “for _them_. For Pete and H.G., too.”

Myka’s father has nothing to say. He is quiet. He nods. He seems to grasp for and fall back against the open door of his car, as if needing to support himself. As if needing the balance to keep him from collapsing onto the ground.

“Goodbye, Mr. Bering,” Claudia says and it sounds so very final. She doesn’t expect to ever see him again. Myka's almost certain she never will.

He can't manage a goodbye in return, he simply nods and watches Claudia as she returns to Myka’s side, takes up Myka’s hand in hers, and looks up at her with an expectant and accomplished smile.

“I’m ready to go home now.”

 


	28. The Barely Alive

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The return of Giselle and Pete and Myka's emotional turmoil, although that never really went away. Timeline is mid-July through late-November of 2004. Myka is still 20, Helena turns 25.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got really long and, as always, I had to break it up into two. Rather than make everyone wait around while I edit 50,000 words of story. The next chapter is almost complete and will be up sooner rather than later. 
> 
> Thank you all for sticking to it! It's been a crazy and tumultuous ride but these last couple of chapters are the end of their "childhood" and the beginning of their adulthood. So they are learning and will soon know exactly how far they have come since those so many years ago.

“I want to hear it from you.”

Myka’s mother is sat at the kitchen table in the Lattimer home with Jane. They are, or had been, talking about Claudia and custody and Myka doesn’t know what else. But now they've stopped, Myka hadn't interrupted them, she'd just walked into the kitchen with a cheek full of tears.  And now they both look to her expectantly, waiting to know what it is she wants to know.

Myka’s mother looks to Jane, Jane looks to Myka’s mother. Neither of them really knows exactly what this is about.

“What my dad did to Helena," Myka clarifies.

“ _Myka_ \--”

“Why everyone always protects him and never me. Never _Helena_.”

“Myka, I don’t have the time for this,” her mother attempts to dismiss her, “and it isn’t my story to tell. I was hardly there.  Why don’t you ask Helena what happened?”

Myka approaches the table, pulls out a chair, sits down across from Jane and her mother. She wants to be angry.  She wants to demand this thing from them.  But she is exhausted again.  She is _done_ again.  She is tired of feeling how she currently feels and she just wants to understand.

But she doesn’t want to talk to Helena to understand it. She hasn’t wanted to talk to Helena for some time now.  She wants to talk to someone she can believe will tell her everything or anything at all. And she knows, she has _always_ known, that person isn’t her mother either.

She _wants_ to talk to Jane.

“You made time to read the book,” Myka says softly, nodding as tears continue to fall, “you said I could come to you. You said you would be my strength. _Both_ of you.  So please, make time for me.  I just need someone to tell me the truth.”

Myka has waited long enough.

***

It’s early July and Claudia doesn’t want to do anything for her eleventh birthday.

“It isn’t the same as turning ten,” she tells the mothers, when they ask what has changed between last year and this year, “when I turned ten, I was excited about turning ten. Excited enough that I didn’t think about them as much.”

 _Them_ is her family.

“I feel bad about it, so I’ll think about them more this year to make up for it. I don’t need to have a party.  There’s not much special about turning eleven.  Maybe when I’m thirteen.”

When Claudia isn’t within ear shot, Myka hears Jane tell her mother, “I’m sure that brother of hers has something to do with this.”

“My money is on Ingrid,” her mother responds with more certainty than Myka has heard from her in weeks.

***

Myka is thinking about all of the ten dollar bets her mother has lost to Jane when Claudia tells her, “Joshua never thinks about them and if he does, he doesn’t talk about them.”

It’s mid-day and it’s hot and they’re walking across the deserted campus of Myka’s old middle school where Claudia will be attending sixth grade in the fall. They’ve been quiet up until now, save Myka’s gentle directions as they make their way through open outdoor hallways and vaguely familiar corridors.

“I don’t want to forget them like he does. I don't even know how he does it,” Claudia sighs as Myka leads her down another hallway, “I don’t want to know.”

They come to a stop in front of a large set of double doors with tempered glass windows and Myka echoes Claudia’s sigh as she tugs at the handles. It’s a pointless effort because it’s summer and everything is locked.

“Ingrid is the how, to answer your question,” Myka supplies, turning to Claudia, leaning back against that locked door and crossing her arms in front of her, “I’m assuming anyway.”

Maybe her mother does deserve that ten dollars after all.

Claudia shrugs and back pedals until she comes to stand against the wall just opposite of Myka.

“Mrs. Armstrong’s classroom is in this building, room A4. Just up the hall and to the left. According to Jane, who has all of the insider information, she’s going to be your home room teacher.”

“Is she nice?”

“She’s…” Myka can’t help the smile that pulls into her lips thinking about this teacher that was once her teacher. She shrugs and tells Claudia, “She’s all right.”

“I mean friendly nice, not nice to look at,” Claudia clarifies.

“She’s that, too.”

Claudia rolls her eyes and puffs out a soft laugh. She tells Myka, “You need a girlfriend. A _nice_ one. Just not one of my teachers.”

“That,” Myka says, standing straight and stepping toward that younger girl, “is the exact opposite of what I need right now.” She smiles and holds out her arm until Claudia is at her side again.  “C’mon, Pip,” Myka wraps her arm over a not-so-tiny shoulder and leads Claudia further down the hallway, “I’ll show you where the library and the gym are, then we’ll head to your appointment.”

***

“I read your dad’s book again.”

“ _Again_?”

They are back in the car, idling in the school parking lot with the engine on, with the cool air turned all the way up, when Claudia asks Myka, “Did you always know your dad was a bad person?”

The question takes Myka off guard.  She is buckling herself into her seat and hesitant, at first, careful next, about what this questions means, how to even begin responding to it to a ten-year-old going on eleven.  She's not even sure she knows the answer.

“I guess I always kind of knew,” is the simplest response that Myka can come up with. She does suppose that she always knew but now she thinks about a time when she didn’t know.  When she _may_ have known and convinced herself that’s just how all parents are or when she may not have truly known and mentally pushed that reckoning away, stopped that revelation from ever happening.

It’s so long ago now that she isn’t sure if that feeling she’d once felt, when her father was an actual father and before he became an actual monster, ever really existed or if she’d just made it all up in her mind.

“I don’t think Josh is a bad person, I just think he does stupid stuff sometimes,” Claudia sighs and she leans back in her seat, allowing her head to rest against the back of it like the old soul that she tends to be, “and most of the stupid stuff he does _is_ for Ingrid, so maybe _she’s_ the bad one."

There’s a ten dollar bill sat on Myka’s dresser back at the apartment. She makes a mental note to give it to her mother the next time she sees her.

"But sometimes I wonder if I’ll get older and realize Josh really was the bad person all along.”

“You really don’t want to know my opinion of your sister in-law, Claudia,” Myka smiles over at the young girl.

“I’m pretty sure I already know it.”

 ***

“Myka, can I talk to you for a minute?”

Claudia’s sessions usually last about forty-five minutes. An hour if she’s feeling talkative, if something particularly interesting or exciting happened that week.

Today, her session lasts an hour and fifteen minutes. When she comes out, she is quiet and unsmiling. Her little forehead is crinkled in all of what Myka can only assume is frustration.

She reaches a single finger to Claudia's forehead and gently taps that crinkled brow. It disappears immediately as Claudia takes in a deep breath and smiles softly up at Myka.

“Claudia, Dougie should be in his room,” Mrs. King tells her, pointing from the doorway of her in-home office, across the large living room, and toward a hallway, “if you want to go say hey for a little bit while I speak with Myka?”

“Okay."

Claudia disappears down the hallway leaving Myka standing alone with Mrs. King.

“Myka,” Mrs. King says, turning to her with a delightful sigh. She extends an arm into her office, to the couch where Claudia usually sits in that large room, just across from the large wing-back chair where Mrs. King sits, “have a seat if you’d like, I won't take up too much of your time.”

She enters and sits, waiting patiently as Mrs. King settles into the large upholstered chair across from her.

“So,” Myka smiles, patting her hands nervously against her thighs, “you’re not having Claudia committed or anything are you? I told her, long before she started seeing you, that you don't do that and the whole liar vibe doesn’t really suit me.”

It’s meant to be a joke, as evidenced by the awkward laugh that follows. She had tried and failed to contain it, the laugh and not the joke. But now it’s out there, making her sound foolish and probably making her look just as foolish, too.  Mrs. King’s smile only grows slightly at one corner, her brow arch is a bit more exaggerated.

"You're right," Mrs. King smiles fully now, "I don't do that. And I try to avoid using the word  _committed_  in that context but rest assured, Claudia is nowhere near close to meeting the requirements for a mental health hold. She's doing very well, considering everything she's been through."

"Oh," is all Myka can say in response. She had only posed the question as a joke to ease her discomfort. She hadn't expected an actual answer and she didn't exactly know what to do with the one she'd been given. Mrs. King seems to know or pick up on this minor tension, on the whisper of guilt that moves through Myka at being corrected for her phrasing. 

Mrs. King waves the subject off and suggests they move onto more pertinent matters.

“Have you given any thought to allowing me to slip you into my schedule?”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh, “I’m not even sure how you find time to do this between both teaching and coaching.”

“It helps that my children are no longer children but I definitely have more time during the summer,” Mrs. Kings says, smile growing, her short response tells Myka that she’s still waiting for a real answer to her original question.

“I’m taking three classes this summer,” Myka says, slipping into a more serious tone.

“Good,” Mrs. King nods, “and Fall?”

“I’m taking a year off,” Myka concedes.

“Jane told me you’re working on two master’s degrees simultaneously and very close to graduating. Any particular reason why you’re taking a year off, when you’re so close to the end?”

“Mental health?” Myka shrugs. “Impeccable timing? With everything that’s happening, I’m more than certain I’ll need it."

“With your dad,” Mrs. King concludes knowingly. Myka is nodding and shrugging and looking away from that woman now. She is looking somewhere else in this room that is half business and half toys. She is imagining herself here as a child, at a time in her life when she knows Mrs. King had tried to get her there. When Mrs. King had tried getting through to her mother despite knowing everything about with her father. And she wonders if it would have helped. She wonders if, like Pete, she could have found some comfort in those meetings, in this environment, in telling things to this woman that she could never really say to anyone else.

Myka eventually says, “Yeah,” and when she looks back to Mrs. King she adds, “you know, this is starting to sound an awful lot like a therapy session.”

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. King apologizes and her smile finally softens into something more believable. Something more comforting, far more relaxed, than before.  “I am no therapist, Myka, and I didn’t pull you in here to talk about _you._ I promise, I was just,” Mrs. King shakes her head and looks up as if in search of the right words before finally landing on, “I’m glad you’re doing well.”

Myka hears the unspoken assumption of “despite everything” but she ignores the tone and averts her attention to a wall to her right that is lined with shelves, filled with children’s toys, puzzles, and stuffed animals.

“Are all of your clients children?”

“Most,” Mrs. King nods.

“That has be to weird, right?” Myka asks turning her attention back to Mrs. King while gesturing to the wall of toys.  “I'm assuming at least _some_ of them end up being your students. Eventually? How weird is it that you know so much about them?”

“My clients are never my students,” Mrs. King says this leaning back into her chair, “well, that’s not accurate. One of my clients was my student for a very short time and it actually ended up working out for her.  Otherwise, my clients are not my students.  The district does a good job of making sure they are not.”

“So, do you have to disclose information about your clients to the school district?”

“They give me an attendance list before every school year,” the doctor says, “and if it needs correcting, I respond with my suggested corrections. They’ve learned not to ask questions.”

Myka supposes the answer is satisfying enough so she lets her own interrogation end, even if it means submitting to one herself. It doesn't take long for Mrs. King to fill the silence.

“Do you know Joshua well? Claudia’s brother?”

Myka shrugs and shakes her head, “I don’t know him at all, to be honest. I only talk to him when I have to.”

“For the custody exchanges?”

Myka nods, “And even then, I rarely participate.”

Mrs. King lets out a soft sigh, a nearly inaudible hum.

“Is something wrong? With Claudia? Did he do something to her?”

“It's nothing he did, it's more who he is that I find disconcerting. You know, Joshua is almost twenty years older than Claudia. He moved out of the house when he was seventeen and he wasn’t around when she was born, he rarely visited in those first six years of her life…”

“Yeah,” Myka laughs softly, “it really makes you wonder how he ended up having the majority of her custody.”

“… to call what he had with his parents a _falling out_ would be a quite generous summary of the events that led up to his leaving home,” Mrs. King continues, “I sometimes wonder, and I say this as a friend of Cleo’s, not as her daughter’s counselor, if leaving Claudia with him was her final effort to bring Joshua back into her life.”

Myka is quiet because in her mind she’s thinking a thing about what that must have meant for Cleo Donovan in comparison to what it means for Claudia, and the only other thought she can think after that isn’t very respectful to her memory. She pulls her bottom lip in under her teeth and bites down on it hard to keep that thought to herself but then Mrs. King is encouraging her to share.

“You have thoughts on that?”

Myka supposes it’s that her thoughts aren’t as quiet as she thinks they are.  That her body language and her heavy sighing and the way she tends to wear her feelings all over her face probably says a lot more about her, a lot more to Mrs. King, than she ever intended.

Myka says, “No offense to Mrs. Donovan’s memory because I liked her a lot and I’m sure she never could have predicted what happened actually happening but that sounds like a pretty shitty and selfish thing to do to your own daughter. _And_ your son, even if he is an asshole.”

“I think she saw it coming,” Mrs. King says softly, wistfully. Her eyes are drifting elsewhere and away from Myka now, as if losing herself to a thought or daydream.  She’s so far gone that when Myka questions what she means by that, she has to ask twice before the older woman’s attention returns.  Mrs. King shakes her head and laughs softly, apparently amused by her own emotional vacancy. She adjusts the way she sits in her chair, to lean forward, resting her elbows against her knees, and she says, “She was prepared, _over_ prepared actually.”

“You know what they say, about luck favoring the prepared.”

“She’d only added Jane to her will three days before the accident.”

“Are you really going to sit here, Mrs. King, and try to tell me that _Ms. Cleo_ was psychic?”  Myka arches a brow and turns a very pointed and skeptical look on Mrs. King whose face has already shaped into confusion and then disbelief followed by amusement and soft laughter.

“Child _no_ , I’m so sorry,” Mrs. King sits back, laughing fully now, “but I do wonder if it was just... in the atmosphere or,” she’s waving a hand aimlessly in the air, “I don’t know.”  She’s shrugging now and and turning her attention back to Myka, sighing out a soft smile.  “I'm a counselor, I'm not a medium. Nor was Cleo Donovan, not in all the years that I knew her anyway. But she was always very in tune, I guess you could say," Mrs. King shrugs a single shoulder, "she always had feelings about things."

Myka's thoughts immediately turn to Pete. They turn, soon after that, to similar moments in her life, in her past, where things just felt extremely wrong or extremely right and she'd based a handful of decisions on those feelings alone.

"What about you, Myka? Do you ever have stronger than average instincts? An intuition that you cannot entirely explain or comprehend?”

“Not normally.”

“Have there been exceptions that stand out to you?”

Myka sighs and shakes her head. She’s thinking back in time to one of the most tense moments of her life. She’s thinking back to a long walk with Claudia down the hallway of the Cho residence. It could have been ten seconds, it could have been an hour. From Abigail’s bedroom to the front door.  To where her mother stood with Jane, to where the Chos stood, too. It was the slow movement of time between the end of that past life, the one where Claudia's family was still alive and she was just a little girl she used to babysit, and the beginning of this one. Where Claudia is her family now. Her little sister. Someone she looks after and loves and would fight just about anyone for.

It's like two acts in a play, and she’s wondering even now if and when this second act will end. If there will be any more life altering moments like that. If she'll survive the way they tend to consume her whole. If she'll defy them when they try.

“The night of the Donovan's accident,” Myka nods eventually, “I _knew_. I don’t know if I would call that instinct. I think… it was mostly observation.  From the looks on their faces. Mom’s and Jane’s, I mean, and Mr. and Mrs. Cho. Before that, I didn’t have a clue.  Not like Pete.”

“Pete knew?”

“Pete always knows,” Myka says softly. “We weren’t even halfway to the hospital before he called Jane to ask what was going on. He told me later that he just started feeling really sick."

"I remember now," Mrs. King nods thoughtfully, "his stomach aches. Jane said he'd had one, more painful than usual, just before his father's accident."

"He had one that day on the softball field, too, and that night... with Helena...”

Myka doesn’t finish that sentence. Thinking about Helena.  And Leo.  Helena and Charlie. She is trying not to think about either of these situations. She is trying hard not to think about any of the hurt that Helena had been through.

Mrs. King doesn’t need to ask about what happened with Helena. Myka can see in the older woman’s expression alone that she has already made the connection, that the connection was likely there before Myka ever stepped into this room and has, perhaps, always been there. Maybe it’s all Mrs. King thinks about when she sees Myka.  Maybe that is her one true association, the thing that draws her so much to wanting to talk to Myka.  To wanting Myka to open up to her.

She’d always just assumed it was because of her dad and her past, her childhood, if she could even call it that, and absolutely anything else. Maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe it was _this,_ her relationship to and with Helena. But if it is this, Mrs. King doesn’t say anything about it. In fact, she changes the subject entirely.

“Claudia is very good at masking her feelings. At first I thought it was just her way of coping with everything that has happened but I wonder, sometimes, if it isn’t a response to the way her brother and his wife have been _raising_ her.” 

The tone Mrs. King uses to say  _raising_ , as if to mean not raising at all, does not escape Myka.  She catches the underlying meaning there and when her eyes find Mrs. King’s again, she’s certain there is a small nod there, too. A mutual understanding.

“I told Claudia that there is no minimum age, in this state, at which a child can voice their own opinion on their custody. All it takes is a good mediator and a _reasonable_ judge to hear the case.” Myka knows, from all of the conversations she’s had and heard involving her mother and Jane that the judge they deal with is not reasonable at all. That he is biased against them because of who and what they are. Women. A couple. One half of them divorced from a man. “And if a judge that happens to be  _unreasonable_  has unwittingly put said child in danger to satisfy his or her own bias? Well, it wouldn't take very much proof of that bias, or the harm such bias has caused, to have a new judge appointed to the case."

"Uh huh," Myka says, getting the entire picture though not know, exactly, what she could do with that information.

"Just food for thought.  In case you, or even Pete, get any instincts about Claudia’s current permanent living situation.”

Myka is opening her mouth to speak when she is cut off by a voice through the door that is slightly ajar but now opening wider.

“ _Mom_ ,” that voice, familiar and jolting, is questioning Mrs. King, “where did you put the keys to your car? I'm going to run out and--”

“ _Imani_ ,” Mrs. King is scolding, barely turning to look at the figure who comes walking into the office coolly and completely distracted by the phone in her hands.

Giselle startles when she looks up, realizing Mrs. King isn’t alone.  She says, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize you had a…” but then recognition sets in. Myka can see it in the way Giselle’s eyes go suddenly wide, “ _Myka_?”

“Yes, Imani,” Mrs. King is sighing, falling back against her chair in defeat, “I have _a Myka_.”

“ _Too Tall_! How the hell are you?”

Myka can’t help the grin that pulls into her lips and broadens her smile. Giselle is walking to her, Myka is standing, and they are hugging before Myka even knows what is happening. And it doesn’t feel awkward, this strikes Myka most.  It feels familiar. It feels so nostalgic and, even more oddly, it feels like _relief_.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Giselle apologizes as they pull apart, “the door was open, so I just assumed--”

“It’s fine, we were just chatting. Nothing official,” Mrs. King says standing, brushing Giselle off and turning to Myka, “Thank you for humoring me, Myka.”

“It was an admittedly nice chat,” Myka shrugs, “but I should probably get Claudia home before the moms start losing their minds.”

“Of course,” the older woman smiles, showing Myka past Giselle and out of the office. She gently backhands Giselle’s belly as they pass by and through the doorway.

“Such violence, Mother,” Giselle teases, grabbing Mrs. King’s shoulders from behind and what starts out as a playful massage turns into a gentle, teasing shake, “ease up, Ma, it’s gonna be okay. You will survive me this summer, I _promise_.”

Mrs. King tilts her head and lends a side glance to Myka. It is both the look of an unbeliever and a silent plea for help. A burst of laughter escapes Myka and the older woman calls out to Dougie and Claudia, still playing somewhere at the back of the house.

A tiny voice calls back to announce their eventual return.

They are standing by the front door, Mrs. King, Myka, and Giselle, when both Mrs. King’s freckle-faced grandson, Dougie, and Claudia appear, laughing and nearly out of breath with their matching red hair.

“And what is so funny, Doug-E-Doug?” Giselle asks, reaching to tussle thick curls. She is immediately met with protest.

“Auntie, _stop_ ,” he whines, ducking away from her grasp and swatting at her hand.

“She's home for _one_ summer and already…” is all Mrs. King has to say about that.

“Please don’t act like you haven’t missed me,” Giselle beams, wrapping her mother up into a hug that Mrs. King doesn’t even bother pulling away from. The look on her face is absolutely not amused but the way she carries herself tells Myka that her standoffishness is just a way to tease her daughter.

Myka’s laugh is awkward and sputtering but she maintains the illusion of an actually functional human being long enough to say goodbye to the Kings, to remind Claudia to say goodbye, too, as they head out the door.

***

“Giselle is H.G.’s ex-girlfriend, huh?”

“Uh, yeah,” Myka sighs, leading Claudia back to the car.

“Do you like her?”

Myka shrugs, “I guess. I mean, I don’t dislike her. It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other.”

“Oh,” Claudia says.

“Why?”

They are almost to the car.

“Because she’s following us.”

***

“She asked you out?” Kelly asks.

“She didn’t ask me out,” Myka insists.

“Isn’t that Helena’s ex-girlfriend?”

“Yes, Mom, but she was _my_ mentor for my first year of high school.”

“Why would she want to go out with you?”

“Thanks a lot, Jane, for that boost of self-confidence. But she wasn’t asking me out. She was just asking me--”

“To leave your house and meet her for drinks and dinner to catch up,” Claudia finishes, telling all.

“So, _out_ ,” Kelly clarifies, "basically."

“ _Thank you_ , Claudia,” Myka scolds sarcastically.

“You’re welcome.”

"You know I didn't mean it like that," Jane says, taking the time to slip in her non-apology.

“Well, what did you tell her?” Myka’s mother is asking.

“I told her I’m not old enough to drink yet.”

“She laughed,” Claudia supplies, “and then she said in that case, drinks are on her and she’ll make sure to pick a place with free refills on pop.”

Myka is rolling her eyes and groaning, she's remembering what it's like to have a preteen as a sister. She shoves a fork-full of mashed potatoes into her mouth to keep her from having to say anything else.

“Were you nervous?” Kelly asks, somehow just _knowing_.

Myka doesn’t say anything. Her mouth is still full.

“Why were you nervous if she wasn’t asking you out on a date?” her mother asks.

Myka holds her hands out in protest because at no point in this conversation did she ever admit to being nervous. Not to them, not even to herself.

“Probably because she’s super hot,” Claudia offers and then corrects, “I mean, Giselle is super hot, not you Myka.”

“ _Thanks!_ ” Myka says through mashed potatoes.

“Nothing about this conversation warrants you speaking through a mouth full of food,” Jane says, her voice lacking any and all emotion but Myka knows Jane well enough to know that no emotion is her interpretation of "annoyed".

Myka glares at Claudia, though if she's being entirely honest, she means it playfully.

“No, I mean not H-O-T hot for you but H-A-W-T hot for her.”

Myka swallows her mashed potatoes.

She says, also sarcastically, “Thank you for that clarification.”

“You’re attractive, I’m just not attracted to you,” Claudia adds.

Kelly chokes on her water. She is simultaneously crying from her laughter.

“You’re like my sister,” Claudia says, almost disgusted.

“Hands up,” Jane directs and Kelly raises her hands, Claudia reaches over to pat her back.

“That was,” Kelly coughs, “so goddamn adorable, _cosita_.”

Claudia beams.

“ _So_ ,” Jean begins again, “why were you nervous?”

“I wasn’t nervous! I never said I was nervous. Kelly asked if I was nervous. I didn’t answer.”

“Calm… _down_ ,” Jane says, eyes going wide, voice mostly unchanging.

“You don’t _have_ to say it,” Kelly says quietly, just under her breath and behind a glass of water.

“Can we talk about something else?” Myka asks.

“Yes, let’s talk about anything else,” Jane pleads.

“No, I want to know if you’re going on this date,” Jean asks turning to her daughter in anticipation, “ _so_?”

“Are you this bored with your life now that you get so much joy out of teasing me?”

Jean smiles and waits. Kelly and Claudia, too, are smiling and waiting with anticipation.

Jane says, the annoyance in her voice obvious now, “Will you three leave Myka alone,” and takes a small sip from her wine glass.

“Thank you, Jane,” this time, there is no sarcasm in Myka’s voice.

The table falls quiet. Her mother, Kelly, and Claudia still watching. Still waiting. Myka tries to ignore them for several very long, very silent moments. She takes a couple sips of water from her glass. She turns and looks completely away from them. She tries another bite of mashed potatoes. By the time she swallows that bite, they haven't stopped staring. They don’t even continue eating.

Myka breaks beneath the pressure.

“I told her I’d call her so we could make plans,” Myka confesses.

“So it _is_ a date,” Jean says with a shake of her head.

“It’s not a date. I don’t even like Giselle like that.  I’m not even sure if I like her _period_ ,” and Myka is insistent on that matter because she _isn’t_ sure.  At all.  Yes, Giselle reminds her of her first year of high school and all of the feelings she used to have for Helena, both spoken and unspoken. But she also reminds her of the pain she used to feel while wrapped up in Giselle’s relationship with Helena. The ache in her heart wasn’t quite as painful as a lot of the pain Myka had felt in her young life but it was still a pain on top of everything else. It was still an ache she couldn't overcome.

She doesn't know how to feel about Giselle. It’s been years since she graduated. _Years_ since Myka has seen her, talked to her, heard anything about her at all from Helena beyond just knowing she's still alive.

Better news than many had heard in the years after Claire had died...

“I like her,” Claudia smiles, cheeks reddening.

“Of course you do,” Myka sighs, “because she’s H-A-W-T hot.”

Claudia nods shamelessly, adding, “And _tall_.”

“I can’t wait to meet my future sister in-law,” Kelly winks at Claudia.

“I can’t wait to hear what Helena has to say about _all of this_ ,” Jeannie says softly.

“Helena’s not going to say anything about it because it’s not really any of Helena’s business who I talk to or go to dinner with or have drinks with.”

“You’re not having drinks,” Jane says, “ _remember_?”

“Non-alcoholic beverages with endless free refills,” Myka corrects.

“You’re not going to tell her?” Jeannie asks.

“No, I’m not going to tell her,” Myka says almost affronted, “she wanted her life in London, she can keep her life in London. She doesn’t tell me all of her little secrets and she doesn’t get to know everything that I do here in the States, nor everyone I see, and I am under no obligation to tell her.”

Silence falls around the table now. They are all arching their brows and looking away from her, staring at their plates, at each other. At anything and anyone except Myka. And so she adds for good measure, now that she's gotten _that_ point across.

“And it’s _not_ a date.”

***

“So you’re really going out with her?”

It’s two weeks later. Myka waited that long to agree to what is  _definitely not a date_.  And in those two weeks, because fate is rarely on her side, she’d run into Giselle no less than five times.  The last of those times had been at Claudia’s _not_ a birthday party in which little Dougie King had been invited and Giselle had happily volunteered to tag along.

Now Kelly is standing in the doorway of Myka’s bathroom as Myka is pulling a brush through her damp hair, teasing away at curls that slowly begin their formation.

“Yeah? Why not?  It could be interesting.  What else am I doing with my life right now?” Myka questions while putting on Chapstick.

“It could be _too_ interesting,” Kelly suggests, arching her brow.

Myka pops her lips together and smiles when she sees, in the mirror, the look that takes over Kelly’s face. She knows exactly what that girl is _trying_ to suggest.

“I’m not going just to fish for information about her relationship with Helena, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Who says that’s what I’m thinking?”

Myka eyes Kelly knowingly and the other woman’s brow arches higher as she turns away and sighs.

“Sounds like a wasted opportunity if you ask me.”

Myka laughs at this confirmation and asks, “How are you and Helena even friends? You meddle _so_ much.”

“I’m not the one about to go out on a date with her ex-girlfriend,” Kelly grins accusingly at Myka before winking and walking off.

“It’s not…” Myka turns, exasperated, but all she sees is Kelly’s hair as she heads out of her bedroom door, “it’s _not_ a date!” Myka calls after her as she goes.

***

Myka meets Giselle on the opposite end of town at a restaurant she has never been to before.

Giselle is a sight in a navy blue button-up shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows and yellow slacks rolled up past her ankles, all punctuated with dark brown loafers, and no socks to be seen where Myka is definitely looking. Definitely _not_ looking, she says in her mind as she forces herself to look away.

Myka’s not sure she would have expected anything less than this display of perfection from a mid-twenties Giselle. Her hair is still very long, maybe longer than it used to be, pulled back into a tight ponytail with a collection of tight, springy curls in back, massive for the sheer texture of her hair.

It makes Myka think of her own curly hair, how it could never live up to Giselle’s tiny ringlets. It makes her think of Helena’s love of curly hair, how Myka has never questioned why Helena loved Giselle so much and for so long, all of the things Helena no doubt found most attractive about her. And she’s thinking about a time in her past, when she was thirteen years old, and first witnessed Helena’s fingers raking their way into Giselle’s hair.

Just another thing Myka shouldn't be thinking about. One more thing to the list of things that Myka has tried to forget.

But Giselle  _is_ handsome and Myka is thinking of Claudia and all of Claudia’s words when she addresses Giselle, only in the back of her mind.

 _You’re attractive, really goddamn attractive… but I am not attracted_ to _you_.

Suddenly Myka’s short-sleeved, white button-up, blue jeans, and plain white tennis shoes aren’t measuring up. She’s taking mental notes of Giselle’s outfit, the way she walks, how she smiles at waitresses and the occasional diner that watches as she makes her way toward Myka. To Myka, of all people, they're probably thinking. To some scraggly girl dressed in nothing worth being in the presence of such a display as _Giselle King_.

They all smile back. The waitresses, the patrons. All of that confidence that she won't trip over her own two feet, all that agility and balance that Myka has yet to master. Where did she get it and where can Myka get some of that ability to walk and gaze and smile and flirt and not worry one single bit about falling flat on her own face?

Despite all of that, Giselle tells her, as she takes her seat across from Myka, that she looks fantastic. She adds, “No surprise there.” Myka’s awkward, nervous laughter makes its first appearance of the night and it is at this moment when she decides that she won’t waste her time be anything that she's not.

Five minutes after waters and a bread basket arrive, Myka dribbles water down the front of her shirt and drops a whole scoop of butter into her lap.

***

They make small talk consisting of school, health, and family, until the waiter comes back for their drink orders. Giselle orders a gin and tonic and tells Myka she's moved home now that she's officially landed a spot in a doctoral residency program at the children's hospital in the city. Myka orders an iced tea and wishes she were drinking something much stronger.

“I’ve got dinner tonight, Bering,” Giselle tells her.

“You don’t have to do that--” Myka begins to protest but Giselle is already waving her off.

“As thanks for even entertaining the idea of dinner with me. I’ve been going crazy being back home this summer and driving Mom crazy along with it.  So don’t be surprised if she wants to buy you dinner, too. Because I'm not moving out again for at _least_ another year."

Myka can’t help her smile, the laugh that follows before she’s arching her brows with curiosity at Giselle and asking, “So is that why you wanted to hang out? Give Mrs. King a break?”

“And I’ve missed you,” Giselle admits almost sheepishly, “I know we didn’t really end on the greatest note but I’ve always really liked you, Bering. Once I got over, you know, _everything_?”  Giselle nods, “I realized we have more in common than we ever knew.”

“Such as?”

“You want me to just set it all out on the table, this early into dinner?”

Myka arches her brow, sure to give her best expectant look.

“I heard about what happened. At the bookstore?” 

Myka, in the forefront of her mind, is laying down the foundation for a very large brick wall wherein every word Giselle speaks inspires a new brick into existence. And laying down the metaphorical mortar for those bricks is a welcome distraction from everything this woman is about to say. 

“Mom told me about it and then she told me about the book.  Said I should read it and see what I think.”

Myka momentarily abandons her imaginative bricklaying to ask, “And what did you think?”

“It reminded me a lot of my dad. Too much, actually.”

This isn’t news to Myka, that Giselle’s dad hadn’t been much different than her own, but she’s never heard much about it. And while she’s heard so many relatable stories, from women and men but most definitely a certain type of older woman, she’s more motivated to hear Giselle’s story.  She’s more interested in hearing what Giselle has to say about it all.

But she knows Giselle. Or at the very least she had.  And she had, despite her relationship with Helena, always respected Giselle for her strength and compassion.  For her skepticism around bullshit and near unwavering devotion to the people she loved, who loved her in return.

“The way he treated my mom and my siblings. The way he blamed me for ruining his life. I guess I was just lucky enough to have him out of mine at an early age. You’re still dealing with yours.”

Myka sighs and they fall quiet as the waiter arrives with their drinks. Myka speaks up once the waiter has gone.

“Everyone thinks I should forgive him.”

“Not _everyone_ ,” Giselle says with a shake of her head, “and fuck those who do. They don’t know, they have _no_ idea. They’re not you, they didn’t live your life, regardless of how well they think they know you or can relate to you by whatever _they_ have been through.”

Myka’s smile grows with Giselle’s display of passion. She hides her amusement behind a hand until her own laughter gives her away.

“I’m serious,” Giselle insists but laughing also.

“I know you are,” Myka nods before taking a sip of her tea, “maybe that’s why I find it so amusing. You’ve always had this weird way of… sticking up for me, I guess?  Despite everything.”

Giselle shrugs, sipping from her drink and shaking her head, looking elsewhere entirely for a very long moment before looking back to Myka and saying, “I have a lot of respect for you Bering. For a lot of reasons I’ve never expressed and, you know,” Giselle allows her voice to trail off and she shrugs.

“Stop shrugging,” Myka teases, arching her brow, “before I throw this bread basket at your head.”

They both burst into laughter.

***

An hour later they are done eating. Giselle is on her third drink, Myka is still sipping away at her very alcohol-free tea, and the topic of Helena has only been broached once when Myka admitted she hadn’t talked to the other woman in almost a month.

She never gave Giselle a chance to ask why, she just offered up the explanation.

Myka didn’t necessarily think Giselle shouldn’t know or that she wouldn’t have figured out that it was about the book. And not necessarily Helena’s refusal to tell Myka what had gone on then, between Helena and her father, but the fact that it had even happened. The fact that Myka never knew about it and had demanded so much from Helena emotionally for so many years back then. The fact that Helena still came around, day after day, year after year, despite knowing the risks.  

Still _gave_ despite everything. Still expected mostly nothing.

Myka is still trying not to be mad at her for absolutely everything else. The half-truths and omissions. The way she just holds on to old feelings from old boyfriends and girlfriends and never seems to want to let them go. But for this, the way she’s treated Helena while never knowing exactly what Helena was going through, she can only be mad at herself.

Myka hasn’t figured out how to deal with the revelation yet, nor has she figured out how to approach the topic of her father’s abuse of Helena in general.

But they’d dropped the subject very quickly after a solemn and awkward silence threatened to linger between them. They’d moved on to talking about other things. Giselle asking Myka if she was seeing anyone, if she’d kept in touch with Abigail as she’d heard she was also been back in town for summer. Myka answered the first question with laughter, the second with a very sullen no. She’d, in return, asked Giselle if she was seeing anyone at all.

Giselle shrugged again and Myka was certain, as laughter took over, that she hadn’t felt this good about anything platonic she’d done with anyone else in a very long time.

***

They’re standing in the parking lot just beside Myka’s _Helena_ car when Giselle says, “I’m really interested in meeting the woman who is both best friends with Helena Wells and _dating_ Pete Lattimer.”

“Funny thing,” Myka says, tilting her head slightly, “she wants to meet you, too.”

“Well, I’m sure she’s heard a lot of terrible things about me over the years.”

“And she’s pretty scrappy,” Myka warns playfully, scrunching up her nose.

“Maybe I don’t want to meet this girl after all.”

Myka laughs, “No, I think she’s just as curious as you are, that’s all.”

“Well, we’ll have to get together again. Maybe next time she and Pete can come along. Ya know, after he’s back from the desert. If he’s up for going out.”

“They’ll call it a double date and then I’ll have to kill both of them,” Myka jokes.

“Dude, same thing with my mom,” and she adds, mockingly, “ _Imani King, you don’t have to ask every girl you know out on a date._ ” To the heavens, Giselle yells, “Can two grown ass queer adults not go out and have dinner together without everyone’s mama thinking it’s a date?”

“ _Thank_ you!”

“And let the people of the congregation say together…” Giselle hollers into the night, gesturing for Myka to jump in.

Myka arches a brow in confused silence.

"Have you never been to a Baptist church before?"

"I avoid all churches at all costs," Myka smirks.

“ _Aaa_ …” Giselle begins to sing, taking over _whatever this is_ entirely, “ _meeen_?”

“You’re drunk,” Myka laughs, “do you need me to give you a ride home?”

“Nah, it's cool,” Giselle grins, innocently, “my sister dropped me off before heading to a friend’s place. I’m just going to walk over and meet up with them. You're welcome to join me,” she glances down at her watch, “it’s still kind of early. No pressure, just if you're looking for something to do.”

Myka could certainly find herself looking for something to do. With the bookstore still closed, September swiftly approaching, and her summer classes soon coming to an end.    With Kelly spending the weekend with her cousins, with cousins she _actually_ likes, and Sam out... somewhere.

Myka isn’t sure what Sam’s up to, she's been to afraid to ask and he’s been rather elusive about his plans in recent weeks, so she's guessing he doesn't really want her to know. She suspects he's been dating that Allison girl and just not telling her for whatever reason he has chosen not to tell her. But Myka has decided that she doesn’t care. That she doesn’t have time to think about it. That it isn’t worth wasting her thoughts on. And what better way to not think about old things than by doing new things with old friends?

“I’ll at least give you a ride over there,” to feel out the situation is the part she doesn't say, unlocking the doors to the car. At least this way, if it's too rowdy for her liking, she won't be committed to staying.

“Mount up!” Giselle yells excited, and there's just something about her, twenty-something years old, intoxicated, and carefree, in _that_ outfit…

Myka rolls her eyes and laughs and tries really hard not to think about how much sense it makes that Helena was with this woman for so long and _in love_.

***

“Fair warning, I’m usually the baby here,” Giselle tells Myka, as they are welcomed into a large, two-story home with the lights all turned on and the music all turned up. Giselle greets a much older woman that answers the door and introduces her to Myka, saying, “Laura, this is a high school buddy of mine, Myka Bering.”

“Bering,” the woman repeats with a smile and wide eyes, reaching her hand out to shake Myka’s hand and adding, “any relation to _Warren_ Bering?”

They are mid-shake when the name, the way this stranger says that name, impressed, almost _excited_ , hits Myka’s good mood like one of Pete's drones to an impenetrable brick wall.  But Giselle, without skipping a beat, says, “Not tonight, Laura. She is _way_ too sober for that.”

This Laura, still bearing that smile, says to Myka’s surprise, “Completely understood,” before raising her hands in the air, as if in surrender, and waving for them to follow her as she disappears through an archway just at the right of the foyer.

Giselle raises her brow at Myka as the woman goes and says, “Bet you’re sick of hearing that.”

“I’d change my name if I weren’t so attached to it.”

“Not an impossible or even difficult thing to do,” Giselle smirks, “trust me.”

Myka is sure, almost positive, that Giselle doesn’t mean what she does next in as intimate a way as it feels when she does it but Giselle sets her hand to the small of Myka’s back, very lightly, and gestures, with her other hand, toward the archway that Laura had disappeared through.

“Kitchen’s just through there,” she tells Myka with a tone in her voice that Myka’s also sure Giselle doesn’t mean to use with her but perhaps is used to using with other women in general. Myka heads that way and quickly, without protest, if only to break the contact of Giselle's hand resting on her back and Giselle’s suddenly too soft and too whispery voice in her ear.

 _You’re attractive,_ Myka is telling herself again, _but I’m not attracted to you_.

Myka imagines all of the smiles from all of the girls in every place that Giselle has ever stepped foot between puberty and now. Probably long before puberty, too.

She imagines Giselle has been winning people over with that smile since birth. Turning heads since she could walk, silencing entire rooms since she could talk. She imagines Helena, in a time before she really knew Helena, trying to rein that smile in, trying to beat all of those other girls off of Giselle. Trying, simultaneously, to keep her wits about her.

The absolute improbability of Helena’s success makes her smile. A jealous Helena makes her smile. A young Helena, newly in like with a young Giselle, makes her smile more now than she ever could have fathomed in high school.

The number of things about Helena in the past that begin to make sense, in the context of her relationship with Giselle, attractive and charming and always smiling at all the girls, makes Myka smile. Makes Myka shake her head and want to laugh and call Helena up and tell her, because she loves her so much and even now, as she’s evading a too-intimate touch from Helena’s ex-girlfriend, she wants to ask her how many girls she threatened to murder in the five years that they were together.

Myka imagines it was quite a few. She imagines Helena, in all of her fury, scrawling Myka’s name onto that hit list. Six whole entire years later.

***

A chorus of “Gigi!” and “Imani!” overwhelms as Giselle leads Myka into an open kitchen attached to informal dining and living areas where no fewer than thirty people congregate around tables, in chairs, on couches, leaning against walls. And Giselle was right.  She is the baby. 

Everyone is older than Giselle. Everyone is much older than Myka. They are sitting around talking, joking, laughing. They are sipping wine from glasses. They are saying hello to Myka as Giselle introduces her to everyone, re-introduces her to Giselle’s older sister.

They are in their thirties and forties, fifties and some sixties, no doubt. From their conversations, they are teachers and professors.  Myka recognizes a few of their faces.  She’s taken classes with at least two of them so far.  They have worked with or known each other in some capacity over many years and they are all, Myka notices too, _women_.

“She’s cute, sis,” Giselle’s sister tells her with a sly smile, followed by an unassuming sip of her wine. Everyone else around them has returned to their own socializing.

“Thanks,” Giselle laughs, “I’m sure she appreciates your thunderously whispered compliments but Myka’s a _friend_ , Nik.”

“Oh, like how you and Helena were _friends_?” comes from a familiar voice approaching from behind. When they both turn, slightly startled, they are met by the familiar face of Vanessa Calder. A face Myka hasn't seen in only slightly fewer years than she last saw Giselle.

“Hey Vanna White,” Giselle greets with a smile.

“Ms. Calder?” it comes out not at all like a greeting but a judgement, before Myka can stop herself from saying it the way she does.

“Good to see you, too?” Vanessa questions sarcastically but she smiles and she doesn’t wait for Myka to respond before she pulls her into a hug. “I see you finally escaped high school.”

Myka hugs her back. An _actual_ hug and she’s amazed she can pull it off.  She’s amazed she can say anything to this woman at all that isn’t, “You slept with Helena.”  Then Myka looks to Giselle to judge her reaction, study her expression, looking for any hint that Giselle might know. She can’t remember Helena ever saying she told her and if _she_ can’t remember it, then Helena probably never told her either way.

Giselle doesn’t look put out but she doesn’t look overly excited either. She smiles at Vanessa and takes her hug but it’s when Vanessa is done asking Myka how she’s doing and brings up Helena, that Giselle glances to Myka and gives her the most dramatic roll of her eyes.

“She’s all right, I guess,” Myka shrugs.

“They don’t talk,” Giselle offers, walking to a collection of wine bottles on the nearby buffet.

“Not talking,” Vanessa smiles, glancing back at Myka and taking a seat at the dining table in front of a glass already half-filled with wine, “practically a sport for Helena Wells.”

Giselle laughs. She is pouring two glasses of wine.

“Myka’s in line for the silver,” Giselle smirks, handing Myka one of those glasses, “top off?” She offers, holding the bottle up toward Vanessa.

“Babe, this is Pinot and _you_ are holding a bottle of Cab.”

“Oh, excuse me,” Giselle shrugs and sets the bottle down, picks up her own glass and clinks it against Myka’s, “guess my taste buds aren't refined enough to tell the difference.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh before taking a sip from her glass.

“Stick around for a while,” Giselle smirks, “and you might learn a few things about your girlfriend.”

***

“Guess I’m not driving home after all,” Myka says as Giselle pours more wine into her glass.

“You’re fine,” Giselle laughs and sets the bottle they've stolen away with down on the nearby coffee table, “someone can give you a ride. Anyway, you were saying… about Helena?”

“I didn’t agree to dinner to get intel on Helena, I promise. That ship has pretty much sailed.”

“You’re telling me you’re over Helena? _You_ , Bering?” Giselle is rolling her eyes and allows herself to sink back, into a couch full of accent pillows.  She turns an incredulous smile on Myka and says, “ _Now_ who’s drunk?”

“With everything she’s put me through…”

“With everything you both have been through?” Giselle offers. “All the waiting you did? All the painful shit she's been holding onto, to protect you?”

“With her being in London--”

“She’ll be back,” Giselle says, waving her hand as if to wave Myka’s excuse away, “she loves this place too much. She loves _you_ too much. You and I both know that she’s not so great at letting go of the things she loves.”

“Love alone is not a reason,” Myka says this echoing her own memory of Helena saying those words, taking another sip of wine, “it’s not enough. I could be happier, right? I have more options than just _Helena Wells_.”

“You’re misunderstanding,” Giselle says, swatting playfully at Myka’s shoulder from just beside her, “I’m not saying you have to be together just because you love each other. If she makes you feel like shit, then tell the girl bye and go find yourself someone new. I’m just saying,” Giselle sits up, setting her wine glass on the coffee table, and continues, “don’t kid yourself about how you feel about her. Don’t try putting up a front, saying you don’t love her if you really do love her because it’s only going to cause problems for you later. When she comes back into town and those feelings come flying at you like a rock.

“I made the exact opposite mistake with her, telling myself I was in love with her when I wasn’t. When our relationship wasn’t even close to great.”

“But you guys were perfect together!” Myka declares with laughter, “By the way, I’m _still_ mad that you broke up with her when you did.” Myka takes this opportunity to swat back at Giselle.

“Dude, this is exactly what I’m talking about!” Giselle turns on the couch to face Myka directly, “everyone thought we were perfect. Everyone _said_ we were perfect. So we believed it and we fed off of it. If everyone kept saying it, it must have been true, right? It must have been the way things were meant to be, right? And if it didn’t feel that way, we just needed to work at it until it did. Right?”

Myka’s brow rises in wait.

“ _Wrong_. And yes, it was bad timing, that break up, but you can imagine how absolutely done I was, how done we both were or should have been, by the time it came to _that_.”

Myka groans as the familiarity of this thought process begins to sink in.

“I am my mom,” she says.

“What does your mom have to do with anything?”

“I am my mom, when I said that to you. My mom doesn’t say it, not really, but she’s mad that I broke up with Helena. She thinks we’re perfect. She thinks we’re her only hope for well-adjusted grandchildren. But she doesn’t know--”

Giselle’s laughter is so loud, several heads turn momentarily startled but everyone is all smiles when they see who is laughing. Myka hushes her but falls into a fit of laughter beside her. She doesn’t know why they’re laughing, not exactly, but it’s warm out and she feels warm inside and she’s happy and intoxicated and sitting on a couch with Gigi #23 King.

Absolutely everything about this evening is _already_ funny.

“She doesn’t know,” Myka goes on about her mother, “all of the things that go on between us. She only knows what she sees and what she sees is perfect, for the most part. What she sees isn’t all of the little tiny things that make me _Myka_ and her _Helena_.”

Giselle, when Myka glances at her, is staring at her with an arched brow and a small smirk on her face. It’s something like admiration but it’s a look Myka has never seen on her before. Not even in the presence of Helena, those so many years ago.

 “I love Helena,” Myka sighs. This is no new revelation but every time she denies it, she thinks she means it. And every time she realizes she's lying to herself, she feels hopeless all over again.

“ _That’s_ surprising,” Giselle says sarcastically and with another roll of her eyes.

“But we can’t be together. There’s just something about us that isn’t right, even when everything else seems to work just fine. We’re like a key that fits perfectly into the keyhole but refuses to turn or a combination lock where every sequence of numbers _clicks_ except for that final rotation…”

Giselle laughs softly, falling back into the couch again and says, “Whereas we were more like the pitcher your mom keeps in the fridge that you _think_ is apple juice but is actually old cooking grease.”

“I don’t get it,” Myka says, narrowing her brows, “why is there a pitcher full of old cooking grease in the fridge?”

“I don’t know why, Myka, but there is.”

“What purpose does it serve?”

“It serves exactly no purpose,” Giselle nods, “it’s only there so it can be disposed of properly, at a later date.”

Myka’s trying and failing to contain her laughter, “This analogy is very intense. I'm not sure if that makes it awful or perfect.”

“At first glance it looked like delicious apple juice but once you actually lifted that pitcher to your mouth, because despite all of your home training there was nobody around to judge you and you were too lazy to get a cup, you realized it was just old ass bacon grease. Welcome to my five year relationship with Helena Wells. It _looks_ refreshing but it’s really bacon grease.”

They're quiet for several long moments as Myka thinks her way through the analogy and regardless of the path she takes through this thought and that though, she always lands at the same spot with the exact same question:

“Did you  _drink_ it?”

“I sure did, Bering. Well, it never made it past my tongue but to this very day I have not forgiven my mother. Nor do I trust pitchers of delicious-looking apple juice.”

Myka is in tears with laughter.

***

“You once told me that Helena was broken. I’m kind of curious what you meant by that because I think, at the time, I was really offended by it – but now I may understand?”

“Oh man, that was so long ago,” Giselle says stretching her hands over her face, “I’m sorry about that,” comes muffled through her fingers as she slides her hands down her face and heaves out a sigh, “I really am. I was just mad and… _young_. It’s not an excuse but Hel knew all the right ways to get to me and I knew all of the right ways to get to her. Especially through you. That’s all that was.”

“But you said she had issues beyond you and I. That you had tried and failed. Is that something you imagined?”

“Who doesn’t have issues, Bering?”

Myka concedes that point to Giselle.

“ _Look_ , Hel and I never operated the same way you two did. She’d get mad at me because some girl I didn’t care about was trying to talk to me and I didn’t immediately tell the girl to back off. That’s just not who I am but she actually had that expectation of me in our relationship. The stupid thing is that I actually tried to do it for a while but eventually I told her she would just have to get over herself.”

“And you survived that?”

“Like I said, our relationship was not your relationship. I wasn’t hopelessly in love with her or afraid of losing her. While you wonder if Helena is your only option, I _knew_ she wasn’t mine and I wasn’t going to let her jealousy and her insecurities rule my life the same way she allows them to rule hers.”

Myka hums thoughtfully.

"Don't get me wrong. I did and still do love Helena. We had a lot of fun and I care about her immensely. As a partner, she was fun and loving and I don't regret our time together but I can't accommodate ultimatums from someone who won't also make compromises for me."

“Is that what made you guys break up?”

“Nope!”

“No?”

“ _No_. It’s your turn now, Bering. You tell me first,” Giselle smiles, pointing, “what made you break up with her. I’m dying to know.”

Myka sighs out, “Lack of trust.”

“Really?”

Myka is nodding.

Giselle sounds surprised, even to Myka’s surprise, when she asks, “She cheated?”

“Not technically,” Myka shrugs, “she just… wouldn’t tell me everything.”

“Huh,” Giselle is perplexed and patient in her wait for an elaboration.

“After she moved to London and after I visited her, it was clear she wasn't coming home anytime soon. But she didn't want to break up, so I agreed to an open relationship."

“Ah,” Giselle smiles, “and _there_ it is.”

“There _what_ is?”

“She wants someone close at all times. That girl needs to invest in a body pillow.”

“I suppose--”

“That’s Helena, running away from her problems. Well, maybe calling them problems is harsh. That’s Helena running away from her past, from all of those things she never wants to talk about. Her father, her brother. _Your_ father…”

“I’ve heard she’s really good at it. Running, I mean. Also, never wanting to talk about it.”

“Bering, you _know_ she’s really good at it. She wants to hold on to things she has no business keeping and fix things by pretending they never actually broke. Every time we broke up, I was the one doing the breaking up.  She won’t do it herself, even if she’s miserable. Even when,” Giselle is incredulous and laughing now, “she stops you in the middle of _everything_ to tell you she’s in love with the overgrown fourteen year old she's been parading around as her best friend for an entire school year.”

“Tell me how you really feel,” Myka scoffs. 

“To this day, I still believe they put something in the water at that middle school.”

Myka is covering her face and speaking through her hands when she says, “She told me about that, by the way. Her version sounded slightly more awkward.”

“Quite honestly, I’m afraid to ask,” Giselle says, so Myka, inebriated and enthralled by her newfound ability to vent about all things Helena, tells her anyway. And somewhere, in the back of her mind, she wonders if telling Giselle something that Helena had told her about another thing that was no doubt personal to _them_ , is a betrayal of Helena’s trust. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Myka wonders what Helena would think or say if she knew that Myka was giving all of this information back to Giselle.

She wonders, too, if she truly cares, now that they haven’t spoken in a month. Not Helena to Myka, not Myka to Helena. Not since the book release. Not in any of the weeks after that.

But the words are flying out of her mouth with delight and incredulity before a single one of these thoughts can make itself whole.

The eye roll that Giselle gives in response is so exaggerated that Myka's almost certain those amber-green irises will never see the light of day again. But they do eventually find their way home, to stare at Myka in what first looks like disbelief and next looks like amusement. 

Giselle is closing her eyes when she finally says, “It’s not like she screamed your name in the throes of passion. I would have had a lot of questions if she had.  A _lot_ of questions.”

“She said she cried,” Myka says, pouting and suddenly overcome with emotion at the memory of that night, “she said _you_ said a lot of really awful things to her.”

“I’m confiscating your wine,” Giselle warns as tears begin to form in Myka’s eyes.

At that looming threat, Myka drinks the last drop in her glass.

“Yeah, she stopped me and she cried,” Giselle concedes with a sigh, “and I asked her what was wrong and she said it was you. She said she had feelings for you. But it’s not something that I didn’t already know. It isn’t something I wasn’t expecting. I just gave her a lot of shit about it.”

“Why?”

Giselle shrugs, “I was angry? I don’t know. I knew she had issues with your age, the gap between you two, and I used it against her. I said a lot of fucked up shit but I was mad. And for what reason? We’d already been spiraling toward the end of our relationship and needed to let go but she never wanted to talk about what was going to happen after graduation, what we were going to do, going to two different colleges in two different states. She never wanted to talk about anything that sounded like the beginning of the end of us.

“I made a bigger deal out of it than necessary. I was looking for a way to get out. I apologized to her a long time ago. She apologized to me. We got over it but after reading your dad’s book… I feel bad about it all over again. Your dad is a mean dude, Bering. He really fucked her up.”

“She never told me you guys made up. Or when. Or how. She never told me much about you guys at all.”

“Did she have to? It was our relationship, not yours.”

Myka feels that one and it hurts. She has always been so protective and loving over Helena, passionate about their friendship, while at once finding it difficult to remove herself from Helena’s _other_ relationships. Taking ownership over a woman that doesn’t belong to her, even when in relationships that don’t involve her.

Helena hadn’t been hers when she _was_ hers. Helena would never be hers or anyone else’s for that matter. Helena would always be, will always only have to answer to, herself. And here Myka sat, talking as though Helena had an obligation to tell her everything. _Everything_.

“Water under the bridge, Bering. I was never mad at you for it. You didn’t do anything.”

“I’m not even sure I _could_ have done anything,” Myka smirks, “I froze up every time she got near me. I was so afraid of Helena and what she meant to me back then.”

“Yeah, you had it out for her pretty bad,” Giselle laughs softly.

“And everything just kind of escalated that day on the softball field, that night at Helena’s house with her brother. Everything just felt… different.”

“I don’t think I ever told you how _awful_ I felt after that night, about making you stay there when you didn’t want to. You were way too young for that. My own mother regrets not allowing me to stay with Helena that night or Helena with us. Should have seen it coming.”

“How could anyone possibly see that coming?”

“Because it’s Charlie. It’s _classic_ Charlie. Something happens to Helena that actually convinces her dad to fly home and there goes Charlie on his fucking jealousy-fueled drug binge.”

“You’ve seen it firsthand?”

“The first and last time he tried that shit when I was with Helena, I cussed his ass out and pulled a steak knife on him.”

“ _What_? _When_?”

“It was a long time ago, I think we were still in eighth grade. He was lucid enough to make sure I wasn't around all of the subsequent times.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Didn’t get a chance to,” Giselle says shaking her head, sipping her wine, “Helena’s dad showed up shortly after that. He said he’d handle it. Helena stayed at Vanessa’s place for a couple weeks and I don’t know what, if anything, ever happened to Charlie.”

“Slap on the wrist.”

“Right,” Giselle nods, “and it’s funny that he always wants to call her a spoiled little cunt when he’s the one literally getting away with assaulting her. He’s just as bad as Leo insofar as he was never _ever_ held accountable for his actions. Not by his family, not by his school, not by law enforcement, and just narrowly by the judicial system.  _That_ , my dear Bering, is called white male privilege.”

“You two doing okay over here?” Giselle’s sister is walking by, lingering just in front of the couch where Giselle and Myka sit, engrossed in conversation.

“We’re good, sis,” Giselle says waving her off.

To Myka, Nikki says, “Don’t let her have you sitting here all bored, listening to her rant about white privilege. You’ll be spooning your eyes out and shoving chopsticks into your ears before the night is over.”

“That’s… really graphic,” Myka says cautiously.

“No one was even talking about that, Nikki!” Giselle laughs, sitting straight and swatting playfully at her sister’s legs as she walks on.

“Just checking.”

“This is a personal conversation, please take your ass back into the kitchen where you belong.”

Nikki is laughing and walking away, “Let’s see how you get home tonight.”

“Not with your drunk ass,” Giselle calls, laughing as she goes.

Myka is incredulous but laughing, too. She tells Giselle, “Kelly is really going to love you. I think she has a similar relationship with her older sister.”

Giselle tells her, “I like Kelly already.”

***

They have been quiet for a long time, listening in on small talk, when Leo enters Myka’s thoughts again. Not just his name or what he'd done but the image she has always had of him. Bloodied and laughing maniacally. Mostly knocked down and being dragged away by coaches.

“I hope that guy never sees the outside of a prison.”

“Leo or Charlie?” Giselle asks, not even turning to Myka, already mostly aware of what she’s both thinking and talking about.

“Leo,” Myka clarifies.

“Are you kidding me, Bering?” Giselle asks this turning to face Myka with a disbelieving look on her face, “he’s up for parole in a year.”

“ _I'm sorry_?”

“If ever there were a reason for Helena to never return to this place, that is it.”

“They wouldn’t just release him like that, would they? He’s a violent sexual predator.”

“They would. They _can_. They have. And they most certainly will.”

“That’s what you mean, when you say just narrowly by the judicial system?”

“White male privilege,” Giselle repeats with a sigh.

Myka has never had more appreciation than this, for the ocean that exists between Helena and home.

***

“I swear I didn’t come here to talk about Helena. I don’t think I’ve talked about Helena this much with anyone in a long time.”

“Let’s get Vanessa in here and just call it a group therapy session,” Giselle jokes, answering a question that Myka has always wanted to know the answer to.

“Ah, so you _do_ know.”

“That was a test to see if _you_ knew.”

“But we’re not talking about this right?”

“No, we are not talking about this.”

“Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

“That is the _very_ last thing we should be doing in Nielsen’s house.”

Myka pauses. She looks around at the decor.  She hesitates to ask.

She does anyway.

“ _Principal_ Nielsen’s house?”

“ _Former_ Principal Nielsen’s house.”

Myka slowly searches the crowd of women.

“Don’t worry, he’s not here,” Giselle chuckles, “this is a ladies only event. Hell, I barely made the cut.”

“Why are we in Principal Nielsen’s house?”

“It’s _Professor_ Nielsen now and we’re _here_ because Vanessa’s hosting the women writers group this month,” Giselle lowers her voice to a whisper to add, “also known as women winos.”

Myka is confused.

“Well, that explains why you called her Ms. Calder earlier,” Giselle puffs out a laugh.

“I called her Ms. Calder because she’s Ms. Calder?”

Giselle’s smile is widening.

“ _Formerly_ Ms. Calder,” Giselle clarifies, “currently, and until death do they part, _Mrs. Nielsen_.”

Myka’s eyes go wide. She remains silent. Giselle, seconds later, voicing her only thought.

“Oh god,” her eyes go wide, too, as the realization sets in. She sits up, turning to Myka and when she asks, it couldn’t possibly be more dramatic than it is, “Does Helena not know?”

***

Helena does not know.

That’s what Myka is thinking as she’s watching Vanessa Calder drive her and her car back to the bookstore across town. That’s what Myka is thinking when she glances at Vanessa’s hands on the steering wheel and notices, only now, that there is a wedding ring on her left ring finger.

It’s also what Myka’s thinking when Vanessa turns to her, only to find Myka staring at her, and says, “Let me know if you need to vomit so I can pull the car over.”

Myka isn’t that drunk, she isn’t really drunk at all. The only thing threatening to spill out of her mouth right now is all of the things she shouldn’t be saying as if it is her place to say them. But she's Myka and she's slightly intoxicated.

She says them anyway.

“You slept with Helena.”

Myka watches closely as Vanessa’s expression change from nothing and into something that Myka can’t quite figure out. Vanessa smiles, an awkward sort of smile, and she swallows hard. Her grip on the steering wheel tightening. She’s glancing into the rear view mirror at the car that trails closely behind them, her ride whenever she drops Myka off. Myka tries to imagine the thought that's running through Vanessa's head in this very moment. Can she stop this car in the middle of the street? Can she just leave Myka there? Can she runaway, somehow, jump into the car behind them, would they then speed off in some other direction on her command? 

Anything to get away from this moment. To get away from Myka.

But she doesn't do any of those things. Instead, she sighs. Myka wants to say out loud, "There is no escape," but manages to keep those wine-induced thoughts in her head. Vanessa licks her lips, she moves her eyes away from the rear-view mirror. She glances at Myka, to measure her expression perhaps, before training her eyes back on the road.

“I don’t know what to say to that,” Vanessa’s smile grows and she puffs out a soft nervous laugh. “It happened,” she confirms with a slight nod, sounding almost remorseful. She swallows hard again, she almost looks frightened. She is a deer caught in the headlights. She is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Myka sighs and only now does she look away from Vanessa and to the road ahead.

“Did you love her when you did that?”

Vanessa glances at her again and Myka returns the eye contact. She’s sure to train her expression into one of expectation. She is waiting to hear this answer and she’s praying that it’s a good one. The _right_ one. Even if she doesn’t want to hear that Vanessa loves Helena. Even if Myka thinks it would serve her a lot better to know that Vanessa doesn’t love Helena at all.

It will make all the difference to Helena that she does. If Helena knew. If she ever found out.

Myka certainly won’t be the one to tell her.

"You say that as though I did something _to_ her."

Myka narrows her eyes on Vanessa. She won't rephrase her question for Vanessa's comfort.

“I always reasoned that I did that… _because_ I love her. That _we_ did that because we love each other,” Myka doesn't know what this means or why it gives her some small sense of relief to know it was just an empty encounter for Vanessa, that it wasn't just guilt that made her give in to it.  “I care a great deal about her, I always have but,” Vanessa clears her throat, “I made a mistake with her that I sincerely regret. She was hurting, I was hurting.  She thought it was a solution that would last forever, the start of a relationship. It was something she'd always... always wanted," Vanessa's soft laugh now _is_  riddled with guilt. She lowers her head when she goes on, "And I knew it could never be that. I knew better but...” Vanessa falls quiet in her thoughts.  Myka still watching her.  Still expectant and waiting for anything more.  “I never wanted our relationship to be like that. It didn’t make anything better for either of us and it never should have happened. We both know that now. It took her much longer to forgive me, for not wanting that, but we both definitely know it now."

“Does she know you’re married?”

That awkward puff of laughter returns and answers the question for Myka before Vanessa ever has a chance but she is shaking her head, confirming what Myka already knows.

 “I haven’t told her.”

“You didn’t even invite her to your wedding?”

“There was no wedding, Myka. It was a small ceremony in front of a judge. We had two witnesses,” and Vanessa smiles, “Nikki was one.” She says it as if that's supposed to make any of this better. She says it as though citing her closeness with Giselle’s older sister is supposed to make all of this information that much easier to swallow.

Myka can’t help that she’s glaring at Vanessa now. She’s trying to understand _why_.

“She looks up to you," Myka whispers.

“Helena is an adult living in London. She has outgrown me.”

“She’s going to be devastated.”

“She’ll be just fine,” Vanessa says and she says it firmly with a hint of annoyance and an authoritative tone that sounds too much to Myka like a dismissal. “She was just fine with Hugo. She’ll be just fine with Arthur.”

“Helena is never _just fine_ … when it comes to the people she loves. When it comes to feeling like she’s being abandoned.”

Vanessa is quiet, glancing at Myka again before glancing at the road and if she doesn’t see the seriousness in Myka’s face, Myka thinks she’d better look again.

“If I know that after thirteen years of knowing her, you should know it after knowing her as long as you have.”

“And yet you broke up with her,” Vanessa speaks softly now, “pushed her away. That sounds an awful lot like abandon. If you look at it from just the right angle.”

"What do you even know about that?"

"It's a small town," Vanessa sighs, "things get around. Especially when your father is who he is."

Myka turns away in her frustration. She is stares out of the window in silence as her neighborhood passes slowly by.

"I'm nothing to Helena, compared to you. I am nobody. I couldn't possibly hurt her like you did."

"Is that what you think?"

Vanessa, when Myka returns her glare upon her, smiles wide and disbelieving.

"You know what, you're right Myka. I do know Helena very well. I know that she loves a lot and she gives too much of herself almost every single time. I know that she has survived a lot of heartache and I know that she's resilient but not impervious to it. I _know_ she knows how to move on and I _know_ she moved on from me long ago. But I also know she did a better job of letting me go than she's managed with you and that she's really good at pretending like it's the other way around.

"Helena has always been just fine with our relationship to one another but she has always been scared to death about how much you mean to her. If either of us is the nobody, it's me. If either of us means more to her now, it is definitely you. If, after thirteen years of knowing her, you still haven't figured that out? Maybe you don't know her as well as you think you do."

Myka is channeling all of her frustration into the way she looks at Vanessa now. She is trying hard, with just her eyes, to will that woman away.

"I'm not the one keeping my marriage a secret from her," Myka tells her, glancing away again, "so some small part of you must know there's a chance Helena won't be _just fine_ about it."

"Touché," Vanessa sounds defeated, she finally let's that conversation die. But then she smiles and when she smiles now, it isn't awkward or unsure. It is amusement. It is in a _knowing_  sort of way.  She tells Myka, “In the year you spent in my classroom, you never had even _this_ much to say to me.”

Myka, in all of her frustration with this woman, who had once been her teacher and one other time her ex-girlfriend's lover, says, “You hadn’t slept with my best friend then. I'm sure I would have found _something_ to say.”

***

Vanessa _had_ slept with Helena by then, she just hadn't known about it. In the fall of Myka’s sophomore year of high school is when it happened. She remembers her and Helena getting into an argument. She remembers Helena being hellbent on making her nineteenth birthday the worst one yet. Myka remembers reading her journal and thinking to herself, it makes so much more sense now, that Helena was so angry around that time.

Vanessa had rejected her. Their friendship had been falling apart. And Helena hadn't said much to Myka about it back then because Myka still wasn't old enough in her mind to know.

***

Myka is still sure to tell Vanessa thank you, when she parks her car in the lot just behind the bookstore, as Laura is pulling her car up just beside them with Nikki in the front seat and Giselle waving from an open window in the back.

“When you eventually tell her,” Myka says softly, catching Vanessa’s attention before she gets into the backseat of Laura’s car, “that you’re married? Can you please do it in person?”

Vanessa doesn’t say anything as she lingers on that thought. She forces a small smile and nods, opening the door to let herself into the back seat of the car as Giselle is opening the other door to let herself out.

“It was great catching up, Bering,” she says, pulling Myka into a hug that she is now much more prepared to receive and too intoxicated to find as awkward as she used to. “We’ll have to do it again some time.”

“Definitely,” Myka smiles as they part, “you have my number.”

“Goodnight, Myka,” Laura calls and waves as Giselle gets back into the car, “it was great meeting you.”

“You, too!”

“We’ll wait until you’re inside,” Nikki adds.

“Thanks!” Myka calls back, turning toward the bookstore and shouting out one final, "Goodnight!"

Their headlights stay fixed on the back door until she is inside, lights on, and waving goodbye.

***

“She wanted to take you away.”

They are having dinner. Myka, her mother and Jane, Kelly and Claudia. It is August and they are sat at the dining table at the Lattimer home, the Lattimer-Bering home as Helena had often liked to tease, having dinner when Myka’s mother says this. It is unprompted by any conversation.

There had not been any conversation to prompt thos words. None, at least, for the last couple of minutes. Before then, they’d been talking about Pete.

They’d been counting the weeks and the days and hours left before his arrival for months but it’s August and he should have been home by now. He should have been home _tonight_.  But there had been another close call in the desert and this one was definitely too close.

Pete lost a good friend and he almost lost his life, too. His return had been delayed by a necessity to tend to his injuries, to rest and heal, to aid in his recovery. 

It happened three weeks before and he hadn’t told anyone in the family, no one told the family on his behalf. Not until he realized he wouldn’t heal in time to return home on schedule did he finally make the call to tell them he wouldn't be coming home as planned. Not until his facial abrasions had scabbed over, the stitches on his forehead done most of their job, and the loss of his good friend had sunken in deep. Not until his mother, when he’d finally come around to telling her, could see him and know, with her own two eyes, that he was _okay_. He was just fine. He was _still alive_ and he would be home _soon_.

The counting down of days now turned back into weeks became discouraging and Pete’s absence, in light of everything that had happened to him, began to weigh too heavily on everyone at the table.

So they’d just stopped talking entirely.

They’d all stopped talking and they’d all been trying hard not to think about it but now here was Myka’s mother, thinking successfully about something else. And probably not anything Myka cared to hear.

“What?” is all Myka can think to ask in response to her mother's statement, presented so far out of context that she's not even sure _who_ she's talking about. Her mother is looking right at her, she can only assume that comment was for her but she cannot yet fathom what it means exactly.

“ _Helena_ ,” of _course_ , Jean clarifies, “everything your father wrote about her, about what he said to her, about what he did, is true. He made Helena question whether or not you were her father's daughter. He made her believe so many awful things about herself because of it. As you got older... as you two grew closer together."

“Why are you telling me this _now_? I had this conversation with Jane a month ago and _now_ you want to be a part of it?  Now you want to amend--”

“Pete’s coming back soon and I want this family to be whole again when he gets here. For _him,_ ” Jean declares with more confidence than Myka has seen her display in a long time, “I don’t want your father’s disasters or the fallout of our _old_ family quietly tearing away the foundation of our _new_ family. Pete should be here with us, he should be sitting at this table but he's not. _Helena_ should be here with us. _She_ should be sitting at this table and she's not."

“Jean,” Jane starts, a hand reaching to Myka’s mother.

“No, it’s fine,” Jean shrugs, waving the concern away, “Myka can know. As inquisitive and intelligent as she’s always been, she deserves to know that what her father did to Helena is still very much a part of who Helena is today and that I am still very much to blame for not having done more about it."

Myka sighs but she remains quiet. She lets her mother talk. It is clearly more for her mother than it is for her. Her mother has to say these things, to make herself feel better? To free her from her own guilt? Myka doesn't know. Doesn't care. She has already accepted that her life is a mess, that her life with Helena is a mess, and that all of it is her father's fault. She doesn't need details about what her father said or why. She doesn't need images in her mind of a young, teenage Helena thinking so much less of herself. During a time when all Myka cared about Helena was how beautiful she was, how much she loved her, how much she wanted Helena to love her back.

“You were eight the first time she asked if you were her sister because she wanted to know if her father could legally take you away from yours. They'd only just returned to the states, she barely even knew you but she saw what he was doing to you, she knew what he was saying about you. And Charlie... Charlie only made it worse. He admired your father in a lot of ways. He regurgitated a lot of things your father never should have said..." the sigh she concludes that sentence with is all Myka will ever need to know. She's glad her mother doesn't continue that story. She's not so glad she moves onto the next. "The second time, you were thirteen years old and you'd just told her that you loved her. But she didn't come to me, she went to Jane--"

" _Jean_ ," Jane is scolding softly once again, hands over her face, resting her head against her palms. Myka's mother ignores her protests and continues telling everyone everything Myka never asked to know.

"She didn't know how I would react to knowing. About _you_ , about being attracted to her. She didn't know how I would react if she found out and if you really were Charles' daughter."

Jane sits straight now and her expression is livid, though not at her mother but the memory that seems to draw itself forth. She says, "I could kill Warren for fabricating this lie about you. I _still_ have to control my temper around him when he has the nerve to say that girl's name. He killed her self-esteem. He drove her into therapy. She has been depressed half of her life and almost taken her life because of him. He has no fucking business writing books about her or you or Myka or anyone else for that matter. I just--"

Jane growls out her anger. She seems to lack the patience for simple words but Myka's mother's hand over Jane's, currently balled into a tight fist, is like a sedative. It instantly calms her down. The invisible grip Jane seems to have on Myka's father's neck loosens as she heaves out a frustrated sigh and closes her eyes.

She lets Myka's mother finish her story.

"I was indebted to Helena, even then. She saved you from a lot just by being in your life. She wanted to put distance between the two of you because of how you felt about her and the three of us, Jane, Helena, and I, had a very long talk about what that would mean for you," Jean says softly. "I didn't tell her not to distance you but I think she was reassured by our conversation. I think knowing you were thriving better with her than you ever had without her convinced her to stay in your life.

"But there were boundaries after what your father did to her. She wasn't allowed at the bookstore anymore, though it's a rule I now know she broke _often_. She wasn't allowed to babysit you anymore but I think you'd long before outgrown that aspect of your relationship. There was distance but it was there to keep  _her_ safe and there were times she just didn't care. If it meant being closer to you, being there for you? She'd risk it and Charles was always less than thrilled about that. Charlie Jr., too."

Myka feels Kelly’s and Claudia’s eyes on her. She keeps her eyes affixed to her mother’s.

"I'm assuming there's a third time she came to you? To ask if I was Charles' daughter?"

"She cares about you, Myka. She always has. All she has ever wanted to do is protect you. She begged me, the very last time, for my honesty. Not because she wanted to take you away from Warren and not because _you_ loved _her_ but because,” Jean pauses a moment to smile at the memory, "as she said it, she loved you and she wasn't so sure anymore that her love wasn't something... _more_."

There's another long pause when Jean lifts her eyes to Myka's again and allows her smile to grow wider, she puffs out an incredulous laugh and sighs.

"What did you tell her?" Myka asks, voice unwavering and narrowing her eyes on her mother across that table, telling her more about Helena that Helena has never bothered to say.

"I told her I already knew," Jean nods, "and I asked her to give you time. To grow up. To _catch up_. You were only fourteen years old."

Myka shakes her head. She is shaking her head and shaking it still until she finally finds the words to say. Until she finally shakes just all of those words free of a mouth that almost refuses to speak.

“We don’t need to talk about this anymore,” Myka says flatly, through tears cascading down her cheeks. She sets her fork down on her plate and leans back in her chair, crossing her arms in front of her, “it’s not going to magically heal my friendship with Helena, and it’s not going to destroy this family anymore than dad already has. So it’s fine, Mom. _I’m_ fine. _Helena's_ fine. And we're both over it so everyone else can be, too.”

Claudia asks quietly, “Doesn't saying you're over it usually imply that you’re not actually over it--”

“Whether that's true or not,” Myka says, raising her voice and cutting Claudia off, “I’m _done_ talking about Helena for the foreseeable future because I shouldn’t have to hear things about my ex-girlfriend from my _mom_ or my mom’s girlfriend, right?  I shouldn’t have to beg to know things about her that she refuses to tell me. I shouldn’t have to read a book by a man who dedicated his life to destroying ours, just to know what the fuck is going through her mind. Or what he _did_ to her. _Why_ she loves me."

“ _Language_ ,” Jane says softly.

“I’m _sorry_ ,” Myka snaps back, though she says it in a whisper, out of respect for Jane, despite her anger and despite her tears.  “I should have heard all of this from Helena. She should have been the one telling me, if she really wanted to protect me she could start by protecting me from herself and all of the things she never says. I want to protect her, too, and I tell her everything. _Everything_. And _she_ has such a back log of confessions that she probably can’t even remember which ones she’s keeping from me anymore.”

A long silence fills the room as Myka wipes away all of those tears, retrieves her fork and returns her attention to the plate in front of her. Head lowered. Eyes closing tight.

“You said what you had to say and now I’m done with the topic of Helena,” Myka sighs, “so let’s all just focus on Pete now.”

***

Myka has figured out, in the week since they received the news, that focusing on Pete is the last thing Kelly needs to be doing. Because the reality of Pete’s proximity to mortality has set in, and not just for Kelly, for everyone – but it has hit Kelly the hardest. Myka can see how everything that’s hit her is manifesting itself in Kelly’s silence because until now Kelly has taken everything about Pete being gone and Pete being where he is and Pete doing the job he does, and buried it somewhere deep within herself. Hidden it away behind laughter, masked it with teasing, sautéed it into her cooking, nurtured it into an oblivion in her care for Claudia and all the two and four-legged creatures she brings home from work.

But now she is still.

Kelly has stalled. Socially, emotionally, physically. She’d worn a convincing face last week, when Myka had finally introduced Giselle to her at a party, some other failed distraction for the both of them, and Myka would give her credit for that. For smiling long enough to make Giselle believe it. For inviting Giselle over for dinner. For making it through one last meal before completely shutting down.

But now she has stalled.

She is sat on the couch, staring at a blank screen. Dressed in her pajamas. Curled up in a blanket in the last weeks of August. Unblinking but not crying. There is a vacant expression on her face that doesn’t falter when Myka calls her name. But when Myka plants herself on that couch right beside her, in her space, Kelly turns with some annoyance, brows narrowed.

“ _What_?”

“You would slap me across my face if I moped around the house this much,” Myka says softly to her.

“ _If_ you moped this much?” Kelly questions.

Myka nods.

“Moping is practically a weekend sport for you,” she accuses.

Myka smiles and says, “Ah, so there is still some fight in you.”

“I’m fine,” Kelly lies, turning to face forward again, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling before allowing them to close.

“Fine? _Please_. Don’t make me call Helena,” Myka threatens, “you are _not_ fine.”

“ _Call_ Helena,” Kelly sighs, opening her eyes and finally removing herself from the couch, “maybe _this_ time you’ll get over yourselves long enough to realize the world is bigger than just the two of you.”

Kelly doesn’t turn back before disappearing into the hallway.

Her bedroom door slams closed seconds later.

***

Myka has had to swallow her pride, though not too much, to send Helena a text.

**_Kelly needs you._ **

Helena doesn’t respond to Myka’s text but she reads it.

At first, Myka has just assumed Helena’s read it because she _knows_ Helena. But the confirmation comes when Kelly is out of her room, hours later, still quiet, still not saying very much at all. But she’s in the kitchen and she’s making dinner.

Something she hasn’t done in a week.

 ** _Thank you_** , Myka texts Helena.

And this one, too, goes unanswered.

***

“Do you actually _like_ Kelly or do you just keep her around because of her cooking?”

Giselle asks this as she shoves a fork full of Kelly’s cooking into her mouth.

At once, Myka says, “I _love_ Kelly!” and Kelly confirms, “It’s the cooking.”

Giselle smiles and chews and nods. She swallows, just a bit, and covers her mouth to say, “I thought so.”

“She hasn’t talked to Helena in almost two months except to text her and tell her to check on me because I stopped cooking.”

“That’s not why!”

Kelly arches a brow at Myka, then tilts her head when she looks back to a grinning Giselle.

“She was worried,” Giselle coos.

“Yes, she was. Very worried about having to get all of her meals from Irene's Diner again.”

Kelly won’t ever say it but Myka knows she loves this new attention she gets from Giselle. She knows it will never replace the love she has for Pete but she also knows that it's a nice way to fill in the gaps until his return. Myka wouldn’t be surprised to know Kelly loves Giselle but  _that_  is something Kelly will readily admit. It’s just enough of a tease to not be taken too seriously but serious enough that Myka truly believes it.

So when Kelly, stood beside Giselle’s chair, reaches a hand to gently pat and grasp Giselle’s shoulder, Myka rolls her eyes. She takes a bite of her own food.

“I don’t blame you, Bering. If I lived closer to this woman, I’d have to run five miles a day instead of three.”

“There's a spare bedroom,” Myka teases Giselle.

“Another tortilla?” Kelly asks, walking back over to the stove.

“Can you sit down and eat?” Giselle asks her in response, then gesturing toward Myka, “or do you have to wait for this one to approve such requests?”

Myka allows her that dig by simply rolling her eyes again.

“I can’t wait for Pete to get home,” Myka says just below her breath.

“Do you think Pete would mind if I stole his girlfriend?”

“As much as you have grown on me in the past week, _Gacela_ \--”

“She has an affectionate Spanish nickname already?” Myka asks, playing affronted.

“--I like my men and I love my man.”

Giselle sighs loudly, theatrically, and says, “All of the good ones are taken or straight.”

“Thanks a lot,” Myka says, “I really appreciate that.”

“You’re H-O-T hot, not H-A-W-T hot,” Giselle teases.

Myka is kicking herself in her own rhetorical ass for ever telling Giselle about the crush Claudia has on her.

***

Pete looks older. He _acts_ older.

He’s _different_ but he is also very much the same.

Jane and Kelly and Claudia go alone to pick him up from the airport. It would have just been Kelly but after the accident Jane insists on going, too. It would have just been Jane and Kelly but Claudia is also insistent and there’s something about Claudia being on the verge of tears that makes everyone want to bend to her every whim, do everything for her.

It’s not like she doesn’t deserve it.

Myka doesn’t know why she’s nervous when the car pulls up, when she sees Pete get out of the car and when he moves to unload all of his things.

Jane is gesturing for him to leave the bags in the trunk and come inside. When they’re halfway through the door, she’s saying, “We’ll get it later. Get yourself inside of this house now.”

Myka's mother has been cooking but now she’s in the living room embracing Pete as he walks through the door and he’s _barely_ through the door when she does. Claudia is holding on tight to his hand. She has a huge smile on her face. She has no intention of letting go.

Pete kisses Myka’s mother’s cheek and tells her how much he has missed her and the smell of her cooking.

That’s the _older_ , Myka thinks. That he says it sincerely and not playfully. _That_ is the evidence of this Pete that Myka is so nervous to see again after so long apart.

He’s just a little different but she's reminding herself that he’s still very much the same Pete.

The same old Pete whose face lights up when he turns to Myka. Whose smile widens. Whose arms go wide. Myka surprises even herself when she lunges toward him, into his arms, and they almost go flying backward and to the ground. If not for Jane and Jeannie and Kelly and Claudia, helping Pete balance his weight against the force of Myka’s hug.

“Careful,” Jane scolds softly.

“I’m sorry,” Myka says as she squeezes her hold around Pete’s shoulders even tighter.

But she’s not sorry. Not in the least bit.

Pete whispers into her ear, “Now it feels like home.”

Myka can’t remember the last time she cried so much for something that made her happy.

The memory, if it even exists, must be stored in the part of her brain that her father short-circuited with a glass bottle, thirteen years ago.

***

There’s a large gash on Pete’s forehead that is still stitched and still healing. It runs from his hairline at the middle of his forehead and through his left eyebrow – the hair is missing there - and then swiftly back up in the direction of his left temple. Myka thinks it looks a lot like a backward check mark. He tells her the piece of metal they pulled out of his skull looked like a backward check mark, too.

Over dinner, Kelly and Jean and Jane won’t stop looking at it with their sad eyes and their worrying brows. They aren’t saying enough about what they’re thinking to justify the amount of gazing they are doing. Myka can practically feel Pete’s discomfort. She’s waiting for him to say something, anything at all, to get them to stop. But he doesn’t and that is this new part of him that is older and more serious, that Myka rarely sees and hardly knows.

She says softly, amidst everyone’s silent gazing, “I'm going to start calling you Harry Peter.”

“ _Myka_ ,” her mother scolds.

Jane glares, silently, her discontent in Myka’s direction.

Kelly just rolls her eyes up. It takes several seconds for them to come back down again.

Claudia is cupping a hand over her mouth to hide her giggle. She is also looking beside her at Pete with mild concern in her tiny eyes. But when he smiles back, she loses it. She lets that giggle go wild. Pete is laughing now, too, and eventually the whole table has returned to their senses and, more specifically, their sense of humor.

“I know you’re trying to make a Harry Potter joke,” Pete says, “and that the idea of a hairy Johnson never crossed your mind but that’s why I love you, Mykes. I’m glad you haven’t changed much.”

Claudia is full on laughing at this point.

“Who is Harry Johnson?” Myka questions.

“Really, Myka?” Kelly asks, gesturing to Claudia, “the eleven year old picked up on the penis joke before you did?”

“Oh. OH! Oh, _disgusting_ ,” Myka says, finally getting it.

“Penises aren’t exactly Myka’s area of expertise,” Jean supplies.

“ _Jeannie Mae_ ,” Jane laughs.

“ _Mom_!” Myka groans, “you of all people!”

Kelly joins Claudia’s laughter. They are already crying tears.

Myka sighs, resting her chin on the palm of her hand and smiles over at Pete saying, “Welcome home.”

“Yeah,” Pete sighs, smile softening, “it is definitely that.”

***

It’s the beginning of September, Labor Day weekend, when Kelly plans a welcome home party for Pete. He has insisted over the past week that he doesn’t want a party but Kelly is in a weird place between trying to make things return to normal and almost acknowledging their normal isn’t, and never will be, what it once was.

So Pete is giving in and letting her throw the party. He's hoping she'll slow down after it's all said and done.

Myka and Pete are sat side-by-side at the counter in the bookstore on the first day of its quiet, _very_ quiet, reopening. Myka is going through a list of book orders she’d accumulated ahead of the new school semester as Pete quietly vents his frustrations.

“She’s stubborn,” Pete says.

“Understatement of the century,” Myka supplies just under her breath.

“It’s one of those things I’ve always loved about her.”

“Always?” Myka smiles, brow arched, “because I distinctly remember--”

“Everything,” Pete interrupts with a soft smile, “you remember _everything_.”

“Well, not everything,” Myka sighs, “not _some_ things.”

“It would be cool if you could selectively forget things instead of just random things,” Pete says, reaching a hand up and tapping the top of Myka’s head. His finger lands directly over that dip in her skull and she isn’t surprised that he still knows exactly where it is.

“I’d like to selectively forget _people_ ,” Myka offers, Pete lowers his hand again and nods agreeably, “I’d forget my dad in a heartbeat.”

“And H.G.?”

Myka sighs and shakes her head, setting down the list of books in front of her. She tells Pete, “I’d like to selectively forget _feelings_ , too, in that case. Not Helena. I’d miss her too damn much.”

“But you’d have forgotten all about her,” Pete supplies.

Myka shakes her head, “It sounds like a cliché but it’s more my luck that I would never be able to forget Helena or how I feel about her. _Felt_ about her.”

“ _Feel_ about her,” Pete corrects.

Myka doesn’t say anything in response to his correction. Instead she asks, “Who or what would you forget?”

“The way Mom and Jean and Kelly look at me now.”

And at that, this lack of hesitation in answering a question that Myka thinks Pete had expected from the very beginning of this conversation, she turns to Pete and she looks at him and she hopes the look she gives him is nothing like the looks they give him. With their sadness and concern, with those heart-sinking gazes that have so many questions and simultaneously nothing to say.

Myka hopes the look she’s giving Pete says exactly what she’s thinking. Because she’s not thinking about the sadness and while there is concern, it isn’t overwhelming. It isn’t taking over everything else she feels. The happiness to have Pete home. The way he grounds her, makes her feel safe.

 _He_ is safe.

“What about the war?”

And Pete is quick to answer this question, too. He says, “Nope,” and shakes his head but turns away from Myka, to look down at the legal pad of paper that is sat before him, “I never want to forget the worst of what this world has to offer.”

He picks up a nearby pen and begins scribbling away.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Myka asks.

He is still scribbling on the pad of paper. Long seconds of silence follow her question as the black lines before him slowly take shape into something recognizable. A comic blast, a dark cloud of what looks like smoke, it's all pulled further together by the cross-hash shading Pete scribbles into that sketch. A tire suspended in air, somewhere amidst debris. He scribbles and he scribbles, retracing old lines, forming new lines, retracing those lines. Again and again and again until finally, the paper rips.

He stops.

Myka says nothing. She stills. She holds her breath.

An eternity of quiet lingers between them before Pete sets the pen down, his hand white and bloodless and shaking. Myka reaches out for that hand, at first cautiously and slowly, but then grasping it tightly.

“It was bad, Mykes,” Pete whispers, closing his eyes tight and pressing the fingers of his free hand into closed lids as tears begin to fall, “it was my dad all over again. _Worse_ because I was there and I still couldn’t do anything for him.”

Pete breathes out a soft sob. Tears falling over his drawing. Wetting paper and running ink. Myka moves closer, to wrap her arms around him, and tugs him into her embrace. She squeezes him tight. As tight as she can possibly manage, and she just lets him cry.

It’s been years since Pete has cried this much. There had been tears for the Donovans but she hadn’t seen him really break, not like this, since after the fire. Since after seeing his dad all those many years ago. Seven years old in the burn ward of an ICU. Saying goodbye to his father. Only alive for as long as the machines were turned on.

She lets him cry and he does for a while. At first silently but then with reassurances. He is reassuring Myka that there are no books, movies or video games in existence that could relay the horror of living in a war-torn nation. He is reassuring Myka that no person could ever be prepared to live that life. That no person could ever be the same after having lived it.

But Kelly, he says, wants everything to be the same as it always was. His mother, he says, doesn’t want to know anything about that life and she doesn’t listen to him when he tells her that there’s a chance he could return to it. Even with his injuries, they would send him back. She refuses to believe that could ever happen.

All she wants to talk about is Jeannie Junior’s wedding, getting him fitted in a new suit, and the only other thing that truly matters right now: that he is home in one piece.

“And the more I wish Mom and Kelly would stop pretending I just returned from a beach-front resort in Aruba and just _listen_ ,” Pete laughs through his tears now, “the more I realize I wouldn’t be able to bring myself to talk to them about any of it anyway.”

“We’re here for you, Pete,” Myka whispers softly, leaning further into the hold she has around him, “they’ll come around eventually.”

“That’s just it,” Pete clears his throat, sitting straight, forcing Myka to sit straight as well, “I don’t really want them to come around. I don’t want them to know. Not anymore. They can stay in their little bubbles and continue believing everything is just fine. That’s why I do this, right? So that they don’t have to. So they can have their bubble. So you can have yours.”

Myka doesn’t know what to say in response to that but Pete nods anyway, reassured by his own words, wiping away his own tears. He clears his throat, nodding and says it once again, as if trying to further convince himself.

“That’s exactly why I do this.”

***

Pete grabs his stomach.

“What’s wrong?”

He shakes his head, “Upset stomach.” Myka arches her brow and Pete quickly follows up with, “Not _that_ upset.”

“Okay,” Myka says skeptically, “help me close up and maybe we can grab some snacks before the party?”

“Sure.”’

They are closing up the store, Pete and Myka, for several minutes in silence when the landline rings in the back office. Myka goes to answer it and immediately recognizes the number. Before she can tell Pete who's calling, before she can ask if she should answer, she sees the near-pained expression on his face.

“ _Pete_ ,” she says, voice wavering with her concern, dragging out the “ee” in his name.

“ _Now_ it’s that upset.”

“It’s my dad,” she says holding up the cordless phone for him to see.

“You know I wouldn’t normally encourage this but you should probably answer it.”

***

Tracy’s had another seizure, her first one in years, and Myka’s father wasn’t prepared to handle it, had never seen it happening before, and had no idea what to do. He tried calling the mothers, he will eventually explain, but there was no answer. He called 911 _after_ that.

Luckily Rebecca showed up at the house soon after and it is Rebecca who is on the other end of the line when Myka answers the phone. It is Rebecca remaining calm, speaking loudly her commands for Myka’s father to calm down in the background, the seizure has dissipated by now. She tells Myka the ambulance has just pulled up, she’ll call back after she’s been transported.

***

Myka and Pete are driving to the city to meet her father and Rebecca at the hospital, so Kelly’s party will just have to wait. It’s the perfect out for Pete because Kelly isn't mad, only concerned about Tracy. And by the time they return home, with any luck, the party will be half over. And Pete won’t actually have to deal with putting on a smile for all of those people.

***

Tracy had used her last ounce of strength to fight off the paramedics.

When Myka and Pete arrive at the hospital, Tracy has been admitted for overnight monitoring. In her room are Jane and Jean, Myka’s father and Rebecca, and it’s weird for Myka because they’re talking. They are having a civil conversation. The moms have never been at odds with Rebecca but Rebecca has always quietly removed herself from these situations. And though Rebecca is still here today, it's her father Warren’s silence and civility that is most surprising.

Though he looks to have about as much strength as Tracy in this moment. He is more hunched than he’s ever been. His skin far more pale than Myka has ever seen it. He has bags below his eyes, he is thinner, if that’s even possible, and the skin of his face is drooping, as if it has nowhere else to go. Nothing left to hold onto.

In the back of Myka’s mind she is asking herself how much longer he can possibly go on like this. In the blackest part of Myka’s mind, she is asking herself what he’s even holding on to.

In a dark corner of the hospital room, Claudia sits quietly in a chair, reading a book that probably weighs more than she does and never bothering to look up.

***

“We’ll stay with Tracy so Rebecca won’t have to deal with navigating around the hospital,” Jane is whispering to them shortly after they’ve arrived, “you kids should get back to town before your party. She’ll be fine.”

“We’re not exactly in a rush to get back,” Myka smirks throwing Pete a side glance but when she looks back to Jane, sees the way Jane also looks at Pete, she wants to take that comment back.

Jane tells Pete, “You should be with your friends. I think it will be good for you, Pete. I think--”

“I think you want to believe it will be good for me, Mom,” Pete interrupts with a smile that isn’t really a smile and a quick shake of his head, “but I think you don’t actually know if it is.”

Jane narrows her brows and Myka braces herself but her mother is suddenly by Jane’s side, an arm moving slowly around Jane’s arm, her hand moving with little hesitation into Jane’s grasp.

Jean says, softly and in this voice Myka has noticed her use in her efforts to sometimes sedate Jane, “I know everyone’s hearts are in the right place,” she sighs and leans further into Jane, “but a party does sound a little overwhelming for a home coming. Considering…”

“ _Thank you_ , Mother Jean,” Pete says acknowledging Myka’s mother while keeping eye contact with his own, his tone lingering somewhere between playful and definitely not.

“If it’s a distraction you’re looking for,” Jean continues, “maybe you can take Claudia back into town with you. I was going to call Hannah and see if she wouldn’t mind keeping her overnight.” Jean turns back to where Claudia is still sat quietly, reading her book, before she continues addressing Myka and Pete, “I think she could use the pick-me-up.”

“What’s up with her?”

“Something to do with her brother,” Jane supplies.

“Or Ingrid,” Jean sighs.

“Claud,” Pete calls across the room, getting her attention. When she looks up, he gestures with a slight wave of his hand, for her to come over and she does. She puts her book into her bag and walks over to them and stands, still quietly. “You’re coming with us, kid.”

“Okay,” she says softly.

“Hello to you, too,” Myka offers with a smile.

“Hi,” Claudia says glumly in response, lowering her head and turning to look away from them.

“Okay then,” Myka half-smiles with wide-eyes, looking back to the mothers for any answer or explanation at all for Claudia’s sudden moodiness but they have nothing. They both shrug.

“A night with the twins might cheer her up,” Jean smiles, gently placing her hand over Claudia’s head and running her fingers tenderly through short red hair. Claudia lets herself fall into a lean against Jean’s side and stills there for the duration of their goodbyes.

“Call when you get home, please,” Jane commands and, to Pete, “we’re going to talk later.”

Pete has always been very smart about things when it comes to his mother. When it comes, more specifically, to talking back. He has tested the waters like this before but he always knows when to stop. He knows how far he can go and he knows he’s already gone too far. Even if he did have a point to make. Even if he knew far better than his mother what was good for his return to civilian life.

He doesn’t say anything in response.

***

“Everybody’s dying.”

These words come soft and quiet from the back seat, from the tiniest voice that the tiniest person in the car could possibly muster. Myka’s not quite sure she’s heard it until she looks to Pete and finds his expression an almost mirror image of hers.

“Claud?” Pete asks, turning slightly toward the back of the car. Myka is adjusting the rear view mirror to see her better and when she does, there are tears in her eyes. “Hey Bud, what’s wrong?”

“Pip, nobody is dying,” Myka offers, “well--”

“Your dad is dying,” Claudia speaks up, wiping tears from her face.

Myka doesn’t want to tell Claudia all of the thoughts that have crossed her mind about her father’s impending demise that probably shouldn’t be crossing her mind. She remains quiet and lets Claudia continue speaking.

“Tracy is dying,” Claudia cries.

“Hey dude,” Pete says softly, “Trace isn’t dying, she’s epileptic. She has seizures on occasion.”

“But it’s a brain disorder and I read online that it can be fatal without warning.”

“Tracy takes medication for it, Claudia,” Myka reassures, “to keep the seizures under control.”

“It’s obviously not working,” Claudia continues, “and Pete almost died and still has to go back to the place he almost died in.”

Myka sighs, thinking of a memory of her and Kelly and divas and says softly, “Almost doesn’t count, Pip.”

“What does that mean?”

Myka shakes her head, still glancing back to Claudia in the rear-view mirror, and says, “It means he didn’t die. He’s right here with us. Safe and sound.”

“For now,” Claudia says softly.

Pete unbuckles his seatbelt and regardless of Myka’s sudden protests, he climbs into the back seat of that car and buckles himself in right beside Claudia. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her into him, kissing the top of her head as she buries her face into his chest.

“ _Everyone_ is almost dying,” Claudia says, her cries muffled now but Myka can just barely make out what she says. She’s adjusting the rear view mirror again, to make eye contact with Pete, but he’s leaning into Claudia now, his arms wrapped tightly around her, his cheek pressed against the top of her head. His eyes shut tight. “And the more everyone keeps _almost_ dying, the closer we are to someone _actually_ dying. So yes, Myka,” Claudia sits straight for this one, “almost _does_ count.”

Myka wishes she had an argument for Claudia’s sadness. She wishes she could say anything to her at all, to reassure her that she’s safe. That no one is dying. No one they don’t already know about, anyway. That they will all be okay.

But Myka is finding it harder, the older she gets, to convince even herself of these things. She’s not exactly sure how to begin to convince another person. A child, no less, and one that had lost all of her family. Every single one of them in one fell swoop.

And even if Joshua is still alive, Claudia had lost him before she'd ever been born.

***

Hannah Cho is a beautiful dream when they arrive to drop Claudia off with her.

She is enthusiastic when she opens the door to receive Claudia but upon seeing the young girl’s mood, she changes her tone to one that is soft and content, loving and understanding. She pulls Claudia into a gentle hug and tells her, “We are so happy to have you here.”

Claudia says softly, in return, “Thank you, Mrs. Cho,” and her sadness is evident in the smallness of her voice.

When Mrs. Cho’s eyes meet Myka’s, all it takes is a simple nod for her to understand that there is a problem, that the problem has been addressed but the problem is still, and understandably so, a problem. Mrs. Cho nods in return and pulls away from Claudia with a soft smile just as the twins come running to the door to greet her.

Myka thinks it a testament to her temperament as a parent, also to her parenting, that they immediately pick up on the soft tone and match it with so much care that Myka wants to push Pete into that house along with Claudia. _This_ , she’s thinking and she’s thinking it as if she’s saying it to Jane specifically, is what Pete really needs.

Laila greets Claudia with a tight hug and kisses her cheek. Leila wraps an arm over her shoulder and says, “You’re not going to _believe_ what Laila did yesterday.”

Suddenly Claudia’s interest is piqued. She asks, “What now?” Laila’s protests finally bring a smile to her face, Myka can see it even as Leila leads her into the house and down the hallway toward their bedroom.

All three of them are giggling before they turn out of sight.

Mrs. Cho turns to Pete and greets him with a big smile. She tilts her head and says, “Welcome back, Pete, and thank you so very much for your service,” and he nods politely in response, tells her, “It is my duty, Ma’am, but it's nice to be home.” Mrs. Cho is next turning to Myka, sighing and saying only, “Hello.” On a better day, in a better year, Myka would joke about her own duties. But tonight just isn't the time for it. Mrs. Cho asks, “Anything I should know?”

“Tracy hasn’t had a seizure in a long time,” Myka says softly, “and I think with all that’s going on,” Myka doesn’t say Pete’s name but she glances in his direction and Mrs. Cho knowingly follows her gaze, her eyes landing directly on Pete’s scar. She doesn’t allow her eyes to linger, though. Not like so many other people do. Myka continues, drawing attention away from Pete and saying, “with my dad and her family, seeing Trace in the hospital isn’t really… helping, I guess…” Mrs. Cho nods as Myka allows her voice to trail off.

Pete picks up where she stops to say, “She thinks someone is going to die because of all the close calls.”

Mrs. Cho sighs and nods her understanding. She says, “Okay. We’ll be sure to take care of her. Get her mind off of everything for a little while.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Cho,” Myka tells her in response.

“Thank _you_ , Just-A-Friend,” Mrs. Cho winks back, before they say their goodbyes.

When they are headed back to the car and the door closes behind them, Pete sighs audibly, throwing his head back, and says, “It’s not such a bad idea, I guess.”

“What’s that?”

“Not thinking about things.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh while reaching to throw a playful punch into Pete’s shoulder.

“Easier said than done, though. Right?”

“Understatement of a lifetime.”

They are buckling themselves in now. Myka is starting the car.

“It’s weird that she calls you Just-A-Friend.”

“I don’t know, I kind of like it,” Myka smiles, laughing. “So, are you ready for this welcome home party?”

Pete brings his head back against the headrest and shakes his head.

“Put on your game face,” Myka smirks.

“This is it, Mykes,” Pete laughs, sitting straight again, “this is as game as it gets.”

***

Pete’s game face passes easily for everyone except Kelly, Myka, and Giselle.

Giselle, of all the people here, including some who have known Pete at least half if not all of their lives, is the one who comes up to Myka with a red cup in her hand, dissatisfaction on her face, and says, “Pete’s a really great guy for pretending he can tolerate this.”

The problem starts later, when he turns his game face off and his real face, the one he’s worn more and more since his return home, makes its appearance. He and Kelly disappear into the back, toward her bedroom - Myka’s old bedroom - and, worried, Myka slips into the hallway to check on them.

They are speaking low but she hears the argument, just a little bit of it, before she decides it’s none of her business.

She hears Kelly say, “I don’t know what to do, to make you snap out of it,” followed by Pete saying, “A snap isn’t going to bring Souza back to his family or heal this scar and make me suddenly forget any of it ever happened.”

Myka can’t get away fast enough to not hear Kelly say several things in Spanish, too fast for her to understand. Or the way Pete doesn’t skip a beat when he yells in frustration back at her, “ _En ingles!_ ”

Back in the living room, Myka is pulling the palms of her hands over her face and groaning. It’s apparently the only cue Giselle needs because she sets down her cup, tells Myka, “I got this,” and makes her way across the room, thanking everyone for coming and politely letting them know the party is over.

***

In twenty minutes, the apartment is empty. Calm. Quiet. Myka and Giselle are sat side-by-side on the couch, staring straight ahead at some mindless thing that plays on the television screen.

Giselle takes another sip from her red cup and silently reaches that cup out to Myka. Myka stares at it for a second and looks to Giselle, who doesn’t turn to meet her gaze but knowingly gestures for her to take it.

She takes the cup. She takes a sip.  She hands it back to Giselle.

“You know my brother was injured in the war,” Giselle says softly, taking another sip from her cup.

“No,” Myka whispers, returning her gaze to the other woman sat just beside her and allowing her brows to furrow, “I didn’t know that.”

“Not this war, if that’s what we’re calling it now,” she says, “but the gulf war.”

“Fourteen years ago?”

“Yeah, I don’t quite remember what happened. I was only eleven and no one really took the time to explain the extent of his injuries to me but I know it took quite a bit of surgery to get him looking like his old self. I _also_ know that, on the inside, he never really got back to his old self.”

Myka turns away, allowing her head to hang low and dropping her gaze to her hands, idle in her lap.

She’s thinking of Pete’s new demeanor and how much it has changed without having actually changed at all. She’s thinking of how different he is without being very different at all. Because the way Pete is now has always been there, it’s always been some part of him. The quiet and solemn, the thoughtful and even sentimental. She remembers this part of Pete because it’s always been a part of who Pete is, it’s just been shrouded in playfulness and youth. She’d seen it once before, after the death of his father. She’s seeing it now, after the loss of a friend.

Now that the youth has been forced to step aside and the playfulness dimmed, all of these other aspects of Pete’s personality, the things he never bothered to display before, are beginning to show through.

“I’m not saying it was a bad thing,” Giselle adds quickly, dropping a comforting hand on Myka’s knee when she no doubt notices the sudden change in atmosphere, “I’m just saying he was different _before_ and it’s been so long that I don't even remember what the difference was. He’s still my brother.”

Giselle shakes Myka’s knee playfully before letting go and returning that hand to the cup she still holds.

“Pete is still Pete. He’s just Pete with a worldview that you and I will never be able to understand,” she sighs, tapping lightly at the rim of her cup and Myka wonders if this is it. If this Pete is the Pete that she will always know. The Pete she’ll always have, from here on out. Because she already misses the playfulness and the teasing. She misses having a reason to punch him in his arm, she misses not feeling bad about it, wondering if she’s going to cause him pain or reignite the pain that’s already there. She misses the jokes she almost doesn’t get. She misses his smile, the way he _actually_ smiles.

She has missed it for a year and a half and now that Pete is back, and things aren’t exactly the same, she misses it even more.

But the love is still there. The care he takes with his loved ones, with Claudia especially, is even more evident. That genuine concern, the protective nature that led him onto this path in the first place. And Myka loves all of these things about Pete, too.

She loves seeing more of the Pete she loves in ways she’d never quite seen him before.

“Kelly will figure that out, too,” Giselle adds as quiet reassurance, “sooner or later.”

“Let’s hope for sooner,” Pete’s voice is saying from just behind where they sit on the couch, “rather than later.”

Giselle, visibly startled, turns and sighs out, “You scared the shit out of me.”

Pete joins them on the couch, taking a seat beside Myka and smiling over at the both of them. “It’s weird and also not that you two are so chummy now.”

“It’s weird that you’re dating _Kelly_ ,” Giselle teases in response.

“Speaking of, where _is_ Kelly?” Myka asks.

“Passed out,” Pete sighs, falling back into the couch.

“She okay?”

Pete shrugs, “I think so. She was just tired. She hasn't been sleeping. Could be my fault, since I haven't been sleeping."

“ _You_ okay?”

He is about to say more when the buzzer for the front of the bookstore sounds off. Myka is up, on her feet, and crossing the living room to the intercom in no time. She says into it, without asking who it is, “If you are here for the party, I’m sorry to say it ended an hour ago.”

The response she gets is, “You had a party and didn’t invite me?”

“Sam,” Myka is smiling a smile that almost grows into a grin but doesn't quite make it before turning into a frown. “I invited you! You RSVP’d!”

“I’m only kidding but hey, a thunder storm’s rolling in, so--”

“Shut up and get up here.”

Myka buzzes him up before he can finish speaking.

***

Myka is play-punching Sam in his shoulder the second he’s through the door, Kurt on his heels.

“You’re late,” she tells him, narrowing her eyes on him before turning to Kurt, “and you, too,” she adds, pointing an accusing finger. She gives Kurt a welcoming hug anyway and hopes Sam doesn’t read too far into the fact that he doesn’t receive one. But it’s just too much and too close for Myka to deal with right now. She hasn’t seen him in a while and seeing him now is making her feel… _things_.

“Sorry,” Sam apologizes.

“Family catastrophe,” Kurt adds with a smile.

Pete is on his feet and greeting them and now, when he smiles and makes small talk, it isn’t his game face or a mask or something that isn’t real. It is genuine delight and it makes Myka smile, for so many reasons. She’s smiling because Pete is content in this moment, despite everything. She’s smiling because Pete really enjoys Sam and Kurt’s company. Because Sam and Kurt both really enjoy Pete, too.

She’s standing back and quietly observing as they talk and catch up and make jokes and they are quite possibly teasing her, in one way or another, but she doesn’t really know. She’s not really listening. She’s just watching them talk. Losing herself in the moment. Letting them catch up.

“This party is suddenly a major sausage fest,” Giselle whispers teasingly into Myka’s ear, getting her attention and prompting Myka to introduce her to both Sam and Kurt.

Half an hour later, they’re all sat in the living room together, completely lost in conversation. Myka thinks this has to be the most scrapped together group of friends she has ever in her life acquired but they’re hers, all of them. And she loves just about everything about this evening.

***

Further into the night, Pete casually throws into the conversation a, “Speaking of RSVPs Mykes--”

“Pete,” Myka laughs, “that was like two hours ago.”

“Well, I just remembered that I forgot to tell you,” and he says the next thing quickly and under his breath, turned almost entirely away from Myka, “H.G. RSVP’d for the wedding,” before immediately trailing off into some other conversation, directed at Sam, about something not at all related to weddings.

Myka is glaring at the side of Pete’s head. Giselle is arching a brow in anticipation.

“The last I’d heard, Helena hadn’t even received an invite to the wedding,” Myka says curiously.

Pete, knowing there was no way he could dodge this conversation, sighs and tells Myka, “You _know_ the moms were not going to let that happen.”

“What’s up with Jeannie and Hel?” Giselle asks.

“Jeannie’s marrying Jules,” Myka informs.

“Helena’s ex-boyfriend!?” Giselle’s eyes go wide as a smile slowly forms on her face and she falls back into the couch with some laughter. “Holy fuck, how did _that_ happen? How are you just now telling me this?”

“How does anything in this town happen?” Myka asks. “It’s too small and I try very hard not to think about Jules when I don't have to.”

"Not that hard," Pete supplies.

"You're right," Myka smiles, "it doesn't take much."

“But he was gone? Hel hadn’t heard from him in _years_.”

“Well, she finally heard from him,” Myka smiles and this is _her_ game face.

“So they got into it? What happened?”

“No,” Myka says with a shake of her head.

“That’s just it,” Pete laughs, “nobody knew there was anything going on between them until Moms realized H.G. hadn’t been invited to the wedding.”

“ _So_?”

“Jeannie says she just didn’t want to deal with any potential awkwardness,” Myka says, puffing out a soft laugh.

“Moms didn’t let that one fly. So, they _made_ her invite H.G.” Pete turns to Myka now, “And she confirmed she’s coming. They were beside themselves when she called.”

“In other news, hey Sam,” Myka grins, turning to where Sam and Kurt sit in a too comfortable silence, “want to be my plus one to the wedding?”

“Your moms invited us already,” Sam says this pointing between himself and Kurt, then with no hesitancy at all, “Allison is my plus one.”

Myka can feel her eye twitch but she forces a smile and a soft, “Oh,” followed by a terse, though not as terse as it could be, “of course she is.” She’s eying Sam for only a moment before she turns to Giselle, a smile pulling into her lips, and asks, “Want to be my plus one to the wedding?”

“Ouch,” Sam smiles with a slight roll of his eyes.

“Double ouch for not being first pick,” Giselle laughs softly.

***

“So you and Allison?”

They are alone now, Myka and Sam. Standing beneath the awning just outside of the front door of the bookstore. Pete and Kurt are talking just on the other side of it.

Sam puffs out a soft laugh when Myka asks this and says, “It’s nothing like that,” he shrugs and Myka is taking in a deep breath, trying to figure out what it’s really like and what exactly _that_ is because whatever it is, Sam sounds like he’s into it and has been for a while. “She’s really nice and we have fun hanging out,” Myka _knows_ they have fun hanging out. They’ve had so much fun hanging out that tonight is the first time Myka has seen Sam in _ages_. They have so much fun hanging out that Sam doesn’t even think twice about bringing her up in casual conversation, “so I asked her if she wanted to be my plus one. Everybody else I know is already going.”

“You don’t have to explain,” Myka says, shrugging a single shoulder and turning away from where Sam stands beside her.

“You asked,” Sam reminds her softly. Seconds later, she feels the soft grip of his hand on her arm and she is steeling her nerves against that touch, for whatever reason these nerves require steeling to begin with. Sam says, “Hey,” and gently turns Myka so that she’s facing him again and when their eyes meet, the look in his reads nothing like what she is expecting.

Myka isn’t sure she even knows what she’s expecting. Something like the way Sam used to look at her, when he always used to watch her? When he used to like her, shy away from her. Anything like that at all, would do. Anything to give Myka some hint about whether or not he still thinks of her that way. Even if she doesn't care. Even if she's only just pretending not to.

But what she gets is concerned, worried brows. A look too serious for the simplicity that is the relationship she has with  _her_ Sam.

“If this is about Helena, I mean if you need me to be there for you because of _her_ , I’m sure Allison will understand.”

Myka wants to slap Sam for looking at her with those useless blue eyes, with his annoying loose strands of hair falling into his face, for all of this worry and caring and canceling dates with women he actually really likes for her. He has such a hard time getting them in the first place and she has invested so much of their time together making sure their friendship remained exactly that. Exactly like this.

 _Fuck your nobility, Martino_ , she says in her mind because her heart is leaping at the thought of her and Sam all dressed up and fancy and attending a party together.

“Cut your hair,” she scolds aloud and just a little pouty.

“I know that’s your way of telling me I shouldn't care,” Sam smiles, letting his hand fall, though not before giving her a gentle squeeze.

Myka hopes her disappointment at the loss of the contact isn’t evident on her face but she’s sure, the way Sam’s smile falters and he twists his lips to the side, that it is all too evident. That it is screaming out loud and not just to herself, quietly inside of her brain. But to Sam and his crumbling resolve.

“Sorry,” he says softly, “I guess I just assumed Helena was going and you’d be going with her.”

“My ex-girlfriend?” Myka smiles now, her expression no longer wistful but incredulous, “who I haven’t spoken to in two months? Who hasn’t spoken to me either?”

“I can’t keep up with you two,” Sam teases, touching Myka’s arm softly once again, “whether you’re talking or not. Together or not. You taught me a long time ago that it’s none of my business until you make it my business. But I still worry about you two, just a little."

"You don't even know Helena," Myka says softly, "how can you worry about her?"

"You're right, I don't her but if you love her as much as you do," he shrugs, "she must be worth it. Right?"

“Fuck your nobility, Martino,” Myka says aloud now, turning away dramatically, though laughing incredulously, “I can’t believe you thought I was going to a wedding with _Helena_.”

“Well,” Sam laughs nervously, “I… definitely didn’t think you’d be going with me.”

Myka cannot even find herself in the right position to be mad by Sam’s perplexity. At the thought of them going anywhere in any sort of capacity that required coupling up. She’d worked so hard for this platonic relationship. She’d done so much footwork trying to get it through Sam’s head that she wasn’t interested in him in that way. That even if he were interested in her, she was under no obligation to humor him and his attraction. He hadn’t even tried. He hadn’t said anything since the last time he’d asked her to dinner, since the last time he’d assumed she and Helena were no longer together. All he ever did was look at her in that way and turn red and be shy and do that thing he does with his hand at the back of his neck. That’s all. But it had been enough for Myka to know she didn’t want to go there. She didn’t want to give him any impressions and she didn’t want to have to deal with the possibility of telling him no.

She’d worked so hard at putting comfortable space between them in their first year as friends that she has it now, she has had it for a while, and she isn’t so sure she wants it. But she isn’t sure she’s ready to admit she doesn’t.

She heaves out a sigh as Pete and Kurt finally make their way out of the bookstore to join them, saying their goodbyes as Kurt, already yawning, gestures for Sam to head to the car.

“Bye Myka,” Kurt is saying, leaning in for a hug, “I’ll be back for those books when they come in.”

“Sure thing, Kurt,” she smiles, returning his hug. When she pulls away, she arches a brow at Sam who is giving her a sheepish look. His hand rubbing at the back of his neck.

“Maybe this is your chance,” he says softly, handing his car keys over to Kurt.

“Chance for what?” Myka asks, crossing her arms in front of her.

“You know,” Sam says, “to talk to her. Work things out. Get her to come home?” to which Myka puffs out another dramatic sigh, much to Sam’s amusement. He is laughing softly one second and the next, he is leaning in close, too quickly for Myka to register why before he hugs her and whispers into her ear, “Don’t be so frigid.”

Her first instinct is to push him away and sock him in the arm but when he kisses her cheek, she freezes. She doesn’t move. She barely breathes. In the very forefront of her mind, she’s trying way too hard to convince herself that she’s mad about this. But the goosebumps that rise all over her arms aren’t as easy for her to deny.

Sam smiles the sort of smile that Myka misses more than once in a while whenever he’s away and he says goodnight in that voice that reminds her too much of the storyteller he’d been for her when she needed him more than she will ever admit.

He is following Kurt’s trail to his car and he is gone before Myka has time to figure out exactly how she feels about this. About him. About anything at all.

***

“I want to move home.”

It’s late the next evening, the moms have returned home from the hospital with Tracy in tow and now she is curled up against Myka’s back in the guest bedroom of the Lattimer house. They are lying in the dark.

“Are you sure about that?” Myka asks with a soft laugh, “I mean, with Kelly and Pete there now. And whatever animal Kelly decides to bring home from work with her.”

“I _need_ to move home,” Tracy clarifies softly, “I love Kevin but I need a break from him. He is at once too much and not enough. Watching Dad just let go and slip away and not care about what he’s leaving behind is something I thought I could handle all on my own but it’s not. And Kevin just isn't the right person…

“He doesn’t understand why I try. He doesn’t understand why I care about Dad, with everything that’s happened. He just doesn’t get it.”

Myka wants to say that she doesn’t get it either but she’d be lying if she did. Because she gets it. She understands why it’s different for Tracy. Why it’s easier for Tracy to still feel so connected to their father. She wasn’t around for most of the bad and she almost always got nothing but good.

Their father didn’t just spoil her, he shielded her from so many bad things. Many of the same bad things that he’d subjected Myka to. He kept Tracy safe.

Myka can’t question why Tracy still feels safe around him now. She _always_ has. He'd only broken her trust a handful of times and most of those times, Myka had gotten it much worse.

“Their family is kind of perfect,” Myka says softly and turning slightly over so that Tracy can hear her better, “I mean, their parents have been together for an eternity and they actually love their children. They treat them all the same and with a ton of respect. They expect respect in return. It’s admirable.”

“But not realistic,” Tracy says, “for everyone.”

“No, not for everyone. I guess our family dynamic isn’t very realistic to him. Abigail never really understood either, why I couldn’t just _call_ someone to get away. She knew why but I don’t think truly believed it. We had a similar issue, actually, where I just couldn’t talk to her about it because she just didn’t understand.”

Myka turns back onto her side, away from Tracy again.

"Maybe that's why Helena and I get on so well when we're together. Sam, too, I suppose," she laughs softly and says, "this is really fucked up."

“But fucked up is our reality and, in a way, I miss it. I miss _you_. And I miss Kelly and her brutal honesty, I miss Pete and all of his stupid jokes.” Myka puffs out another soft laugh at that and thinks, only to herself, about how she misses those, too. “I miss Mom and Jane, Jeannie and Claudia. God, I even miss…”

Tracy stops speaking and sighs.

“It’s okay,” Myka says, “you can say you miss Helena, too. She _is_ a part of our family, regardless of where we stand.”

“I miss H. A _lot_ ,” Tracy says, pushing her face into Myka's back, arms wrapped around Myka tight. Myka’s sure she can hear the break in her voice. A subtle cry that refuses to fully materialize. “I don’t _just_ miss you guys, I _need_ you. Dad only has so long and... I don't know what that's going to feel like. I don't want to be alone when I find out."

Myka turns over onto her other side, facing Tracy, and pulls her younger sister into her arms, holds her tight, and squeezes her close.

“You don’t have to ask to come home, Trace,” Myka says softly, pressing a kiss to her sister’s forehead, as the younger girl finally allows herself to cry. She whispers, into her ear and to her amusement, “I’ll even let you borrow my U-Haul.”

***

Myka and Pete and Kelly go into the city to shop for wedding clothes but Myka stops in to see her dad before they go shopping. She makes the visit brief and it’s only for her sister. It is only ever for her sister.

“You should want to watch your daughter grow older,” Myka tells him. “You should want to live as long as possible and be here for her, to help her grow, for as long as you can. Instead of clearing out a path to your mortality just because you can see it on the horizon.”

But he tells her, after taking a small sip from his water bottle, “Don’t worry about that,” and “she’s better off without me here. I trust that you’ll take care of her. Give her everything she needs.”

“And with what income do you suppose I’ll be able to accomplish that?” Myka says, raising her voice. “Why do you think it’s my job to do?”

“Because you're her big sister and I trust you to do it,” is all he says in response. Low and unmoved by Myka’s passionate anger. “I know you’ll do the right thing. I know you’ll handle everything well.”

Myka wants to yell at him all the reasons why that is not her responsibility but she can only stay for so long. She can only stand him for a little while before everything inside of her starts to burn up and she overheats and draws nearer to the edge of implosion.

She takes the water bottle form his hand and sniffs it. She moves to the kitchen and pours it down the sink.

“I’m calling Rebecca,” is the last thing she tells him before she walks out of the door.

***

Myka is staring at her laptop, at a chat window that remains open and without text. The user at the other end is Helena Wells. The date this conversation has yet to start is September 21, 2004. It's Helena's 25th birthday and Myka has already typed out "happy birthday". She is trying to will herself to send that message but all she can do is stare at it and wait for it to send itself. 

She's mulling through all of the possible responses, through all of the things that could happen if she does. Helena could tell her off. Helena could ignore her completely. Helena could say thank you or sorry or yes or no. She could, in Myka's wildest dreams, magically appear before her eyes.

Myka takes in a deep breath and breathes it out slowly and by the time she is done with that, by the time she has worked up the nerve to hit enter, to face whatever possibility may come her way... Helena goes offline.

Myka closes her laptop.

She doesn't thinking about it nearly as much when she grabs her phone. She doesn't try to talk herself out of it. She sends Helena the text:

**_happy birthday, wells_ **

And she gets an immediate response:

**_Thank you, Myka xo_ **

And that is where they leave that.

***

Giselle tells Mrs. King about the conversation she had with Myka about Pete and by early October, Myka and Pete are taking Claudia to Mrs. King’s house together. Pete has finally decided, after a month of things only getting slightly better between he and Kelly, that it might help them both if he had someone to talk to.

He _needs_ someone to talk to. Even Jane and Jean can see that now.  Even Claudia is excited for Pete to meet with Mrs. King.

But it isn’t Mrs. King that Pete gets to talk to.

When they arrive and they are inside saying hello, there is another man there, too. An older Black man that Myka knows the second she sees his face and his long-ago healed scars that have discolored his darker skin tone, leaving his skin pink where melanin no longer resides.

This is Giselle’s older brother.

“My son,” Mrs. King introduces with a smile, “Anthony, this is Myka Bering, Claudia Donovan, and _this_ ,” when she turns to Pete her smile widens, she seems especially proud to be introducing him, “is Peter Lattimer, if you remember.”

“Pete! It's good seeing you again,” Anthony greets him and he is shaking his head with wide-eyed surprise, as they are shaking hands, and says, “you were just a kid when I last saw you."

Myka can already see so much of the tension melting away when Pete greets Anthony. When he sees the scars and Anthony sees his scars and there is no guilt in either of their eyes. Only a familiarity and an understanding that they share a past that so few people they both know can relate to.

Anthony is shaking his head, still with those wide eyes and says, "Man, you look just like your dad.”

“You knew my dad?”

Anthony says, “Not very well but he taught some of the fire training classes out on base when I was newly enlisted.”

“Small town,” Pete says looking across at Myka, "even smaller military base."

“So, I hear we have a couple of other things in common,” Anthony teases, gesturing to the scar on Pete’s forehead that is now completely healed and free of stitching but still very much a scar and still very much not going away.

“Yeah, I guess we do,” Pete smiles.

***

They sit down, all five of them together, to talk and catch up. Giselle, Mrs. King explains, isn’t here because they changed the hours of her residency at the children’s hospital.

“Giselle’s a doctor?” Claudia asks, suddenly perking up. Myka supposes that most of the conversation before now hasn’t been quite as interesting as she had anticipated. Or that she had anticipated Giselle actually being present for it and her absence makes this visit more disappointing than usual.

“She’s doing a residency for pediatric physical therapy,” Mrs. King nods, beaming out a very proud smile.

“Did you know this?” Claudia asks Myka accusingly.

Myka, rolling her eyes, says, “Yes.”

“Why? Is that a field you’re interested in, Claudia?” Mrs. King asks.

“No,” Claudia says with a dismissive shake of her head, “no reason.”

Myka is trying very hard not to smile.

Anthony and Pete are so engrossed in their own conversation that Myka, Claudia, and Mrs. King leave them to talk alone, heading into the kitchen to make some tea.

“This isn’t H.G.’s kind of tea,” Claudia says curiously, as Mrs. King sets a glass pitcher on a table out on the back porch.

“Helena?” Mrs. King clarifies with a soft laugh and Claudia nods, “I know it’s not the way she prefers it. She and Gigi were just kids when she made sure I was well aware. The first time I poured her a glass, you’d think I’d poisoned the queen herself.”

Claudia bursts into a too rare fit of giggles and Myka smiles wide at the sight and sound of that laughter. At hearing a story about Helena from this new point of view.

“But Imani _enlightened_ her and once she took a sip, she quickly got over herself.”

“Why do you put so much sugar in it?”

“It’s sweet tea,” Mrs. King smiles, heading back to the house with a curious Claudia on her tail, “it’s meant to be very sweet.” Myka is hanging back and out of the way, enjoying the innocence of this conversation. Only now does she realize that it so rarely happens with Claudia. That girl knows so much about so many things that it’s a relief to watch her learn something new.

“You just leave it outside?”

“And let the sun do the rest,” Mrs. King laughs, leading Claudia back inside, “come on, child. Between Tony, Dougie, and Imani, I can’t make nearly enough but there’s still half a pitcher in the refrigerator, calling your name. You too, Myka.”

"Oh I don't do sugar," Myka says with a shake of her head.

"She's lying," Claudia says with a roll of her eyes, "she eats Kelly's empanadas all the time."

Mrs. King tells Myka, "I'll grab you a small glass," and gestures for her to follow them inside.

***

Pete _talks_ on the short drive home to the bookstore, a place that Pete has also called home since he’s been back. Pete talks and it is so much more than he has talked since his return that all Myka can do is smile.

Anthony told him all about his time in the military, about his experiences during Desert Storm. He told him about the day he got hit, the time after, all the surgeries that followed. And in all the time Anthony was talking, Pete had never felt more compelled to talk back. He had never heard a story so newly relatable to the life he now knows.

“He's invited me to a group he hosts in the city with a couple of military vets. All ages, across so many different wars...”

When Pete says this, his speech slows, his voice isn’t quite as sure of itself, and the excitement that was just there seems to dissipate entirely.

“Sounds like something you might like, Pete,” Myka says. They’ve already reached the bookstore. Myka parks the car. “So what’s the hang up? You don’t seem interested.”

Pete shrugs, “I don’t know Mykes. It’s just kind of… _reat_.”

“ _Real_?” Myka questions.

“Yeah, you know like, acknowledging it makes me one of _those_ guys.”

“One of _what_ guys?” Myka is incredulous. Pete remains quiet. “You mean someone who has experienced something extremely traumatic and seeks out healthier ways to cope than pretending like it never happened in the first place?”

“It happened,” Pete says solemnly, “there is no pretending. I just, don't know that anyone else cares to hear about it. There are ware heroes out there who have lost so much more than I did and maybe I don't really need this as much as the next guy? I'm still here. I still have my mobility."

Myka takes the key out of the ignition and sits back in her seat, closing her eyes, pushing her hair behind her ears, sighing her sigh. She turns back to Pete, turning her body so that she’s facing him straight on, and holds her hands out.

Pete arches a brow and Myka gestures for Pete to take her hands.

He’s reluctant. Very reluctant. But he does. He puts his hands in hers and then says, in a high-pitched tone, with a slight southern lilt, “Why Myka Bering, you devil, you better not be proposing to me in the front seat of a Honda.”

“Would you prefer the backseat?” she asks.

“Role play over,” Pete says in his normal voice, to Myka’s amusement.

“I know my opinion might not mean much at this point.”

“Your opinion always means a lot to me, Mykes. At every point.”

“I just mean, we’ve been through everything together. We’ve spent our whole lives together and now you’re dealing with something that I have no experience with. And as much as I want to be here for you and give you advice and offer suggestions to you, I _know_ that what I think you want and what you actually need are two completely different things.”

Pete’s face reads only of understanding but he says nothing. He gives what Myka takes as his silent approval to continue.

“So take my opinion with a grain of salt, I guess, but I think… I think talking to anyone who will listen will be good for you. There is no comparing what you've been through to what any other person has been through. You experienced something traumatic and yes, you came out of it alive and," Myka lifts a gentle finger to his forehead, "relatively unscarred," and he laughs softly at that and she moves that gentle finger to his temple, "but you still have a lot to work through and acknowledging doesn't mean you are treading on another's experiences or loss. If anything, you are honoring it. You are telling the story that many cannot tell."

Pete takes in a deep breath but he doesn't say anything at all. He nods, he works through it. He tightens his grip on Myka's hand.

"Today is the first time, since you’ve been back, that I’ve seen you excited over, enthusiastic about, interested in, or this engaged with anything. You even did _a voice_.”

“Well, don’t go makin’ such a big deal of it,” Pete jokes in that voice again.

“I think you should check the group out. See how it goes. If it helps? I think you should at least try,” Myka is squeezing her hands around Pete’s now, “but I completely understand and fully support your decision if you choose not to. And if we need to find another way? I will be here for that, too.”

Pete pulls Myka, by her hands still grasping onto his, into an embrace that is tight and so familiar and everything they both need right now.

“Thanks, Mykes,” Pete whispers.

“Always,” Myka whispers back.

***

It is mid-November when Myka finds Pete sat in the apartment, at the dining table, in the middle of the night. In the middle of the dark. He is staring at a glass of what could be water, if not for the height of the glass holding that clear liquid.

It’s alcohol, Myka has determined, she doesn’t have to get any closer than she is to know that she can tell by the atmosphere that lingers between them. By the way Pete is staring at it. By the way he doesn’t touch it or sip it or blink or even turn to look at Myka when she steps closer to that table, just at the other side of Pete. Cautious and slow.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

His voice is low and hoarse and empty. His eyes are red and teary.

Myka takes a seat in the chair directly across from him.

“Same,” she whispers, “I had a feeling you’d be up.”

Her feelings, the intuition, the thing Mrs. King had asked her about some months back? It is only occasional when it happens. But Myka is beginning to notice that it doesn’t cause her physical pain, not like it does for Pete. It just wakes her up out of her sleep or changes the pace at which she moves through time when she is already awake.

Tonight, for instance. She’d been dreaming about Helena and it has been a long time since that’s happened but Helena was there, not just attending a wedding but the bride of the wedding. She’d turned to Myka, amidst all of her vows to a faceless man she’ll just assume was Liam and yelled out Pete’s name. The last time Dream Helena had screamed a name out at her, she awoke to find Claudia needed her, too.

Myka still has chills thinking about it.

But she got up and her feet carried her, on worry and instinct alone, out of her bedroom, into the hallway and toward the kitchen. Only to find Pete here, sat at the dining table alone.

Staring at a glass of liquor.

Intuition, Myka calls it, in her efforts to tell herself that it’s not a big deal. But even Pete would and has called this scary as fuck. She’s never been too quick to disagree.

“That from Kelly’s stash?” Myka asks, nodding toward the glass.

Pete smiles and brings his eyes to look up at Myka’s. He nods, he says, “Yeah,” and he laughs softly when he adds, “she thinks it’s cursed by your dad.”

“Probably so,” Myka smiles, though she’s not entirely joking.

They are quiet for several moments more. Until Myka cannot take the silence anymore. Cannot take not knowing whatever is happening inside of Pete’s head.

“What’s going on, Pete?”

He shakes his head, his eyes falling back on that glass.

“Some of these guys, Mykes,” he says softly, “they’ve been through hell, they made it home, and they’re still going through it. They find all sorts of reasons to help them stop thinking about it.”

Myka isn’t sure if Pete is expecting her to say anything, so she doesn’t. She waits.

“I wonder sometimes if this,” he points at the glass, “has as much power as they say it does. When they say it helps them forget? I wonder if it can really do all of that. If it’s worth it to try and find out.”

“You’ve never had a drop of alcohol in your life, Pete,” Myka says softly, her concern no doubt shining through.

“That’s,” Pete laughs, “not entirely true.”

Myka arches a brow.

“Dad let me sip the suds of his beer once. I was four."

Myka sighs and wipes at the tears that form in her eyes. She puffs out a soft laugh.

“That hardly counts,” she smiles.

Pete shrugs.

“This tiny little glass causes so many problems for so many people, Mykes, but they still drink it. All the time. Every day. And I… can’t help wondering how magical it truly is. For them to give up their families, their integrity,” he looks directly at her when he adds, “their _lives_.”

Myka wonders the same thing about her own father. All of the time.

“How could something so unassuming do so much damage? It must do _something_. It must help _somehow_. To survive bullets and bombs just to come home and fall victim to this," Pete glances up at her, "how does that happen?"

“It does nothing,” Myka says quickly. She leans forward, onto the table, and says softly, “It’s an illusion, Pete,” she nods, “that magic. It’s not real. It’s not even magic. Trust me, it won’t help you forget. It’ll just distract you long enough that you think you’ve forgotten. But you won’t. And there’s a chance you never will.”

Pete sighs softly, staring back down at that glass. He reaches out to it. Taps the rim. Grasps it in his hand. But before he has a chance to do anything else, Myka is standing, reaching across the table, taking that glass away from him. She throws her head back and throws that shot back right along with it.

She gently sets the now empty glass back down, onto the table.

It burns. She grimaces. Her whole body shudders. And it’s a miracle none of it comes back up.

“You could have poured it down the drain,” Pete says, trying to contain his smile.

Myka ignores his comment and levels her tone so that Pete knows she is serious and she means it when she leans across from him on the table and says, “I can call Anthony. If you need someone to talk to. He said he’s always available. Any time, day or night."

“No,” Pete waves her off, “it’s okay. I’m fine. Thank you, Mykes. For checking on me, sitting with me.”

“Always,” Myka nods, standing straight. “Okay. Well, I’m going back to bed before the buzz sets in,” Myka turns and heads back toward her room, still not acknowledging Pete’s tease but she’s smiling at his soft laughter, that he can laugh at all anymore. She says, “Don’t let me catch you in here again,” disappearing into the hallway. Into her bedroom.

***

It’s Thanksgiving again.

Jeannie’s wedding is in a little over a week and Myka has, so far, done a great job of not thinking about it or what that really means.

She’s not thinking about how stressed out Jane and Jean have been for the past two months, how much of that stress they’ve tried and failed to put onto everyone else. She’s not thinking about Helena flying back into town next weekend and she’s very close to not thinking about this being the first time, in a long time, that she won’t be there to pick Helena up from the airport.

Instead, she’s thinking about Sam. Because Sam is here, in this town, and he's more than tolerable, and he's just outside of her reach. And it’s better this way, she thinks, to want someone that you can’t have, that you've never had. To long for something as you simultaneously come to the realization that the something is completely outside of your grasp.

A crush, because that’s all that she’s willing to call it now, is so much better than whatever has been going on between her and Helena.

It is so much easier to think about than attending a wedding with the ex-girlfriend you haven’t spoken to since your father destroyed your friendship with his tell-all novel about how he destroyed your life for ruining his.

Myka takes in a deep breath as hot shower water runs over every inch of her body.

She heaves out a sigh trying, once again, not to think about any of these things.

***

Kelly is watching Myka with some suspicion. Her right eye squinting. Her left brow raised.

She leans in close once, then a second time smelling the air. She moves away again and looks Myka up and then down. She tugs at Myka’s top. Pokes a solitary finger at the exposed skin of Myka’s chest, just above the low-cut neck of the top she wears.

She leans back in again, to examine her face closely.

“Are you wearing makeup?”

Myka says nothing but looks up to the ceiling with a half-hearted eye roll.

“Is that,” Kelly sniffs again, “a new perfume?” Kelly’s eyes widen, a smile pulls slowly into her lips. “Your mom and Jane invited Sam to Thanksgiving dinner, didn't they?”

“Why do you say that?” Myka is curious to know but she will deny everything.

“Helena’s not here for another week but it’s not like you ever wear makeup for her anyway. It can’t be Giselle because she’s working tonight and your name isn’t Claudia,” Kelly smirks, “who else would you possibly do all of this for but Sam?”

“Um, _no_. Sam has a girlfriend,” Myka says, “and besides all of _that_ , we’re just friends.”

Kelly’s smile grows wide.

“If you hadn’t said the ‘just friends’ thing _second_ , I might actually believe the first thing more.”

“I’m not talking to you about this.”

“It’s okay Myka, if you want to be with him,” Kelly says, allowing her voice to sound soft and sympathetic now, “you know that, right? These feelings that you’re feeling? They’re completely natural.”

“Here we go,” Myka says exasperated.

“Being attracted to the opposite sex is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Well, that would certainly explain the amount of PDA I’ve been subjected to in recent weeks,” Myka teases.

“I’ve been out and proud for years!”

“Goodbye, Raquel!”

Myka pushes her and all of her laughter out of the bathroom and closes the door behind her.

***

Thanksgiving dinner is Jane and Jean, Jeannie and Jules, Pete and Kelly, Tracy and Kevin, Sam and Kurt, Myka and Claudia. It is the largest Thanksgiving they’ve had in a while, in the forever that Myka can think of. The only person missing and truly being missed at this table is Helena Wells. Even now, when they haven’t spoken for months, Myka would love to trade Jules in for Helena. She would love to send Jules thousands of miles away and have Helena thousands of miles closer for Thanksgiving. Talking or not, together or not, happy or not…

“I assume you’re not picking Helena up from the airport,” Myka’s mother says to her and why, Myka does not know. Any way her mother can remind her that they aren’t together, that they aren’t even talking, and that she finds all of this foolish, she takes with glee.

“You assume correctly,” Myka says with a shake of her head. She sees the sympathetic looks she gets from both Pete and Sam. Claudia’s look reads more like disapproval.

“I’m getting Helena,” Kelly speaks up, “and we’re going straight to the hotel. She can sleep and adjust herself for a day before the bachelorette party the next night.”

“If she’s too tired, she doesn’t actually have to go,” Jeannie says aloud, “to the bachelorette party _or_ the wedding.”

“ _Jeannie_ ,” Jane says sternly.

“No need to tone down your hate, Sis,” Pete says with sarcasm shining, quick to call her out, “we definitely can’t already see it.”

“ _Pete_ ,” Jane scolds.

But Pete is already speaking and talking over her when he asks Jeannie, both aloud and in sign, “I want to know why you suddenly hate her so much. Your own best friend. The _only_ girl who ever had the nerve to stick up for you in school. The only reason you even met _Jules_.”

Myka doesn't need to know. She gets it. She sees it in the way Jeannie glances quickly to Jules. The way Jules looks right back at her, as if nothing about this exchange is bothersome. As if he doesn’t have a single thing to add to it.

Myka can’t help it, if she’s glaring at him from across the table. _He_ is the reason why. It is written all over both of their faces.

Tracy and Kevin and Sam and Kurt and Claudia remain quiet. None of them says a word, they barely look up from their plates.

“Every year?” Jane asks, standing suddenly, “Do we have to have drama every single year?”

She doesn’t say another word after that. She takes her plate and she leaves the dining room. Myka’s mother is not far behind, calling out to Jane, offering only a sigh and a shake of her head as they disappear somewhere across the house in the direction of their shared room.

Pete is glaring across the table at Jeannie Jr. who looks more guilty than Myka has ever seen her look in the past. And almost a minute of silence passes before she excuses herself from the table and disappears down the hall that leads to her bedroom.

After that, Jules stands and holds out his arms and says, “It was me.”

Myka arches a brow. She is the least surprised of everyone here.

“Look bro, I didn’t and still don’t think _she_ needs to be at _my_ wedding,” Jules says and he means it when he says it. It almost comes off as a genuine concern but then he says all of the wrong things entirely. “She isn’t a part of this family but your mother, _and yours_ ,” when he says this looking at Myka, his tone changes to one of slight annoyance, “insisted.”

Myka presses her lips together tight, her eyes going wide. She has come to know Jules far too well in this past year to care much at all about what he has to say about her relationship with Helena, about her mother’s relationship with Jane. He plays it off as a tease but Myka knows, better than anyone, that his issue with their relationships are _real_. 

Pete, on the other hand, hasn’t been here and Myka can just about feel the heat burning off of his skin. She can see Kelly, sat at the other side of him, reaching under the table for his arm and squeezing tight. But it is far too late for that. Pete is on his feet. Leaning across that table. _Glaring_ at Jules.

“Helena is more a part of this family than you will ever be,” Pete says steadily and slowly, almost as if he’d been reading Myka’s mind, “she deserves to be here, at this table, with this family, _her_ family, a million times more than you do. And don’t you ever forget that, _bro_.”

Pete and his plate are gone in seconds. Kelly lingers long enough to glare and shake her head at Jules. She says something in Spanish that Myka cannot pick up for the sheer speed at which she says it.

“I don’t speak Spanish,” Jules says, as if Kelly doesn’t know.

Myka waits for the comeback and she doesn’t have to wait long. Kelly narrows her eyes on that boy that stands across from her at the table and says, “I know one hand gesture in sign language that I'd love to share with you and I’m pretty sure, _cabron_ , that you'll definitely know what it means.”

When Jules has nothing to say to that, Kelly leaves the dining room.

“Congratulations, Jules,” Myka smiles, setting down her fork, crossing her arms, and raising her brows, “you’ve ruined Thanksgiving ten times better than I ever could.”

***

Kelly and Pete are the closest Myka has seen them since Pete has returned home. They are sat outside on the back porch, side-by-side in the swing. Kelly has an arm draped behind Pete, her hand is just behind his neck, and her fingers are moving through his hair. She’s leaning in close to him, speaking in a whisper. He’s leaning in closer to her, eyes closed, head tilting toward her.

They must not hear Myka because they don’t turn to acknowledge her presence. Pete smiles and then he’s laughing softly and moving his arm around Kelly’s waist. She is laughing now, too, and Myka can definitely hear and understand when she tells Pete, in Spanish, that Jules isn’t so bad until someone talks about Helena. Pete understands every word she says but responds in English, saying, “If you come for _any_ of my sisters, you have basically come for blood.”

They are laughing softly, kissing each other’s laughter, sitting straight when they part. And it is now that Myka moves further into view, smile on her face, moisture in her eyes. They greet her with knowing laughter and wide smiles of their own.

 “Just making sure you guys are okay,” Myka sighs her relief.

“We’re fine, Mykes,” Pete says, patting the bench at the other side of him, “how about you?”

“We didn’t mean to leave you in there with him,” Kelly adds.

Myka shrugs and waves off their concerns, “I can _deal_ with Jules. It's Sam that I can’t deal with right now.”

“What’s wrong with Sam?” Pete asks.

“ _Nothing_ is wrong with Sam,” Myka sighs, “that’s the problem. He’s perfect and he’s sweet and he cares about everything and everyone.”

“Huh?”

“I think what our daughter is trying to say is that he’s too damn fine,” Kelly grins.

“Kelly,” Myka groans, covering her face.

“Wait, stop,” Pete’s smile grows wider, he suggestive eyebrows begin their ascent.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Myka pleads.

“Did you or did you not draw a very thick line of gay-lady ink between the two of you a year ago?”

“She did,” Kelly nods.

“I did,” Myka confirms.

“But I think she just erased it,” Kelly adds.

“I think I erased it a long time ago,” Myka sighs, “I’m not so sure I ever finished drawing it.”

“ _What_?” Pete asks.

“Maybe it wasn’t as thick as I originally thought,” Myka sighs, staring up at the night sky.

“ _Huh_?” Pete queries again.

“Sam just gave Jules a speech about Helena being an integral part of what makes our family a family and it was so heartfelt and convincing that I’m not even sure who, between Helena and Sam, that I love more.”

Pete slowly arches a brow.

Myka can see that Kelly is trying very hard to contain more of that grin.

“You just said you love Sam,” Kelly says, just barely containing herself.

“I know,” Myka says covering her face with her hands. Dragging her hands down her face. Groaning loudly. “I know.”

“Wait, _what_?” Pete asks again, “I don’t understand the question.”

“Myka thinks Sam is attractive,” Kelly clarifies, “ _and_ she’s attracted to him.”

***

When Myka thinks about Sam, it isn’t sexual. And she doesn’t know why.

It was never sexual with Helena when she was younger and she knew why then. It’s because she didn’t know anything about _that_ and even if she did, she didn’t want anything to do with it. Now she’s older, when she thinks about Helena… it is most certainly sexual. It is almost always exactly that. But she knows Helena intimately and to dream of Helena sexually isn’t just a fantasy, it is a memory. It is a collection of memories that she is very fond of, that she still enjoys remembering.

Her memories of Helena are all warm skin and soft lips, wandering fingers and longing eyes, tongues in places she never knew, not before Helena, tongues could ever venture to.

When she thinks about Helena in this way, her heart aches and she misses her, not just having sex with her but everything about her. From her hair, how perfect it always is, to her freezing toes that always manage to find the warmth of Myka’s calves.

But her thoughts of Sam are not sexual and they aren’t as vivid and she doesn’t quite feel as fluttery as she always has with Helena. Her heart doesn’t leap or skip beats, her breath doesn’t disappear, her stomach doesn’t exactly turn.

The way she feels about Sam, the way she has come to _love_ Sam, is muted but still so very real and in a way that she hasn’t been able to explain or even come close to finding the words for. If not for her jealously, for _Allison_ , she might not even believe it. If not for her jealously... she wonders if she’d even care enough to linger on it.

But here she sits, beside him on the couch in the living room of the Lattimer home, with another Lattimer-Bering Thanksgiving dinner disaster behind her, not knowing what to do with herself. She’s gazing at him, not even occasionally but steadily, as he talks with Kurt and Pete and Kevin about Allison, about where they’re at, about where they intend to go. She stares and she stares but he doesn’t look and she doesn’t know whether to be thankful that he doesn’t, that all she gets is the side of his face, mostly hidden behind still-long hair, or upset that he's forgotten all about her.

When the moms enter the living room and join the conversation, they ask him about the police academy, about how much further he has to go. About when he’s graduating. They want to know so they can attend and be the proud Other Mothers that they are. They don’t say that but Myka knows it’s what they _want_.

“It’s not really a graduation, just a little ceremony,” he tells them, “but if I get hired onto the police department there, in the city, there will be a swearing in. I would love to have you both there.”

Both Jane and Jean are beside themselves with that invitation. Myka wants to roll her eyes but she surprises herself when a smile creeps relentlessly into place. She’s happy their Thanksgiving isn’t entirely ruined. Jules can burn all of the bridges he wants to. He’s already on thin ice with them for convincing Jeannie to move to Florida after the wedding.

“And Allison, what does she do?” Jane asks in her typical sort of _Jane_ way, both curious _and_ accusing. Myka can’t help smiling even more at that tone. It is somewhere between protective and judgmental, it is both permissive and scolding.

But Myka’s thinking about the way they used to tease her about Sam. She’s thinking about the way she vehemently denied wanting anything to do with that, with _this_. And now she’s thinking about the look her mother shoots her after Jane’s question.

They love Sam, almost too much. If they could convince Jeannie to marry him instead, they would. But they’re stuck with Myka, who has worked so hard on pushing him away that he isn’t even interested in _looking_ at her anymore.

 _Yes, Sam, what does this Allison do?_ Myka is thinking it. She has enough sense not to ask it aloud. She hasn’t really cared up until now and even now, she’s not so sure she really cares.

“Mostly school for now,” Sam nods, “she wants to teach but she works part-time at the child development center across town.”

“A girl after our own hearts,” Jean all but cheers, her eyes finding Myka again. Now Myka _does_ roll hers.

“She sounds like a real peach,” Myka smiles, turning back to Sam and he finally, finally turns to look at her. His expression is mostly confusion accompanied by a small smile. He doesn’t say anything to her comment but turns back toward Jane and Jean and carries on talking about Allison.

***

“I hope you know that I was joking before, about the opposite sex thing. I don’t want it to seem like I’m more excited for you because Sam’s a guy,” Kelly tells her when they are standing outside together, before Sam comes outside to join them. Myka doesn’t say anything at all in response but waits for her to go on. “It’s not that at all. It’s just that… it’s been you and Helena going back and forth for a long time. With each other and with other people that… don’t really break the mold.”

Myka puffs out a soft laugh at that now. She gets what Kelly is saying. She isn’t offended by Kelly telling her what’s on her mind. As it is, she is just barely listening. She is watching Sam talk to Pete inside, just on the other side of that sliding glass door. She is watching Sam zip up his sweater, move a hand through that too long hair, and glance out at her, through the window. His smile with his cheeks, red from the heat that fills the house, makes her want to fall away from everything bad that has ever happened in her life.

She wants to take Sam right along with her.

“I love you nerds and I want you both to be happy,” Kelly continues, “even if that means finding other people that make you smile the way you’re smiling right now.”

“I’m not smiling,” Myka says, attention averting back to Kelly.

Kelly whose brow is arched with skepticism, whose smirk is unconvinced, who takes several steps backward, shaking her head before turning away and saying, “If that’s not a smile then this definitely isn’t me, walking away to leave you two alone in the dark, in the cold.”

“ _Raquel_ …” but Myka doesn’t bother trying. Kelly is through the door, being pulled into Pete’s grasp and walking further away, into the house.

Sam is outside now.

Myka bites down on her bottom lip hard. It’s all she can do to tame what is _definitely_ _not_ a smile.

***

“A real peach?” Sam questions when they are alone and outside, on the back porch, in the cold and staring up at the sky, at nothing but lingering clouds and darkness, a moon that is hidden above the fog.

Myka is grinning and laughing, buried in a thick coat that she moves further around her, to warm her. She doesn’t mean to meddle but she does. And she enjoys it, not entirely on purpose.

“I’m _teasing_ ,” she says and playfully, gently, punches Sam in his shoulder.

“I know you don’t like Allison,” Sam laughs softly, turning away from her to look at the nothing above them.

Myka’s smile fades. Her happy melts away. Suddenly she can feel the cold, it’s much colder than it was just a few seconds ago. Suddenly, she is shivering.

She wants to apologize but she can’t bring herself to speak, to break the silence. She glances at Sam to confirm what she feels. This silence, his thoughtfulness, the way he stares up as if waiting for someone, anyone, to reach down and pluck him into the sky, is perfect. She doesn't want to ruin it or distract him. Not even to apologize. She wants this particular moment, where she doesn't know what’s happening inside of her mind and heart and the very pit of here stomach, to last forever.

She’s thinking of all the times before, when Helena was just a thought and a dream, a fantasy that would play out in her mind in the dark of her room, almost every night before she went to bed. She’s thinking of how perfect Helena had always been to her then, before they really got to know each other. Before everything just… _spiraled_. 

She still could be perfect. If Helena were here. If Helena were honest. Forthcoming. Not with Liam. Not constantly trying to drive Myka straight out of her mind.

 _They_ could be perfect.

“Bering,” comes Sam’s voice, soft and low, and he’s looking at her now, she’s looking at him, too. She has been for a while but she doesn’t know how long exactly or how long since he turned to look back at her. All she knows is that it’s cold and his lips are turning purple as his breath swirls into puffs of warm air from between them and into chilly night air.

She bites her lip. She doesn’t mean to but she does. It’s so cold out, she can hardly feel it.

He smiles. His cheeks are red and turning more red but it’s still the cold, she’s convinced. She wants to put her gloved hands on his cheeks and shield them against the cold. She wants to pull him closer, put her lips on his, and warm him in this way, too.

“Are you going to be okay?”

“Huh?”

“At the wedding? Allison will understand if I tell her--”

“No,” Myka says softly.

“No, you won’t be okay? Or no, you don’t want me to tell her?”

She shakes her head and lowers it, breaking their eye contact. She says, “No,” again and, “don’t do that. Just bring her. It’s fine,” then looking back up at Sam with a slight nod, “ _I’ll_ be fine. And even if I’m not, my entire family will be there. _Pete_ will be there. _You_ will be there. That’s good enough for me.”

“You’re sure?”

Myka nods and shrugs.

“It’s just Helena and besides,” she says softly, leaning onto the railing of the porch and heaving out a fantastic sigh. She watches as her own warm breath billows into the freezing night’s sky, “we haven’t been together for a year now, so whatever secrets she’s keeping? They aren’t my problem anymore.”


	29. The Newly Wedded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Helena returns for Jeannie's wedding. Secrets are revealed. Myka & Helena are on the mend. Kind of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took. Forever. And it's kind of sad and awful and full of more historical trauma and secrets and problems. But it is basically the end of Helena's and Myka's past revealed and time apart. It is also the end of their "childhoods". It's time to move on and heal and focus on the present, the future. And there is quite a bit more to their future...

_“We don’t have to do this.”_

_When Myka looks up at the sound of that voice, barely a whisper, her eyes meet jet black hair, darker than she remembers and shorter than she has ever seen it, falling just above exposed shoulders. Those shoulders tense against Myka’s gaze, she can see the way those muscles move and tighten, the way they then still in anticipation. The way they brace against the silence that falls between them. Between Myka and the body that stands turned entirely away from her._

_That body is trying to breathe steadily. Trying to breathe at all._

_Helena turns her head to the side, not far enough to see Myka but enough that Myka can see her and the way her bottom lip sticks out just so._

_Long-missed perfect lips speak to her again. Softer this time._

_That accent. Myka wonders now, of all times in her life, how Helena had never lost it. How much thicker it is when she’s gone._

_“You don't have to stay with me.”_

_It almost sounds like a question._

_Helena stills for a moment more before facing forward and away from Myka’s gaze. She lowers her head and her shoulders fall slightly, her posture slumps into something less defensive, something more docile or submissive. Something like someone just… giving herself up._

_Myka takes in a deep breath as she leans back against the handrail of the elevator they occupy. She glances up at the floor indicator._

_They started on floor seven. They are slowly working their way up to nineteen as the elevator stops, doors opening and doors closing, on almost every single floor between those two._

_Myka lets that breath go._

_“This doesn’t need to happen--”_

_“When did you cut your hair?” Myka asks, looking for anything, any other topic of conversation at all than this. Anything that will keep her from second-guessing this decision because she’s already made up her mind and this is what she wants. She has wanted it for too long and the very last thing that she needs right now, in this moment, is for Helena to convince her that she doesn’t. That they shouldn’t be here together. That they shouldn’t even try existing in the same space. Moving toward the same goal. The same floor. The very same room in this hotel._

_They absolutely should. Myka knows it. Even if, in actuality, they shouldn’t. Even if they aren’t actually ready. Myka knows they should, she has already convinced herself that they will. As long as she gets to have a say in this, they absolutely will._

_Floor ten dings. The elevator stops and they both look up in wait._

_The doors open. There is no one there._

_Helena sighs._

_“This summer,” she answers and lowers her head again, “I’ve kept it up since then.”_

_The doors close. The elevator continues rising. And stopping. Opening, closing._

_Her hair is short enough in back that her neck is exposed. It’s short enough in the back that Myka is staring at the skin of that neck, at freckles dotting the skin of bare shoulders and she’s imagining her lips over them, kissing. Devouring. She shuts her eyes closed tight, to steel herself against these thoughts for now. She doesn’t need them, even if she wants them._

_Myka isn’t used to this Helena. She’s never seen her before. With her hair this short, looking so much older... she almost doesn’t look like herself. She could be someone else entirely. Maybe that’s exactly what she’s trying to be but it isn’t helping them stray away from the past. It makes Myka want to consume her even more. From the top she wears, the neck so wide that it falls down and just past her shoulders, revealing bra straps, an undershirt, and more freckled skin. To dark gray leggings, tight enough that Myka_ notices _. She can see more curves on that girl than she remembers Helena ever having._

_“I like it,” Myka tells her, opening her eyes to everything that still stands before her. Somehow surprised to see Helena is still here. That this isn’t a dream._

_She tells herself she shouldn’t like it this much but it’s been a year, a whole entire year and then some, since she’s seen Helena. Since she’s_ had _her, or anyone at all. And she is swiftly remembering why she was, is and has always been, so in love with this girl._

_The elevator doesn’t stop on floor fourteen but continues its journey to floor fifteen. It dings again, doors opening. And again, no one is there._

_“Myka…”_

_Helena hasn’t sounded like she isn’t on the verge of tears since they started talking again. Since long before then, if Myka’s being honest with herself. Helena has sounded like this since the moment they broke up._

_The elevator doors close._

_Myka reaches her left hand out, the tips of her fingers just barely touching the back of Helena’s arm. Helena turns at that touch, all the way around now. She faces Myka and it’s then that Myka sees the tears in her eyes, her brows furrowed and sad._

This _is the Helena that Myka knows._

_In the depths of her heart, though she would never admit it to anyone, it pleases her to see Helena in this way. It pleases her to know that Helena has been just as miserable as her. To know that Helena still needs her. And that Helena still needs her just as much as she still needs Helena._

_Myka grasps and tugs gently on Helena’s arm without ever saying a thing. She just looks up and Helena already knows everything that she needs to do, exactly where she needs to be._

_Helena steps to Myka, leaning, and into her arms as Myka holds her closer. Holds her tighter. She kisses Helena’s cheek. Moves her hands up Helena’s back, up arms, over shoulders, to the sides of her neck, fingers into hair. She holds her just close enough that they are face-to-face, Myka’s breath against Helena’s lips, Helena’s staggered breath warming Myka’s._

_Myka curls her fingers, still lost in Helena’s hair, raking fingernails gently against scalp._

_“I like it,” she whispers softly against Helena’s lips and the intake of breath that follows, the sound of Helena trying to breathe, the way her eyes roll before they close, the way her head falls back just so, to welcome the kiss that soon follows... it is almost too much._

_They are this way for two more floors of the opening and closing of elevator doors. Reaching, holding. Tugging, kissing. Gasping for breath as if trying to steal it from between the other’s lips._

_It takes everything in Myka not to fall and bring Helena down with her to the elevator floor. It takes all of Myka’s strength and every last ounce of will power to push forward. To get all of herself and Helena and the duffle bag she’d abandoned long ago, through that door, out of that elevator, and quickly, very quickly, onto floor number nineteen._

_They disappear into room 1901, Helena only narrowly securing the latch over the door._

***

It is the Wednesday before when Giselle confirms she can’t make the wedding and the only person more upset about this than Myka is an eleven-year-old Claudia Donovan who hasn’t stopped talking about Dr. Giselle since she found out about _Dr_. Giselle.

And there has been no filtering of conversation about Giselle to anyone, not even Helena. Myka finds out from Kelly who was told by Helena that Claudia was very forthcoming about the fact they see Giselle _often_ and _like_ to see Giselle often. Helena, as relayed to Myka from Kelly, had not sounded happy about that but in her typical Helena way, she’d said absolutely nothing about her dismay, opting instead to use her _pleasant_ voice.

“She has a peasant voice?” Myka asks with intentional sarcasm.

“I love both of you but I’m not touching that conversation with a five foot long wooden spoon.”

“Does she really think I hate her enough to date Giselle? That I hate Giselle that much to even try? Or that Giselle hates _herself_ so much she’d date _me_?”

“First of all, I’m not all that sure Giselle would say no to dating you. Second, you’re the only one throwing around the word hate here,” Kelly says, “just so that we’re clear.”

***

“I am not a child.”

“Start practicing what you preach, missy, and I might believe that one day.”

Today is apparently not that day.

It is the Thursday before Jeannie’s wedding and Myka is helping her mother and her surrogate other mother load their luggage, gifts, and wedding favors into the trunk of Jane’s car.

“I’m twenty years old. I live on my own. Mother, I run a _business_.”

“An _adult_ would put on a happy face for another woman, who is practically her sister, and attend her bachelorette party, regardless of who else would also be in attendance.”

“You’re confusing adulthood with masochism but I won't fault you for that, Mom. The similarities _are_ quite remarkable.”

“It’s fine Jean, if she doesn’t want to go up today, with everyone else, she doesn’t have to go.”

“Thank you, Jane, for the assist.”

Myka’s mother shakes her head with the might of all of her disapproval.

“Anything I can do to minimize the chances of me running into _her_ ,” Myka adds, just so that they are clear on the exact reason _why_.

“Anything _I_ can do to minimize the chances of me murdering both of _you_ ,” Jane counters, also making herself clear.

“You’re going to see Helena sooner or later,” Jean says, Myka can hear the frustration in her mother’s voice, “we’re all staying in the same hotel. In hotel rooms her father was generous enough to pay for. Along with so many other things.”

Myka throws her head back and this look is exactly what she thinks of Charles and all of his so-called generosities.

“Very adult,” her mother says, criticizing her newly defensive stance.

“I think she’s aiming for seeing Helena _later_ , honey,” Jane smiles at Jean.

“ _Much_ later,” Myka confirms with a nod.

“The girl has her own car,” Jane continues, “as long as she’s in the city on Saturday--”

“That unreliable jalopy? What if it breaks down? Rehearsals are Saturday, _before_ lunch.” She turns to Myka. “Will you even be awake--”

“Then I’ll take the train,” Myka says, nonchalant and waving her mother’s worries away, “I’ll set my alarm clock for six in the morning.”

“If that happens, I will personally drive back into town, bright and early, to pick her up,” Jane says with a teasing smile, moving an arm around Myka’s mother’s shoulder and pulling her closer. Jane plants a kiss on Jean’s temple and whispers, “Breathe, Jeannie. It’s almost over.”

“And no one will be more happy about that than I,” Myka says just below her breath, though by the sounds of their exasperated sighs, both mothers hear her.

***

Helena’s plane lands safely in the city on Thursday evening, not that Myka has been tracking her flight but there had been a snow storm moving in on New York and she may have glanced at the status of her layover a couple of times online. _Just_ to ease her mind.

It’s the first time, in a long time, that Myka isn’t meeting Helena at the airport. Kelly and Tracy have been tasked with that errand and Myka is unsurprised when she receives a text update from Kelly an hour and a half after they’ve left for the city.

**_Helena has landed safely, soundly, and sleepily._ **

**_I don’t care_** is how Myka responds without even the slightest hesitation but not even two minutes later she is amending her first text to say ** _but thank you for letting me know_** _._

 ** _Mhm_** is all the reply she receives from Kelly.

***

Jeannie Jr.’s bachelorette party is Friday night and Myka’s non-attendance, despite what her mother believes, had been an almost-silent compromise between her and Helena. All Kelly had to say was, “Helena’s definitely doing the bachelorette,” and Myka had happily ceded her spot.

Something about a group of women hopping through the city drunk, wearing glitter pink sashes and sipping champagne through penis-shaped straws just doesn’t scream _excitement_ to her, even if they are mostly family. But it could also be that _mostly family_ part that has further dissuaded her from attending.

She’s a little curious about Jeannie's dedication to the event but her friends, the _other_ ones that Myka doesn’t really know, seem to have rallied behind the idea on her behalf.

It’s one more reason for Myka to spend as little time as possible around them.

***

**_have fun tonight!_ **

Myka sends this text at first to Kelly and then to Tracy and another to Jeannie Jr. She thinks about sending it to Helena but she’s not sure whether it would read as genuine or sarcastic. And she’s also not sure in which of the two she’d prefer it to be read. So it’s probably best, she concludes, not to send it at all.

Myka receives an immediate response from Kelly:

**_HAVE FUN READING._ **

Myka rolls her eyes, reaching for the book that rests in her lap. She picks it up and tosses it onto the bed, just beside where she sits.

**_M: shut up. love you. be safe. gnight._ **

**_K: Don’t worry. Helena is MISERABLE._ **

She doesn’t know how to respond to that but she’d be lying through all of her front teeth if she said it didn’t make her feel at least a little bit better. She’d be lying, too, if she’d claimed it wasn’t taking absolutely everything inside of her not to drive into the city _tonight_. Because Helena is this close after being so far for so long.

Myka could be there in forty-five minutes. No fourteen hours worth of flying, no layovers in New York. No passport checks, airport security. No waiting to get through customs and dragging an overtired nine-year-old behind her.

The least difficult part was getting her here and into the same space, onto the same continent, close enough to touch, and that wasn’t easy at all. The hard part would be figuring out what had become of them, what they would say to one another, if anything at all, and how they would make it work in this new way of life. This way of life where they weren’t a thing or destined to be together or hoping to love one another or waiting to be just the right age. This new thing where all of that was behind them and everything that was ahead of them was unsure and… no longer an inevitability but a complete mystery.

Myka’s been too busy this weekend reminding herself that they aren’t together anymore. That Helena isn’t hers. Not to hug or to hold or to kiss or to touch. That she shouldn’t _want_ to do any of those things with Helena. That _wanting_ to do those things made her the biggest hypocrite of all. So she thinks of Sam to distract herself and all that she can think of him is that he’s out with Pete and Jules and Kurt and some other guys she doesn’t really know. And he’s about to have the most awkward bachelor party experience of his lifetime when he could be here, at the apartment with Myka. Reading a book. Reading a book to _her_.

He is a very good reader and Myka is so very good at listening to his voice.

Myka receives two more texts before she finally commits to finding something better to do with her time. She has so much of it to waste between now and tomorrow, not thinking about Helena. Not thinking about Sam.

One text is from Jeannie:

**_Thank you, Myka! Wish you were here but understand why you’re not. <3_ **

The other text, from her sister, is a photo of Kelly and Helena.

***

Myka does not in fact set her alarm clock for six o’clock, so she sleeps through a call from Rebecca St. Claire early on Saturday morning. She is surprised to find that she cares enough to listen to the voicemail the woman left for her. She is even more surprised to find herself holding her breath as it begins to play.

Rebecca sounds about as enthusiastic as Myka feels…

_“Myka, this is Rebecca. I’m at the hospital with your father. He seems to have caught himself a bit of a bug that’s giving him a few complications. It’s nothing pressing, he’s stable and he’ll recover but he’s requesting to speak with you. I completely understand if you have no desire to see him but… give me a call back if you do decide to come by. We’re in room 211. Oh, and he is, for some reason unbeknownst to me, asking if you could please not tell Tracy.”_

Myka sighs when the message ends. A familiar tightness moves into her chest.

***

Her father does not look like the weak man she’d last seen. His skin isn't so pale, his cheeks not quite as sunken in. He’s still too thin and graying, his breathing is labored even with the assistance of oxygen through the nasal cannula he wears. But he doesn’t look on the verge of death like he had months before. He doesn’t look like he only has _so long_ to live.

He seems to have his bad days and sometimes he has much better days and today is just one of the days that is better than most of the others.

Myka is unamused by his happiness to see her as she enters his room. When he smiles, she frowns. When he lifts up a welcoming hand, she crosses her arms in front of her. He doesn’t seem to notice or care that she isn’t interested in being here. That she’s only come because something in Rebecca’s voice compelled her to. Perhaps he’s learned to see past Myka’s disinterest now. Perhaps he’s so used to this expression on her face that he doesn’t actually know what it means anymore.

Has he ever seen her happy? Would he even know what that looks like?

Myka is sure to remind him where they stand.

“I have to be at a wedding rehearsal across town in an hour.”

She knows she perfected that _tone_. He really just doesn’t care.

“Who's getting married?” he asks almost jovially, though his voice is raspy and slow. He has to clear his throat when he’s done speaking.

“Jeannie Lattimer,” she says, “you know, the girl you used to think of as a niece?”

“From what I hear, she’s more of a sister to you now,” Warren smiles and that smile sends a chill through all of Myka. She is not used to it, doesn’t like it. Doesn’t care to see it as often as she tends to now. “Are they married yet? Your mother and Jane?”

“I’m sure they would if they could but considering same-sex marriages are banned…”

Myka is slowly making her way into the hospital room, Rebecca greets her only with a soft, apologetic smile then gives an expectant glance to Myka’s father.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pull you away from such an important engagement,” Warren says catching Rebecca’s gaze and letting go of a heavy sigh, “Tracy didn’t mention it.”

“Maybe she did and you just weren’t paying attention,” Myka offers.

“Or she didn’t want me to know,” he counters, still baring that smile.

“I didn’t come here to play games, Dad.”

“I know, you came here for Tracy.”

“I didn’t come here for her either,” Myka says.

It isn’t until the words hit her ears that the impact of what she says begins to gnaw at her nerves.

She really did not come here for Tracy this time. Whatever this is, for whatever reason he wants to speak with her, it isn’t for Tracy. It’s for _her_. She came here, for once, for herself. And she hasn’t yet figured out why.

Curiosity is as close a reason as she can guess. Oxygen deprivation is a runner up. And she isn’t the only one who reads into her words. She can tell by the look on her father’s face that he's thinking about what she’s said, too. Thinking about her motive for being here, thinking that suddenly things have _changed_. He’s nagged for so long or so much time has passed between the bad and the now, that he thinks this moment is the turning point in their relationship. That they will begin to have something of a relationship for once.

Myka wants nothing to do with that.

“Rebecca,” Warren says softly and that’s all he has to say before Rebecca excuses herself, saying she's going down to the cafeteria to find a bite to eat. The room is quiet when she approaches Myka, when she reaches out for Myka’s hand and squeezes it tight.

“Unless you need me to stay,” Rebecca says softly.

Myka shakes her head but further straightens her expression and says, “I”ll be fine.” Rebecca nods her understanding and squeezes Myka’s hand gently once again.

“Please give Jeannie my congratulations.”

Myka offers Rebecca a sympathetic smile before the woman takes her leave.

She still doesn’t understand why that woman has invested so much of herself into Warren Bering. Is she trying to help him? To save him? Does she feel like she owes him something? _He_ is the one who almost killed _her_. He owes her just as much as and maybe more than he owes Myka.

“How much time do you have?” Warren asks.

“Very little,” Myka says. She doesn’t bother to look at her watch. She doesn’t plan on staying. But then her father is trying to adjust the way he lies and the position of the hospital bed. He’s reaching for the bed’s remote control that has fallen to the side, dangling by its wires just out of his reach.

Myka rolls her eyes, she heaves out a sigh. She doesn’t like her father for everything he is, for everything he’s done to her. She thinks her time and efforts would be better spent unplugging his supplemental oxygen and rolling his bed out of this room, out of the hospital, and into the middle of the road. But she’s thinking about the way her mother still talks about her father like he’s an actual human being. She’s thinking about the way Jane still talks to her father when Myka needs help with matters pertaining to the bookstore.

She’s thinking of the word _tolerance_ and also the word _forgiveness_. He deserves neither. He especially deserves neither of these things from her but she’s fuming, all at once, at her own good nature.

Even as she’s walking to his side, picking that remote up, and holding it out for him to take from her, she is screaming, every single inch of her wailing through every single pore. She is wishing herself away from this place. She is regretting ever coming. That feeling in her chest tightens its grip around her heart.

He touches her when he reaches for the remote. It's purposeful, Myka is telling herself. When he reaches up and takes it from her, his hand touches her hand and he looks up at her. She immediately pulls her hand away and turns and walks to the end of his bed. Far away from his reach. Far away from hands that have the nerve to seek out her touch, as if in search of her approval, when the only thing they’d ever given her in the past were marks and bruises.

“It’s okay, Myka,” he says softly to her, his voice speaking against the soft buzz of his hospital bed whirring him into a more upright position, “that you want me to die. I understand.”

Myka doesn’t turn around. She lowers her head and says, “You are a truly awful person if you think you can pin your self-hate on me. I am not the reason you hate yourself.”

“I said it’s okay,” he repeats and she spins around, quickly now, to face him.

“I don’t want you to die, you _are_ dying,” she says raising her voice. “You’re killing yourself and you don’t even care enough to _try_. You don’t care about Tracy. You don’t care about Rebecca. You certainly don’t care about me outside of convincing the general public that I somehow owe you my forgiveness. And if _you_ don’t care, Warren, then why should I?

“I don’t _want_ you to die, that would make me too much _your_ daughter. I just don’t _care_ if you die and I am _exhausted_ with asking myself if that makes me a bad person or not.”

“You’re not a bad person, Myka--”

“Spare me, Warren,” Myka laughs, shaking her head, wiping away tears. “Forgive me if I don’t find your opinion on whether or not I am a bad person to be worth anything.”

“I’m sorry--”

“You don’t even know what a real apology sounds like. Just saying that your sorry isn’t going to fix _everything_ ,” Myka sighs. She lowers her head again, turning away from her father, exasperated. She breathes in and out. She swallows to rid her voice of sadness. She says, angrily, “I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Coming to see you. Expecting you to change. I don’t know what you want me--”

“I like seeing you,” he says softly, “I like seeing you this passionate about anything.”

“This is anger,” Myka says turning a teary-eyed glare on him, “Warren. Not passion. Pissed off. I am so pissed off at you and I have taken absolutely every chance I possibly can to let you know that.”

“You have every right to be pissed off at me. I deserve to hear everything you have to say. Take every chance you have to say it.”

Myka is laughing again, shaking her head, saying, “What a martyr you are, Dad,” as she tilts her head back and closes her eyes. When he doesn’t say anything, she opens her eyes and turns back toward him. His smile is small now. The look he’s giving her looks almost like admiration or… pride.

“Every now and then, you slip and call me _dad_.”

“A martyr and a narcissist,” Myka adds nonplussed.

“I know you think I’m gloating but it actually makes me regret so many things,” he continues.

“My birth,” Myka supplies quietly, arms crossed, looking away again.

“ _Drinking_ ,” he corrects, with little protest, “to fix all of the things about my life that I always thought were problems. Things I saw as problems that actually turned out to be blessings. _Miracles_  even.”

When she glances up, he is looking right at her.

Myka doesn’t say a word. She turns away again.

“I really fucked up, in the time I was given on this earth. I really fucked up with you and your sister… if I could go back--”

“No shit,” she says under her breath.

He hears and it makes him laugh. He laughs and it sets him into a coughing fit from which he doesn’t easily recover.

Myka turns as he’s coughing and she’s regretting so much about this morning already, she’s dreading so much about what this means for the rest of her day. Why did she wake up so early? Why did she look at her phone, listen to that voicemail, let that voice get to her? And now she’s regretting her actions, the fact that she cares _just enough_ , as she’s pouring water from a nearby pitcher into a paper cup.

She takes the cup to her father and hands it to him, still coughing. This time he doesn’t touch her. He takes absolute care not to.

He lets her set the cup into the palm of his hand and he takes it from her carefully, grasping from the bottom, amidst his coughing fit. He sips the water and clears his throat. It takes some time but he recovers and holds that cup out. Myka grabs the pitcher and she pours more water into it, her father watching her as she does. She narrows her eyebrows to reinforce the illusion that she doesn’t actually care this much. That she doesn’t care at all.

It is just an illusion, that uncaring. She cares enough to be curious. She cares enough to want to see her father be a better father. To see if he is trying at all to be better. It hasn’t happened yet but she’s still holding out hope that it might. That one day he’ll say all of the right things and she’ll feel all of the right ways a daughter is supposed to feel about her father.

She just doesn’t want him to know that. She doesn’t want him to see that she too is trying. Waiting. _Hoping_.

But it is too late for that now. She knows it when he smiles softly at her and says, “Thank you.” She hums her acknowledgement of his thanks and returns the pitcher of water to a nearby tray.

When she turns back to her father, he has a large yellow envelope in his hands. She doesn’t know where it came from, where he has been keeping it this whole time, but he holds it out to her now. He doesn’t tell her to take it but gestures with a nod as he pushes the envelope toward her again.

When Myka doesn’t immediately take it, he says, “Keep these hidden, in a dry place. The bookstore safe, that’s in the office? Or give them to your mothers, perhaps?”

“What is it,” she asks this staring at that envelope as though it has the ability to knock her right over, “another manuscript?”

It’s just a dig for the sake of digging, that envelope is much too thin to be another book. Another book written by _her_ father.

“For you and Tracy, for later,” he says and with a gesture of his head to the side he adds, “for _after_.”

He doesn’t say after what but Myka’s thoughts fill in the blank. It is for after he dies. After his death. _After_ he is gone. The things he had promised her in his book. But she doesn’t want it, whatever it is. She tells him just as much.

“Whatever you’re trying to give me, I don’t want,” Myka says furrowing her brows, shaking her head slightly, “I don’t need anything from you.”

“You don’t really have a choice,” Warren tells her, “and it isn’t just for you. It’s for your sister and Claudia Donovan. I don’t suspect your mother and Jane can afford to put four young women through college or pay for five weddings on two primary school teacher salaries. This should help alleviate some of the expenses.”

“They’ve done fine thus far.”

“Take it, Myka, please. It's not for me, it's for them.”

But Myka is getting mad all over again. At the thought of her father dumping all of this responsibility onto her and using her family as incentive. At the thought of her father giving up on all of these things he so easily speaks of but has no desire to be a part of.

“You should want to live long enough to see Tracy get married. To walk her down the aisle.”

“I’m not going to live long enough to see Tracy get married. Or you, for that matter,” he tells her, finally dropping the envelope on the bed from sheer exhaustion, “that is the point of _this_. I’m trying to fix everything. I’m trying to do right by you girls and give you everything I couldn’t – that I _refused_ to give you when you were younger.”

Myka closes her eyes tight and warm tears begin to fall.

“I invested so much of my life in destroying yours, Myka,” he says again.

She doesn’t feel bad for him. Not for his guilt or his upset. Not with her anger and her sadness.

“Please allow me to repay you, all of you, with my death.”

***

When Myka sees Helena for the first time in a year, the woman is a blur in the distance through tears as Myka rushes by her. She is seated in the hall where Jeannie’s wedding ceremony is being held the next day, she is watching, but most certainly not participating in, the rehearsal.

“There she is,” Pete announces from the makeshift altar where the soon-to-be bride and groom stand facing one another. They are flanked - a word that always reminds Myka of Pete when they were kids, that usually makes her smile, that does nothing for her today - by friends and family on either side.

“Ophelia where have you…” her mother starts, she’s sat in the very front row beside Jean but she quiets immediately when their eyes meet and she sees Myka and all of her tears.

“Busted,” Kelly and Tracy say in unison.

Jeannie signs, with a concerned expression, “Are you okay?”

But they are quiet when Myka offers them nothing. When Myka, silent and wiping away tears, walks to her place in line with the rest of Jeannie’s bride’s maids. She is stood just behind Tracy, just in front of Kelly. Jeannie’s two best friends stand just behind the three of them.

Myka’s mother stands and approaches her and begins with, “I had no idea _this_ was going to be _that_ difficult for you--”

“What?” Myka looks up at her mother perplexed. She sees and finally registers Helena’s presence just over her mother’s shoulder, sat all the way in the back of the hall, watching her with an expression she doesn’t quite recognize. Helena is smiling softly, perhaps sadly. Her eyes are wide with something that looks a lot like hope but there is concern in the way she watches Myka, too.

Myka can see that Helena knows this isn’t about _her_. _Of course_ Helena, of all people, _knows_ that this isn’t about _her_. Helena is the “this” that Myka’s mother is talking about but difficult doesn’t even begin to account for half of what Myka is feeling about _that_. She’s only just seen Helena, she hasn’t had enough time to process that she’s really there.

“Dad’s in the hospital,” is all Myka adds to that interruption of whatever her mother is saying about whatever she _thinks_ is going on. And thankfully, for now, it is all she needs to say. Her mother seems almost relieved.

Jean pulls her hand through her own hair and nods. “Okay,” she says softly, “we’ll talk about this later. Is everything okay?” Myka just nods. “Okay,” her mother offers her a sympathetic smile and says, “I’m just… glad you’re okay.”

Jean returns to her seat and gestures for the rehearsal to continue, whispers something into Jane’s ear and Jane only nods in response. When Jane moves her eyes to Myka, Myka looks away.

“Okay, let's run through this one more time now that our bridal party is complete,” the wedding planner announces, her tone a touch accusatory, “queue the music please.”

Nobody says anything else about it to Myka for the duration of the rehearsal.

***

Myka isn’t actively trying to avoid Helena, it just works out that she doesn’t see her.

In all of their concern, her mother and Jane whisk her way from the wedding rehearsal before she ever has a chance to be confronted by Helena’s presence. They take her and all of her things upstairs and into their hotel room to talk.

They are sat around the table, just Jane, Jean, and Myka, with the contents of the envelope Myka had eventually allowed her father to give her. They both have on their reading glasses, they’re both lamenting the fact that they even need them, and they are looking over, examining, reading, and re-reading a stack of documents with wide eyes.

They ask Myka if she knows what her father has given her.

“More crap to read,” Myka says, opting for an attempt at humor to help ease her own mind.

“Everything,” is what Jean says just under her breath, still reading through the paperwork. She looks to Myka, her expression overwhelmed, when she clarifies, “He’s giving you everything that he has.”

Myka doesn’t want it. Whatever it is. She doesn’t need to be saddled with his problems. She has the bookstore and that is the one thing her father had in his possession that she never wants to let go of. Taking over the bookstore had been a sort of reclamation of her youth and she is satisfied with that.

She already has the answers to more questions than she ever thought to ask. She has her family and she has her distance from him.

She doesn’t need anything else.

“He can have it back,” Myka says.

“I don’t think you understand, Myka,” Jane adds, letting her hands fall with several other pieces of paper, to the table, “he’s named you as the sole beneficiary in his will,” she sets that paper on the table, “his life insurance, assuming they'll pay out,” she sets that paper on the table, “his estate,” more pages follow, “supplemental life insurance? Stocks in Charles’ company, a 401K he started thirty years ago. There are even some old bonds here from your grandparents that he has remarkably never touched…”

“The only thing he didn’t give you was power of attorney,” Jean’s eyes go wide and her eyebrows rise as she sets that particular document before Myka, “seems he’s bestowed that unto his brand new wife?” she points at the signature line toward the bottom.

Myka picks up the paper and reads the print that is just below that.

_Rebecca Maria Bering St. Clair_

“Signed and notarized,” Jane adds with a slight nod, “looks like your new step-mother has been moonlighting as a guardian angel.”

“You think this was her idea?” Jean asks.

“This has Rebecca written all over it,” Jane smiles, “ _literally_. She’s co-signed everything.”

Myka is still staring at that signature, at her last name taking up space amidst someone else’s. She is taking in a deep and steadying breath.

She doesn’t want it. However much it is. However little. She doesn’t want it and she doesn’t need it. All of it, everything, would be of more use to her in a fire. She’ll throw it into the furnace with her father when they cremate him or she’ll bury it in the ground with him when they lower his casket.

His money, to her, has about as much worth as the dirt and ashes he will soon become. The droppings of worms and beetles that will eventually take back the filth that is everything her father has always aspired to be.                

“These stocks alone could pay for Tracy’s college.”

Myka’s eyes move to her mother. She is exasperated. She is _emotional_.

“They could have paid for yours and he never said anything. You and your sister’s hospital bills. The bookstore. He never said…”

“I don’t want it,” Myka says aloud.

“Myka,” Jean sighs.

“I don’t think you really have a choice, kiddo,” Jane adds.

“I don’t want it,” Myka repeats.

“This is a _lot_ of money,” her mother argues, “not counting the worth of his estate, this is a lot of--.”

“You can have it,” Myka is dropping that paper, standing, pushing her chair hard and far away, “you can have all of it and pay off every bill, get Tracy and Claudia through college, get Pete out of the Army, buy a bigger house, a more reliable car. Do whatever you want with it. I don’t want anything to do with it.”

“Myka, honey,” Jean calls as Myka turns, she grabs her things from the entry hallway of the large hotel suite and heads straight for the door.

“I don’t _need_ it,” Myka calls behind her, she is fighting with the locks on the hotel room door. She is trying _not_ to cry. She is trying _not_ to be seen. She is trying not to be here at all. “Please, just let me go to my room to lie down and I’ll see everyone in the morning.”

***

“Forgot to get the key, huh?”

Myka looks up from where she sits, just outside of the hotel suite she’s sharing with Kelly and Pete and Tracy. She looks up at Pete who smiles wide and mischievously back down at her. He holds up the extra key card to their room and when she reaches up, he hands her the key then helps her stand.

He opens the door and let's her in, carries her duffle inside for her.

The hotel suite they’re in is large. Larger than the room where her mother and Jane are staying. Those two are sharing a bedroom, a kitchenette and a living area with a pullout couch for Claudia but Myka and Tracy and Pete and Kelly have two bedrooms to split between the four of them, a much larger living area with a large breakfast nook and an almost full sized kitchen that they won’t do anything with.

As if he’s reading her mind, Pete says, “I don’t know why the moms didn’t get the big kitchen when they’re the only ones who brought food to cook from home--”

Myka cuts him off with a huge hug that nearly knocks the wind out of him. He steps back to catch his balance before laughing and wrapping his arms around her, too.

“That bad already?” he asks.

“It isn’t Helena,” she says softly, burying her face into his shoulder.

“Your dad?” Myka sighs heavily, standing straight now and meeting Pete’s concerned gaze with curiosity, “Mom told me about the inheritance. I gotta say Mykes, of all the things you’ve run away from in your life, I never thought a million bucks would make the cut.”

“It’s not a million dollars,” Myka says rolling her eyes and relinquishing her hold on Pete. She grabs her bag and asks, “Which room is Tracy in?”

“You’re right, it’s not a million dollars,” Pete says, leaning against the breakfast bar that separates the kitchen from the living area, “it’s probably a couple million after you factor in your dad’s estate, with his book sales, his town house in the city, that bomb ass Mercedes I’ve seen him driving around in…”

Myka stands there staring at him quietly. Expectantly.

Pete points to the room on the left.

“Thank you,” she says annoyed and done with this day, she goes to put her things away.

“I think Trace has made other sleeping arrangements for tonight and tomorrow,” Pete calls after her.

The room is empty. And clean. Myka doesn’t see any of Tracy’s things. Any evidence that Tracy has been here at all.

“Kevin’s up?” she asks, loud enough for Pete to hear from the living area. But he isn’t there anymore. He’s much closer than that now.

“Yep,” he answers from the doorway. Myka turns startled, she faces him now. She sighs and lets her bag fall at the foot of the bed then turns to sit down on it.

“More bed for me, I guess,” she says softly, kicking off her shoes. Pete crosses his arms and raises his brows, as if in wait.

“More bed for you and… H.G.?” he asks when Myka doesn’t offer anything more than that.

“No,” Myka says confidently but she is laughing softly and, giving up on this quiet war she has waged against Helena’s return home, she asks Pete, “How _is_ Helena?”

“All right,” he nods, “a lot better when she saw Moms. She loves them, you know. They love _her_.”

“I’m glad,” Myka says softly, “she might as well be theirs.”

“She _is_ theirs,” Pete corrects, entering the room and sitting on the bed beside Myka, “as much as Claudia is theirs, Helena is, too.”

“I never want to take them away from her.”

“I know,” Pete smirks, “So about this meeting you had with my mom and yours--”

“I don’t want the money,” Myka interrupts.

Pete smirks, arching a brow. He wraps an arm around Myka’s shoulder, pulls her closer and says, “Mom said you told them to get me out of the Army.” Myka lowers her head.

“It’s frustrating to me that there can be no secrets in this family,” she says softly.

“Some people would call that _great communication_ ,” Pete offers with a coy smile.

Myka gets it, she knows what he’s implying. Because she can't have or want to have it both ways. Secrets and great communication. Tell-alls and no communication. But where the mothers sometimes say too much, Helena doesn’t say much at all. And all that Myka wants, all she’s really asking for in this life of hers is some balance and a little consideration. For everyone to know the difference between when something necessitates telling and when something should not be told at all.

“I don’t care about the money,” Myka says softly, her eyes move slowly to Pete as she settles further into his hold, “I just want everyone to be together. I just want everyone to be happy and healthy and, for once, not have to worry about bills and tuition and whether or not it makes financial sense to fight to keep Claudia a part of this family or give her completely up to her brother. I don’t want the money but if it will ease the burden… if we absolutely need it...”

“At this point, needing it is the easiest part of all of this. Taking it is a different story altogether because I’m not so sure I’d want it either,” Pete sighs, tightening his hold, “considering the source.”

“Rebecca and my dad are married,” Myka adds.

“I heard that, too.”

Myka shakes her head and says, “I’m going to take a nap.”

“Good idea,” Pete says, “we’re all apparently going out tonight. I don’t know if Helena’s going but if you’re up for it, you should join us or, you know, just stay here. By yourself. Alone.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing but it’s actually everything I want and more,” Myka laughs softly, sitting straight again. “I don’t know if I’m ready to face Helena. I can’t even convince myself that she’s actually here. I saw her and I still can’t believe it’s her.”

“She cut her hair,” Pete points out, “ _short_.”

“I know,” Myka says, laughing softly at herself because she definitely noticed, “I _saw_.”

Pete sighs heavily and stands, moves to exit the room but turns back when he reaches the door and says, “I know it’s a lot to ask, Mykes, but I say this echoing words you once told me, to help me open up. You have come this far, you are alive and you are,” he taps the top of his head to indicate that dip in Myka’s skull, “relatively unscarred,” his smile grows for only a moment, her smile grows along with his. “But you both still have a lot to work through. Acknowledging that isn’t a betrayal of all the things you have been through. I think talking would be good for you,” he nods, “both of you.”

He doesn’t give her the opportunity to respond. He tells her to rest up because she’s going to need it. For this wedding. For her father. For everything else the one month left in this year decides to throw at her.

It is December and the year is almost over but even Myka is beginning to understand that she shouldn’t let her guard completely down.

Even Myka knows _now_ that would be a foolish thing to do.

***

Sam is here.

Sam's here in her hotel room because it’s the night before the wedding and everyone has gone out, including Helena, so Myka has opted to stay in. Allison isn’t here just yet and she won’t be here until tomorrow. So Sam is here to keep Myka company and she doesn’t mind that he’s the one interrupting her seclusion. She doesn’t mind at all that he’s the one who decides to stay.

He’s brought a bottle of wine because he just turned twenty-one. He’s got two wine glasses because the girl at the front desk of the hotel thought he was cute enough to offer them to him (that’s what Myka tells him anyway). And he’s smiling and Myka doesn’t know why.

She hasn’t quite figured that smile out yet.

But Sam is here. Sam is in her hotel room and they are sat on the couch in the living area, laughing, drinking cheap wine, talking about nothing after having caught up on _everything_. And that is where they are, side-by-side, when Kelly returns with Tracy. When Helena returns with them both.

Helena doesn’t come inside. Myka sees her from where she’s sitting with Sam. She sees Helena through the doorway when Kelly and Tracy enter and she sees that Helena sees her, too. She sees that Helena sees Sam and she sees Helena’s expression immediately change from something to something else. From something that looks like happiness but maybe it’s coping, into something that looks like sadness but maybe it’s anger.

Jealousy?

Myka doesn’t truly believe that. Not for one second.

Whatever it is, this new face Helena makes, Myka sees it and she also hears when Kelly invites her inside, when Kelly all but begs for her to come inside. She hears Helena’s voice say, “No, it’s all right. I’m still recovering from the flight, I should get some sleep.” She hears when Kelly whispers like thunder, “Just for a little while. You can say hello. She _wants_ to see you.”

She hears when Tracy, rolling her eyes and waving a hand, says, “If she doesn’t want to come inside, she doesn’t have to come inside.” She sounds just like their mother when she says it.

She hears when Kelly admonishes Helena by saying, “You have to tell her _eventually_ so that she won’t hate you _forever_.” She also hears that Kelly is very intoxicated, that Helena is only here now because Tracy needed assistance getting her upstairs, and that they'd lost the boys somewhere in the hotel lobby and they were about to lose Helena, too.

Helena tells Kelly, “Darling, please take your drunk arse to bed,” and she tells Tracy, “please see to it that her drunk arse gets to bed.”

Myka cringes when Helena says _arse_. It reminds her of Maggie. She hates that Helena is _saying_ the word arse. It reminds her that Helena’s been away for far too long and in a place that is much too far away from her and much too close to _Magdalena_.

Tracy tells Helena, “I’ve got her,” and also, “goodnight, H. See’ya tomorrow.”

Tracy drags Kelly into the room, even as Kelly is calling out, “I love you, I miss you already!”

She sees Helena when Helena sees her. She sees the soft sad smile that Helena offers. She sees Helena turn and walk away.

Tracy closes the door. She pulls Kelly down the hallway, further into the hotel suite, into the living room.

“Sam!” Kelly hollers, falling beside him on the couch and giving him a tight hug.

She doesn’t immediately let go.

“I’m frightened,” Sam says, holding completely still.

“I’m frightened for you,” Myka says, arching a brow.

“You should be,” Tracy smirks.

***

Kelly is in Myka’s room, pushing at her as she sleeps, waking her up.

“What?” Myka is half asleep when she asks this, when Kelly falls onto her bed beside her and into the pillow beside hers, moaning.

“I need drugs,” she groans.

“I only have Ibuprofen,” Myka tells her, one eye open, still not entirely awake.

“I need that,” Kelly says, “I can’t be hungover tomorrow. Jeannie will be pissed and if she’s pissed, Pete will be pissed and if Pete’s pissed, Jane will be pissed and if Jane’s pissed--”

“You do know that it is,” Myka lifts her wrist to check her watch, the glow-in-the-dark hands are telling her it’s either much too late or much too early for conversation, “three o’clock in the morning, right?”

“ _Myka_!” she groans, dragging every syllable and vowel that she can possibly drag out for effect.

“Please brush your teeth,” Myka says, throwing the blankets of the bed off of her. Kelly breathes intentionally into her face as Myka pulls herself further out of that bed. She throws the covers over Kelly and the older girl rolls onto her back, closes her eyes. “Oh no, it’s no trouble, your majesty. Make yourself comfortable while I retrieve your pain killers.”

“Thank you, peasant,” Kelly says softly, moving her arms up, placing her hands below her head, and sighing her relief, “I drank a lot of water, I think I’ll be okay but my head…”

Myka is digging through the side pocket of her duffle bag for the bottle of ibuprofen. She moves to her bathroom to retrieve a glass, to fill it with water from the sink and bring it back to Kelly, half asleep in her bed.

Tracy wasn’t shy about the fact she wasn’t staying here tonight or tomorrow night. She’d dropped Kelly off and stayed long enough to make sure she’d stayed in bed. She left immediately after that, saying goodbye and goodnight with a suggestive wink at Myka and Sam as they’d sat, still talking (and definitely not doing anything to justify that wink) in the living room.

“Here,” Myka says, handing the glass and pills to Kelly. When she takes them, Myka falls immediately back into bed. Not walking around to her side of the bed but climbing directly over Kelly, who protests only momentarily before she swallows back those pills, drinks several gulps of water.

Myka lies back down, turned away from Kelly, and pulls the covers back over her. Kelly lies back down behind her. She makes zero attempts to move. Myka sighs but she doesn’t bother fighting it. If Kelly wants to stay, she will stay. If Kelly wants to go, she will go.

She doesn’t go.

“Are you going to talk to Helena?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” Myka answers quietly, opening one eye to darkness.

“She thinks you hate her,” Kelly says softly.

“Maybe I do,” Myka sighs.

Kelly is quiet. For a very long time. She is so quiet that Myka thinks she’s finally passed out. But seconds later something hits her back and Myka realizes that hit is from Kelly’s hand. She is still waiting for Myka to say something else. _Anything_ else.

“I don’t hate her,” Myka confesses, “but I don’t want this weekend to be about her… or us. Because it isn’t. It’s about Jeannie Junior. The very least we can do is give Jeannie this weekend.”

“She leaves Monday afternoon,” Kelly says and when she says it, she sounds more sober than she has the whole night. She sounds sober and lucid and like she knows exactly what she’s talking about. Like she knows what she’s saying and that what she’s saying is the absolute right thing to say. “So you should probably try to give at least _some_ of this weekend to Helena.”

Myka is quiet.

“You’ve only got one night.”

Myka closes her eye again, pulling the covers further around her.

“Helena and I,” she says softly, “we don’t do countdowns.”

***

Myka doesn’t go to breakfast, so she doesn’t see Helena. Helena doesn’t come to Jeannie’s hotel room, where all of her bridesmaids are being prepped, so she doesn’t see her there either.

At noon, Helena texts her:

**Are we going to avoid each other all weekend?**

Myka is halfway through her second mimosa of the day when she responds:

**just like old times**

***

“You look…”

Myka waits.

She waits and she watches as Helena’s eyes are on her, all over her, traveling from the very top of her to the very bottom.

Helena’s eyes are at first on hers, and she looks exasperated. She looks almost as though she cannot breathe at all. But then her eyes are falling. They are on Myka’s hair, curls falling over bare shoulders. They are on Myka’s chest, where the dress she wears – and wears with much reluctance – barely contains cleavage that she never knew she had. Helena’s eyes fall past Myka's breasts in this dress, they are falling to her hips and even lower than that.

Helena’s eyes are on Myka all the way down her legs, past her knees and to her shoes and when they see what is there, when they see what she wears, Helena smiles. She smiles softly, at first, then wider and her eyes are quickly rising again.

Brown eyes rise to Myka’s and she’s still smiling and her brow, the right one, arches slightly. It is playful curiosity. It is a memory recalled from so many years ago. It is a silent tease.

“For comfort,” Myka’s smile is small, she’s crossing one sneakered foot behind the other, “and compromise,” she adds softly.

Myka had wanted to wear a tux, even a pants suit. She had wanted to dress like Pete and all the other guys, like all the rest of Jules’ groomsmen. But Jeannie begged, she actually begged Myka to wear a dress. She begged her to wear heels, too, but that was never going to happen. They’d only compromised on the dress and white Converse after Jane had painted a beautifully graphic image of Myka tripping and falling over herself as she attempted to walk an entire wedding hall in heels.

A type of shoe she’d never worn before and would never master in under a year.

“ _Breathless_ ,” Helena says finally, quietly completing her sentence.

Myka almost doesn’t hear it. She wants to ask Helena to say it again because she isn’t sure. But Helena is blinking rapidly and as she blinks, tears fall from her eyes. They are on her cheeks and Myka is biting down hard on her bottom lip, she is balling her hand into a fist. She is doing everything within her power not to reach out and wipe those tears away. Not to press her lips to those cheeks and kiss away all of Helena’s sadness. The sadness that floods her voice when she whispers to Myka, “You take all of my breath away.”

It's unbearably cheesy, Myka has decided, but it's also Helena.

They are still and they are watching one another in silence for what could be an eternity then a toilet flushes somewhere behind Myka and Helena’s attention is gone, the moment right along with it.

Claudia emerges from a bathroom stall. She is walking toward them, looking down at her dress, struggling with a button and asking, “Why do I have to wear this?” when she looks up and sees Helena. Claudia’s smile, when she greets Helena, is brighter than Myka has seen it in a while. She is happier now than she has been in months and Myka only wishes she’d been there that first day, when Claudia first saw Helena. She wishes she hadn’t missed that for all of the absolute nothing she’d been doing at home.

Claudia’s smile grows when Helena gestures for her to come closer, when Helena bends to fix her dress. She kisses Claudia’s forehead when she’s done, she tells her, “Hands now,” nodding toward the row of sinks near the entry of the restroom and Claudia goes without question.

Myka doesn’t know what to say.

She doesn’t have any more words for this moment. She doesn’t have anything else to offer Helena. Nothing, at least, that would sound intelligent. Nothing at all that Helena needs to hear. Because telling Helena she looks beautiful with her hair cut lower than she can ever remember seeing it isn’t the best option even if it is the only one she's been able to think of. And telling Helena she still loves her, that she still _needs_ her, probably wouldn’t be wise either.

Especially now, at a point in her life when she’s not exactly certain that’s true. When she has found herself finding it harder and harder to differentiate between things she actually feels for people and emotional expectations.

Claudia fills the silence by telling Helena she knows she’s only here for this weekend but she wishes she were staying permanently. Claudia fills the silence while looking at Myka in the mirror of the public restroom by saying, out loud to Helena, “ _Everybody_ misses you.” Claudia fills the silence with running water, an automated paper towel dispenser, and a far less than innocent inquiry into Helena’s post-wedding plans.

“I don’t know,” Helena says with a gentle shrug, smiling in Claudia’s direction, then looking to Myka, “I’ll probably just… go to my room, go to bed.”

More silence lingers between them as they hover closer than they’ve been in a year and more than anything else in this world, Myka wants to reach out and touch her. Myka wants to lean into that girl and hold her. Myka wants her hands on Helena, she wants her arms around her and, at the very same time, she wants to run screaming, away from this room.

Claudia, stood just ber seen them, says below her breath, “Ouch,” and also, “Myka’s probably doing that, too. Maybe you guys can be sad and alone together--”

“We should probably head out,” Myka interjects, her hands reaching for Claudia’s shoulders to stop her from reaching to cover Claudia's mouth, “ _Claudia_ , we’re going to be late and then we’ll be dead because Jane is going to kill us both.”

Claudia rolls her eyes.

“Oh right,” Helena says moving out of their way as Myka leads Claudia to the door, “of course. Off you two go.”

“See’ya soon, H.G.” Claudia beams as Myka pushes her on and through the door.

“See you soon, love,” Helena smiles as they go.

Her words are meant for Claudia. But she is looking right at Myka.

***

Myka is making a promise to herself as Jules’ friend Bennie, with his arm snaked through hers, tugs her down the aisle to what could easily be her very end.

Myka is promising that she will never again agree to be a bridesmaid. That she will never again agree to participate in any wedding wherein she has to wear a dress. Wherein she also has to lock arms with a boy she doesn’t really know and almost certainly doesn’t like.

Myka is also promising to never get married.

She’s looking around at everything, at everyone, and it’s all so overwhelming. It is all too much for her to bother with. She’s thinking about how stressed out the mothers had been with timelines and deadlines and hard to find _everything_. She’s thinking about the astronomical costs, even with financial help from Jules’ side of the family, even with the _generousness_ of Helena’s father. She’s thinking about how passive Jeannie has been in tolerating her other friends ridiculous requests, how intolerable Jeannie has been in her occasional demands upon her family.

She is looking down at her feet, at the shoes she wears, and smiling as she thinks about all of these things.

She looks up and she sees Sam.

She sees Sam with his long hair falling in his face as always and all she wants to do is reach up and tuck that hair behind his ear. She wants to whisper in his ear, “Cut your hair,” and this time, when she says it, she wants to be close enough to kiss it. She smiles at the way he smiles at her, the way his cheeks still redden when he looks at her, and the look he gives her when he sees the shoes she wears. She glares playfully back at him. She sticks her tongue out at him and he is stifling laughter, she is laughing softly at him, too.

She sees Allison standing just beside him, moving her hand around his arm. It throws him, catches his attention. His smile is gone when he looks almost confused back at Allison but he doesn’t move away from that touch. He doesn’t ask her to let go.

Allison is glaring at Myka for whatever reason she has told herself she needs to glare at Myka. But it’s fine, Myka thinks, because even if she’s interested in Sam she knows she shouldn’t be. She knows it isn’t her place. She knows this because she’s been telling it to herself for a year or more. She’s been avoiding those feelings for so long that acknowledging them now would just be… hypocrisy? No.

The word she’s looking for is _drama_.

Myka smiles wide at Allison. As much as she dislikes that girl for distracting Sam, she appreciates that girl for keeping Sam distracted. The last thing Sam needs is to be loved by Myka. The last thing Myka wants is to drag Sam into the catastrophe that is her love life. Her inability to just _love_ life.

The absolute last thing that either of them needs is a reason to be together.

She sees Helena.

Helena is standing just one row ahead of Sam and when their eyes meet, all that Myka hears is the sound of Helena’s voice saying, “ _Breathless_.” All that Myka sees is Helena on New Years Eve at the end of 2002, at what should have been the end of their relationship. Helena is in a dark blue dress, they are walking through the cold, Myka is wrapping her blazer around freezing cold arms, pulling a freezing cold body into her. Kissing a freezing cold cheek before moving on to freezing cold lips.

Helena is wearing that dress that Myka loves so much. That Myka _used_ to love so much but now all she sees, when she sees Helena in that dress, is Liam’s hand against her back, Liam leaning in and whispering into her ear. All she can imagine is Liam’s hand on Helena’s exposed leg, moving over and up her bare thigh. Pushing that dress slowly away. Touching _her_ Helena everywhere he shouldn’t be. Everywhere Helena _let_ him touch her.

She probably still lets him touch her.

It happened at least once, Myka tells herself, trying desperately to reignite her disdain for Helena. She might have lied about how long it went on, she might have intentionally omitted that from all of their conversations, but it happened at least once without her knowing and that it happened at all is enough for Myka.

She closes her eyes tight, she doesn’t open them again until she is past Helena, until they have reached the altar and Bennie is letting go of her arm. Myka moves into place behind Tracy. Kelly is moving into place just behind her, Pete taking his place behind Bennie and Jules’ younger brother. Once all of them are exactly where they need to be with Claudia and Todd bringing up the rear, the music changes.

The bridal march begins.

***

Loving Sam is Myka’s happy place because Sam is _safe_. Sam isn’t Helena. Sam isn’t hers. And Sam isn’t trying to be. Not anymore.

When Myka thinks about Sam, about the way she feels about him, it isn’t overwhelming. Her love isn’t _in love_ , it is just love enough to want to be near him, to want to spend time with him, go on walks and runs with him, have dinner with him, tease him about his new girlfriend without wanting to be her. When Myka thinks about Sam, she doesn’t feel like she’s drowning. They are both just floating above the surface in a crystal clear lake. Calm and serene and warmed by the sun.

There are no hesitations about honesty, no secrets that need to be kept. There are no doubts, no shared history of abuse to overcome. No _miscommunication_.

They have their time apart. They have moments where they just don’t agree, moments when Myka lets absolutely everything that is happening get to her and get the best of her but Sam isn’t Helena. He doesn’t run away and his solution for helping her isn’t, couldn’t possibly be at this point in their lives, to just have sex and forget that it ever happened.

Sam tells her he’s giving her space and then he waits. But he is always right where he says he’ll be. He is always within reach when she is finally ready to talk. He doesn’t ignore her text messages or phone calls. He doesn’t pretend like everything is fine.

Sam is safe. She isn’t drowning. There are no unsuspecting tidal waves.

When Jeannie comes walking down the aisle, led to the altar by her mother, Myka loses herself to a fantasy but it isn’t herself she imagines wearing that dress. It isn’t Sam waiting for her at the end of that walk.

That would be too easy.

It is Helena walking the aisle, arm-in-arm with her generous father giving her away. It is Myka standing at the altar, waiting patiently for her bride.

They’re happy and home, standing on the shore of _their_ lake. No one is sinking or drowning. And everyone in attendance is wearing white tennis shoes.

But it is just a fantasy, that happiness, their home, standing together. Not sinking or drowning.

It is nothing more than wishful thinking and Myka thinks about it often.

***

Myka sees Helena.

Helena is watching her.

 _She_ has been watching Helena.

When Myka becomes cognitive of their eyes on each other, Helena smiles softly. Brows furrowed, still sad. She lifts her hand to her cheek, four fingers fanned apart as she runs her index finger slowly down the length of her cheek.

Myka blinks at that gesture and warm tears fall. Moisture stings in her eyes.

She takes in a deep breath and looks away from Helena.

Someone in the front row holds a tissue box out to her. She takes a single tissue and wipes those tears from her face. They’ll think she’s crying over the bride and the groom and that’s perfectly fine with her. Only Helena, still watching her, knows exactly why she’s crying because Helena, when Myka looks back at her, is suddenly crying, too.

Kelly is behind her, leaning forward, whispering into Myka’s ear.

“Sap.”

***

Helena won’t look at her now.

Myka is sat with the bridal party at dinner in the reception hall and Helena is sat with Myka’s family. Her mother and Jane, Claudia and Todd, Sam, Allison, Kevin and Kurt. Helena is sat between Claudia and Jane, she is speaking, only occasionally, to either of them. Sam is two seats away from her but Helena doesn’t say much of anything at all to him through the bulk of dinner.

Come dessert, they shake hands. Claudia, of all people, is introducing Helena to Sam and then Jane is introducing Helena to Kurt and Todd and Allison, too. Sam makes a knowing gesture with his hand when he talks to Helena. Myka can practically hear him saying, “I’ve heard so much about you.” She can practically hear Helena saying, “Myka never mentioned you at all.”

Kelly elbows her and says, “ _Relax_.”

“I am relaxed,” Myka quips.

“Right,” Kelly laughs, “I can practically see the steam coming out of your ears and hear your teeth grinding themselves to bits but you’re definitely relaxed,” she rolls her eyes and says, “ _cabrona_ ” as she turns away.

Myka sighs, “Why did she sit them at the same table?”

“I don’t think Junior knows or cares how you feel about Sam,” Kelly smiles, “who has practically been adopted into this family, same as Helena and me.”

Myka lets out a heavy sigh.

“This is really bothering you, isn’t it?” Kelly laughs softly, “Are you worried they’re going to hook up? He has a girlfriend.”

“They’re not oFrisian,” Myka corrects, “I just call her that because he hates it so much.”

“Whatever they are, it doesn’t matter,” Kelly says, “he’s here with her and we all know Sam is too good-natured for Helena anyway. So the real question here is why don’t you want them talking to each other?”

Myka doesn’t answer that question because she doesn’t know the answer.

She lowers her head and continues poking her fork into a slice of wedding cake.

***

“Less time sulking,” Jeannie says and signs while leaning on the table across from where Myka still sits. The lights are low, the food is gone, the drinks are being served, and the music is playing loud, “more time dancing.”

She is whisked away in a twirl of laughter by Jules who winks at Myka as he pulls Jeannie back out and onto the dance floor.

Myka glares at him as they go then turns her glare back to where Helena dances with Bennie at the opposite end of the banquet hall.

Helena still won’t look at her. No matter how hard Myka stares.

***

Sam sets a drink down in front of her, takes the seat beside hers.

“Thanks,” Myka says softly, pulling that drink closer.

“Hard to watch?” he asks, gesturing across the dance floor at Helena, still dancing. Still with Bennie but now with everyone else, too. Kelly and Pete, Tracy and Kevin. Jeannie and Jules and Claudia and Todd. Allison is there also but she is keeping a close eye on Sam and where he sits with Myka.

Myka smiles wide and waves across the hall at her.

“You’re taunting her,” Sam accuses softly, though smiling.

“I would never do that, Sam,” Myka says, still waving and now sipping on her drink. Sam laughs and she smiles at that laughter, at the way he lowers his head and all of his hair falls back into his face.

She doesn’t care much about what Allison thinks of it when she does it, and she knows that girl is still watching, so Myka reaches, when Sam looks back up at her, and she moves his hair out of his face. When he stills, she slows her movements. She tucks loose hairs behind his ear.

The tips of her fingers against the back of his ear remind her too much of Helena. Make her feel too much like she has felt with Helena. And Sam… he stills, he slows his breathing. He just looks right back at her. Eyebrow quirking slightly, smile falling into a curious smirk.

When too much time has passed between that touch and Sam breathing normally again, she lowers her hand and turns away from him. She takes another sip of her drink and clears her throat.

“I see you met Helena,” she says, changing the topic.

“Yeah,” Sam says softly. Myka is opting to ignore how exasperated he sounds. He coughs and nods when she looks back at him and he says, “Yes,” more clearly and shrugs. “I like her. I mean, I can see why you love her. She’s… beautiful.”

Myka arches a brow at Sam.

“I mean that in a very platonic sort of way,” Sam clarifies.

“She’s attractive, you’re just not attracted to her,” Myka supplies.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll go with that,” Sam shrugs again and this time, when Myka arches her brow at him, he starts laughing, “I’m just messing with you, Bunny.” She glares at him now for using that _name_ but the longer he smiles, the more he laughs, the softer her glare gets.

Several stray hairs escape their perch behind his ear and fall back in front of his face.

She takes a long sip of that drink and averts her eyes to the dance floor to where all of her friends, sisters, one ex-girlfriend, and _Allison_ are now dancing in a circle.

“You should come dance.”

She shakes her head, “Not with Helena there.”

“Are you going to at least _try_ to talk to her?”

Myka shakes her head again, turning her attention back to Sam, “If she has something to say to me, she knows where to find me.”

“Okay, well,” Sam sighs, “that sounds a little childish but I guess you have a point since she hasn’t approached you either.” He sits back in that chair beside Myka and takes a sip of his own drink.

“What are you doing?” Myka asks.

“Keeping you company so you don’t look so miserable anymore,” he says.

“No, Sam,” Myka says sitting up, lightly back-handing him, “you should be out there having fun with your girlfriend.”

Sam side-eyes her.

“ _Allison_ ,” Myka corrects cautiously, having obviously hit a nerve.

“ _You_ should be out there having fun with your family on your sister’s wedding day.”

“She's not actually my sister,” Myka says.

“Kurt isn't actually my cousin,” Sam counters.

“What?”

“Our parents aren’t siblings, they were just really good friends. That doesn’t make him any less of a family member. Doesn’t mean we haven’t basically been brothers our entire lives.”

“How can you just drop a bomb on me like that when I’m in such a vulnerable state,” Myka teases with a puff of laughter.

“A night like this, Bering, when all your friends and family are together, having the time of their lives and not worried about the world? It doesn’t last forever. And, with any luck, it’ll be the only wedding night Jeannie ever has. You should enjoy it.”

  
“I know, I know, I’m just… not emotionally prepared for this,” Myka says gesturing across the room to where Helena still dances.

“Do you want to know one of the greatest things about attending a wedding for someone else?”

“What’s that?” Myka asks.

“It isn’t about you.”

“Ouch,” Myka says grinning now, “right in my pride.” She punches him in his arm softly. “I guess it is a little pathetic to sit here and mope at Jeannie’s party.” Myka throws her head back and groans at herself, “Especially after I told Kelly I didn’t want to make this night about _us_.”

“It’s a lot pathetic,” Sam says softly with a smile that is almost a grimace, “you can always be mad at your own wedding. Which, let’s be honest, if it’s to Helena? There’s a good chance of that happening.”

“I’m never getting married. Even if I lose enough of my mind to agree to marriage, it won’t be to _Helena_ ,” Myka laughs, not because it’s funny but because she’s trying hard to convince herself that this sentiment is true. She finishes off her cocktail, stands and says, “Come with me to get another drink and then I’ll think about dancing with you, Martino.”

“Or you can stay,” Sam says, standing with her, his tone changing to one less certain, “yeah, you might… want to stay… here, for a little bit.”

“All this time you spent trying to guilt trip me out of my seat and now you want me to stay?”

“I don’t want you to but I think… _she_ might?”

Sam gestures to where Myka isn’t looking but as she’s turning, she hears Helena’s voice call her name.

“Myka,” comes out sounding like it has sounded from that girl for thirteen months and counting. Beautiful and regretful. Asking for something neither of them is emotionally prepared to offer.

Myka is face-to-face with her now, though Helena is lowering her head and busying her hands with the fabric of her dress before lifting her eyes to Myka’s once more.

“Can we talk?”

 _Can_ they talk?

 _Should_ they talk?

“I’ll stay,” Myka eventually tells Sam, just above a whisper.

“Yeah,” Sam laughs softly, “I thought you might.”

***

“You’ve been avoiding me,” Helena says just above a whisper, her tone is almost teasing.

They are sat facing one another, not close enough to touch. Not so far away that Helena couldn’t touch her if she wanted to.

“You seemed busy,” Myka responds, her eyes giving away the underlying accusation when she looks across the hall at Bennie who dances with Allison now, even as Sam rejoins them on the dance floor.

Helena follows Myka’s gaze and she smiles when she sees what and _who_ Myka is referring to. When she looks back at Myka, that smile is mischievous, almost taunting. She says, still quietly, “I find it… _intriguing_ that I can fly thousands of miles and run into someone from my country, from my _city_ , who knows some of the same people that I know.”

“Does he now?” Myka asks this with complete disinterest.

“Benedict is a nice boy with an unfortunate name,” Helena says, smile softening. She bites down on her lip, “But this isn’t about him, is it? I’ve only just met him--”

“You weren’t exactly in any rush to talk to me,” Myka interrupts before Helena can continue with any more talk of the boy she doesn’t care to know, much less talk about, “I’ve been here. I was here last night. You _saw_ me.”

“I didn’t think you wanted to talk. The way you looked at me…”

“As always, Helena, you made an assumption about the way I feel,” Myka says resolutely, “about how I _might_ feel about something before ever giving me the chance to react to it.”

“I made the assumption because I know you, Myka. You have reacted enough in the past for me to…” she stops herself from speaking, heaves out a sigh and opts for a less accusing approach. “You were with your friend,” she says this lowering her head and speaks even more softly when she adds, “Samuel? I didn’t want to interrupt your evening together. I thought you two might have been--”

“It’s Sam,” Myka interjects.

Helena looks up at her again.

“His name is Sam. _Just_ Sam.”

In that moment, something seems to turn inside of Helena. Myka can see the change in her eyes, the way she straightens herself a bit. How she plants her feet firmly on the ground. She leans in, just a little bit but her expression doesn’t turn cold or angry, it is just Helena being Helena. Giving the illusion of confidence where she has none to speak of.

“This is about your father’s book,” and it isn’t merely a suggestion. She knows that this is about the book. She knows that they haven’t talked in months and the last time they talked, it was about the book. The last time they talked, the current stage of Myka’s life had just been on the cusp of falling apart all around the release of that goddamned book.

Myka says, echoing Helena’s words, “ _There are things you won’t know about me until you read the book_.”

“That memory of yours,” Helena sighs, abandoning her faux confidence in exchange for something better suited to her incredulity. Her, what Myka thinks is beginning to look a lot like, entitlement.

Myka doesn’t stop. She tells her, “You have loved me, fallen in love with me, and made love _to_ me, Helena,” and _this_ quote gets Helena’s full attention. It immediately brings back those furrowed brows and sad eyes and everything else about this woman that Myka had vowed to leave far behind one year ago, “and for all of your fears of losing me, you only push me further away. For all of your fears of being too old for me, you still treat me like a child.”

“Myka…”

“Fragile. Broken,” Myka continues, never breaking eye contact, “unable to care for myself. Unable to care for you.” Myka shakes her head. “You have no trust in me. You don’t think me capable of loving you like an adult. You don’t value my opinion of anything. You talk down to me when I have genuine concerns. You look at me and you still see a stupid child with a foolish crush.”

“I don’t see that at all,” Helena whispers, “I never intended to…” she moves her hands toward Myka but she abandons that reach halfway there. She busies her hands in her lap instead. “I had no idea you felt… all of that.”

Myka goes on getting everything out of her mind and off of her chest.

“All I want to do is love you, Helena. I want to love you like Pete loves Kelly,” Myka is exasperated when she says this, when she points to where Pete dances with Kelly wrapped securely in his arms, “like Kevin loves Tracy, like Jane loves mom, and like Jules…” Myka says with another shake of her head, “even that _douchebag_ Jules is allowed to love Jeannie. They are all equals to each other, not one greater than the other. Not one less trusting, less trustworthy. And they are all _together_ even when they are not. They ake it look so easy and yet we can't... I just…”

Myka pauses and lowers her head into her hands, covering her eyes and running her hands up, through her hair. She brings them together again, as if in a prayer, in front of her lips.

Maybe she should pray. Maybe that’s what is _wrong_ with her whole life.

She quickly abandons that pose.

“That’s all I have ever wanted to do. And you won’t let me, Helena, not without question. Not without wondering who else loves you, when I’ll ever see you again, whether or not you’re endangering yourself to keep things from me. To protect me? Everything just has to be _so_ difficult.

“So, I’ve come to a conclusion, Helena, to make this so much easier for both of us,” she lowers her hands now, into her lap, and she shrugs, looking entirely away from Helena, lowering her head, too, “it’s taken me a year to get here but I've come to realize the only question we should be asking each other is why should we even try?”

Helena is silent.

Myka sits back in her chair and turns further away from Helena, lowering her head into her hands.

“I’m sorry,” Helena says softly.

“No, Helena,” Myka says, puffing out another soft laugh.

“I’m sorry, Myka. I’ve said it a million times and I don’t know how many more times you want me to say it. How many different ways--”

“I don’t want you to say it at all,” Myka shakes her head, “I’m done with sorry, Helena,” she sits straight and turns her head to Helena now, “what does it matter, at this point? We’re not together and we’re not getting back together. That’s the one thing in this relationship that I’ve done for myself. So what does it matter how many times or in how many ways you apologize to me?”

“I would think that answer obvious…”

“You say sorry like it’s supposed to mean something even when there is no meaning behind it. Why are you trying, if you don’t actually care? Why do we _need_ to be together?”

Myka is waiting for an answer. A genuine response to this question because she hasn’t been able to answer it in all of this time they’ve been apart. Before, she could have listed a million reasons starting with I love you, ending with you love me. But now? Now everything that is happening has outweighed all of the things that happened and she is exhausted from all of her efforts to keep everything balanced. She is tired and done and she doesn’t want to hold onto any of it anymore.

She doesn’t want to hold on to Helena. She wants to let her go. She wants this to be easy and quick and cutting HElena off, cutting herself off from Helena, seems the best way to go about it.

“You’re right,” Helena says softly, lowering her head once more, “we don't need to be together, we could just remain friends or--”

“We don’t need to be _anything_ ,” Myka interrupts.

“--family.”

Myka shakes her head and she’s regretting it even as she’s doing it. She’s regretting it even as Helena’s tears begin to fall. She’s regretting it, even as she opens her mouth to say, all over again, “We don’t need to be anything to each other. At all.”

Helena cannot hold on. Helena lets go entirely.

For all of Myka’s stubbornness and need to get her point across and saying things she doesn’t actually mean but says just to make Helena _feel_ what she feels, she has finally driven the last remaining inch of dagger into Helena’s heart. And she has broken it right open. She is watching it all bleed out.

Helena is standing and she can barely manage to say goodnight before the tears come. She couldn’t possibly walk any faster without actually running when she leaves the banquet hall for the hotel lobby.

Myka hasn't even registered what she’s done, what she’s said to her, before Kelly is storming directly at her from the dance floor.

***

“What did you say to her?”

“More truth than she has ever said to me,” Myka says, standing and walking.

She is leaving. She is done with this night and this place and she is sorry if she made this night worse for Jeannie but she is absolutely done and she is going upstairs and straight to bed. And if not for that cocktail, a heavier pour than she’d realized before standing, she’d be in her car.

She’d be driving home and far away from here.

“ _Stop_ ,” Kelly says sternly. Myka doesn’t. “I swear to God, Myka, if you don’t stop _right now_ I am going to rip one page out of every single book you own.”

Myka is just outside of the doors of the banquet hall when she does stop, when she turns, and tells Kelly, “That is the most ridiculous threat--”

“Test me,” Kelly says, approaching her, narrowing her brows and glaring.

It’s been a while since Myka has seen Kelly this upset. Not just mad or angry but absolutely livid. Pete, lingering silently just behind her and out of view, won’t even get in Kelly’s way. Won’t get anywhere near her line of sight. He ducks back into the darkness of the hall and signs to Myka that he’s sending a prayer up to the heavens for her. And all she can do is glare at the back of his head as he turns and slips silently away.

“Nineteen oh one,” Kelly says when she approaches her.

“You’re giving me a history lesson?”

“Nineteen oh one,” Kelly repeats again, “make sure your big stupid brain that never forgets anything remembers this number. One. Nine. Zero. One.”

“What is--”

“It’s Helena’s room number.”

“Why do I need to know--”

“Because when I’m done telling you everything that Helena has for two years been refusing to tell you, that is the very first place you're going to want to go. So find a chair and sit your ass down.”

Myka highly doubts that. She highly doubts absolutely everything that Helena never tells her. But she sits anyway because the one thing she doesn’t doubt at all is Kelly’s ability to literally turn her whole entire world upside-down.

***

Kelly knows too much.

Myka is standing outside of room 1901 replaying everything that Kelly has just told her about everything Helena has apparently refused to.

She doesn’t want to believe a single word of it and maybe if it had come from Helena at this point in their lives she wouldn’t. But it came from Kelly. It was corroborated by Pete. Even Jane and Jean, when she asks them about it, _know_. They know because of Helena’s father, Charles. Pete _knows_ because of Kelly.

Not _everyone_ knows but of everyone she knows, it seems like everyone _knows_.

Myka doesn’t know because Helena hadn’t wanted her to and, in some regard, her mother and Jane must have agreed she didn’t need to know because they nor anyone else ever bothered to tell her.

She’s thinking back to last year, not long after their break up, when everyone was going to bat for Helena and she couldn’t figure out _why_. Asking Myka to give Helena a chance, telling Myka to _talk_ to her. Encouraging Myka to _listen_ , try harder, push through. But how could she possibly know to keep pushing forward when she couldn’t even see what she was up against? When she never knew what she was pushing?

And now that Myka knows what everyone hasn’t been saying, now that Myka knows what Helena never wanted her to… she wants to take it all back. Absolutely everything she’s said and done and hated about the past two years, about her relationship with Helena, about her non-existent and failed relationship with Helena. And at the same time, she hates everything about this. She wants to hate Helena so much more for always doing so well what seems to come naturally to her.

Keeping secrets. Lying by omission. Trying to protect Myka by keeping her in the dark. Making Myka feel bad about everything when the truth finally beings to surface.

But Kelly had told her, “The world doesn’t revolve around you, Myka,” and she’d said very clearly and very firmly, “what happened to Helena isn’t just about you. That she kept it from you was her choice to make. Whether she couldn’t, wouldn’t, or didn’t want to tell you is not the problem you are faced with. She made her decision, she suffered in silence, and she did it to keep _you_ safe. The only question you have to ask yourself now is are you going to support her or are you going to continue knocking her down because she chose to go through it alone?”

Support her or don’t, Kelly had said it so simply before she’d turned and walked away.

Kelly knows way too damn much.

***

Myka lifts her hand in a fist to knock on the door but before she can manage, it swings open and Helena is there. She is just there and watching her like she has been expecting her for hours.

Myka lowers her hand. She opens her mouth to say something. To say anything at all. She wants to start with “I’m sorry”. She wants to tell her “I love you”. She wants to say “I hate him” and “I’ll kill him” and a million other things that she cannot bring herself to say.

She says nothing. She just lowers her hand and her head and stands there in silence.

“Kelly said you might be coming by,” Helena says softly, Myka sighs and looks up defeated. Helena takes her hand and it is the first time, in a year, that they’ve touched. It is the first time, in a year, that Myka has felt anything move through her in the way Helena’s touch moves through her. The way Helena moves her. “Come in?” Helena offers with hesitancy or worry and gently tugging Myka forward.

Myka nods and allows Helena to lead her inside.

***

Myka won’t come any further into Helena’s room than just beyond the entry door. When Helena leads her in, she stops and she backs herself up against the now closed door and that is where she decides to stay. And when Helena turns to her, curious and quiet, Myka shakes her head, hangs it low.

“I don’t…”

What she’s trying to say is that she doesn’t deserve to be here. That she doesn’t deserve to have Helena in her life at all. That for everything that happened, everything she never knew about and could never do anything about, and never cared enough about Helena to find out about… she doesn’t deserve to be here _with_ her.

But she can’t bring herself to say these things, so she redirects. She gets straight to the heart of why she showed up anyway.

“Kelly told me everything,” Myka says softly, head still lowered.

Helena doesn’t say anything. She is still standing in the hall that leads from the entry. She is still waiting for Myka to follow her the rest of the way inside.

“Not everything,” she corrects, “but enough.”

Myka looks up and catches Helena’s expectant gaze. She sees the worry in her expression. She shakes her head again and breathes in deep. She is trying too hard not to cry. Not because she doesn’t want to but because what right does she have to?

Myka had suffered through a lot in her life at the hands of her father but she’d escaped him long ago. Helena’s suffering never seemed to stop. She always managed to find her way back into it or it always managed to find her, follow her, drag her back down.

“I want to hear it from you.”

Helena looks away from her now.

“If you’re up for it, Helena. You don’t have to… but if I’m going to hear it from anyone, I need to hear this from you. While you’re standing in front of me. So I know that you’re okay. That you survived him…”

After long moments of silence, Helena finally nods and whispers, “Okay. But I’m safe now, Myka. I need you to know that.”

Myka isn’t sure that it makes a difference in the end, it certainly isn’t making her less angry. It doesn’t make her want to kill him any less. But she nods anyway because she needs to hear this from Helena and she needs all doubt in her mind to go away. She needs to see Helena living and breathing before her in the aftermath of all that has happened.

She needs the absolute truth.

“Okay,” Helena heaves out a sigh, turning to fully face Myka, “after you left London,” Helena begins, lowering her head again, “Charlie came home.”

Myka takes in a deep breath and holds onto it for as long as she can.

Helena asks with a sheepish, almost frightened smile, “One last confession for the road?”

***

Charlie hates Helena.

There is no other way to say it than that.

Charlie absolutely hates Helena and it isn’t because she’s spoiled or because she’s a woman, it’s not her sexuality or the way that she dresses, it isn’t because he’s convinced himself that she, in her infancy, scared their mother away. It’s because _Charlie_ _hates_ _Helena_. There is neither a rhyme nor a reason to his hate in Myka’s mind. He can give whatever excuse he gives, he can say whatever bullshit he wants to say. But there is not one single excuse that he could come up with in this whole entire world, across their shared lives, that would justify Charlie’s hatred for Helena.

He just does. He always has. And he absolutely hates anything that makes her happy.

*

After Myka left London, Charlie came home.

He hadn’t returned voluntarily, he’d been deported from the states and spent less than a week detained in England before his father was able to arrange for his release. When Helena says _arrange for_ she says it with a level of disdain that Myka has never seen in her before. She doesn’t elaborate on what it means that their father _arranged for_ his release but Myka is almost certain it has something to do with money. That it’s a code phrase rich people use when what they _really_ mean is that they’re paying someone off.

Charlie was released and returned home and for a day or two, Helena says, things were okay. He played the part of begging her for her forgiveness, of throwing her apologies and spiels about regrets and turning his life around. But his words felt empty to Helena. His statements had no merit or substance, his eyes were blank and without emotion.

Helena didn’t linger on how genuine or not Charlie was about that, so long as he’d left her alone. She had advocated for her brother, she wanted to believe that he was better. She was trying very hard to convince herself he was.

She would be busy with school and Charlie would be busy doing whatever it is that Charlie does with his life when he isn’t at home. But in less than a week he’d found his old friends and fallen back into old habits.

He’d gone through Helena’s room one evening, presumably looking for money, and he’d found a box that Helena kept hidden away at the very back of her closet. It is this box that reignites what Helena calls a change in his attitude but what Myka knows as his open hatred for her and everything that makes her happy.

*

“What’s in the box?” Myka asks as it becomes apparent how vague Kelly’s story had been.

“Everything,” Helena tells her. They are still standing several feet apart. Myka still with her back against the door. Helena still taking up unsure space in the hallway. “Every drawing, every note and letter, every photo… every little thing that you have ever given me,” Helena’s hand rises to grasp the necklace that falls just over her chest, “that I don’t already wear.”

On that necklace are both the locket and the ring that Myka had given her years ago.

Myka takes in a deep breath to steady herself. She pushes back against the door and waits for Helena to continue telling her everything she’d been keeping from her for two years.

*

What begins as an almost playful taunt by Charlie to Helena about her relationship with Myka, escalates within the week to harassment when he calls her a deviant. Escalates again to assault as he tells her Mr. Bering had always been _right_ about them both. They deserve to be together, he tells her, and miserable every second that they are.

Charlie hates Helena, there is very little doubt in Myka’s mind about this, but Charlie also hates everything that Helena has always been because it is _her_ being those things. Suddenly it matters to him that she is this way and with Myka because Charlie _hates_ Myka, too. Myka makes Helena happy. Myka is a part of the problem. _Charlie’s_ problem.

The very same problem that scared away his mother and made him _this way_.

Helena had been miserable in Myka’s recent absence but the box, _that_ box, was evidence that the happiness still existed. It was all Charlie needed to see to be moved to action once again.

He insults Helena. He calls her names. But he has always done these things, he hasn’t changed in years. She doesn’t say anything at first, she’s trying to _help him change_. He is her brother after all. And when their father is home, as always, he acts just civil enough to be believed.

More than once he pulls her hair, not just a yank, but grabs it at the end and wraps it around his fist and pulls her backward until she falls over, doesn’t let go even as she is on the floor and crying and then _screaming_ for him to stop.

He steps over her, kneels, sits on top of her and whispers things into her ear about Myka, about their relationship, about perversions and abominations and how there are _cures_ for these things. In so many words, he offers to perpetrate these _cures_ on Myka to help Helena become a better person. If he ever sees her again, if she ever comes to London again. If Helena ever talks to her again. If she doesn’t stop being _like this_ with _her_ , the little cunt that could be her sister. But in the fantasy world that Charlie lives in, Warren Bering is Helena’s real father. Not Charlie Myka’s.

Helena doesn’t believe in Charlie’s reach. She doesn’t think that he has the drive or even the ability to get to Myka but she knows that if Myka comes to her, to _London_ , he will make good on his threats. And more than anything else that he has ever done to her, including the time he holds a pillow over her face, this thought frightens her to her very core.

She still doesn’t talk about it. He never does it when their father is home. Sometimes, she begs her father not to leave. But she won’t tell him why and when he finally catches on, he confronts Charlie, there is a physical altercation, but he doesn’t tell him to go. He just tells him to get _help_ or else.

There is never an “or else”. Nothing really happens. He cuts Charlie off, Charlie gets desperate for money to support his habit, he steals Helena’s things and the cycle begins all over again.

It is her childhood. She has no privacy. Her life is in actual danger. She wants to move out but her father won’t hear it, he threatens to cut her off, too. Somehow he doesn’t see that using the same punishment for both Charlie and Helena is feeding into the cycle of abuse.

Charle's just narrowly sees the abuse from Charlie but doesn’t see his contribution to it.

He promises her he’ll handle it because she has school and her studies to focus on, she doesn’t need living alone to _distract_ her like it did back in the states. Not when she is _so close_.

When he says distraction, he is referring to her dating and _dancing_ and locking herself into the Bering's bathroom. When he says she doesn’t need to live alone, that means he’s doing everything in his power to make sure that it doesn’t happen.

Charles never actually _handles it_ and then he leaves the city, leaves the country, leaves the entire continent on business.

Charlie leaves bruises but Helena starts fighting back because she can and she has and sometimes, if he’s coming down hard after a big high, she wins with just the right amount of force. It only makes him more angry, that he can’t always overpower her, so he learns when to make his assaults verbal only, he learns how to make them really hurt. The threats against Myka’s life escalate to a point where Helena gives her father an ultimatum and it’s at that point he calls Jean and Jane to warn them about Charlie’s statements.

Helena refuses, even now, to tell Myka the exact words that he’s said to her in that first month of assaults both physical and verbal and some close to ending her life. But she admits to at least one cracked rib, and she laughs as she cries when she tells Myka, “We may even have matching cranial fractures.”

It isn’t funny but Myka understands why she’s laughing. She doesn’t say anything at all in response.

“We truly are soul mates,” Helena adds in a whisper, allowing her sadness to take over again.

Myka won’t ask her to say any more than that. She _wants_ to bear this weight with Helena, she wants to be the one to take all of the pain away but she doesn’t want to know how much worse it is than this. It is already worse than that night in the pool house, it is already so much more worse than Helena’s journal.

She doesn’t, she couldn’t possibly, want to know anymore.

The intense rage she has felt toward Charlie, even when she was too little to know, has always been overwhelming but now it is unbearable. She is clenching her fists, even as Helena continues speaking. She is breathing through a fury that she can barely contain. Her cheeks are hot, eyes burning with tears that don’t fall. It is nearly impossible to breathe.

And the thing that gets to her most about Charlie’s words, his words shared by Helena, is that he quotes her father, word for word. He constantly tells Helena, “Mr. Bering was right.”

Charlie could be her father’s son. It wouldn't take matching DNA to know that her father had helped, in some way, to create this person that Charlie is today. They didn’t need to share blood, they didn’t even need to live under the same roof.

It just took Warren saying the right thing at the right time in the right tone with exactly the worst audience possible.

*

“Liam didn’t know,” Helena explains about the time they’d first been together.

He doesn’t know that she’s using him to distract her brother from speaking or thinking all that he does about Myka. To throw him off of her trail, to make him think she’s living her life as is expected of a Wells with a person Charlie finds is worthy of a Wells. And Liam, Charlie lets her know, is just barely worthy.

Myka doesn’t question the irony of Charlie hating the daughter of a man he obviously admires. There’s little reason to anything he does.

“But he caught on,” Helena says of Liam, “I guess my heart wasn’t in it. I know that sounds like a _line_ ,” Myka wants to interrupt her to say it doesn’t, that she believes Helena, that she’s sorry she ever made Helena question her words but she still can’t bring herself to speak, “but I really did try to make it work.”

She doesn’t have to lie to him when he asks what about her relationship with Myka. It is conveniently _open_ now, she still loves her but Myka is too far away. She needs somebody closer. They talk more, they hang out more, they go out more, they have sex but the sex isn’t part of the lie.

Liam knew something was wrong long before he ever saw the marks and the bruises. As they sat in bed together, her over him, he questioned her interest and when they’ve talked about it long after then, he tells her his heart fell at her silence. It burst into pieces when she began to cry. He wasn’t surprised to find out that her mind was on Myka and feeling guilty but he was completely thrown when she began to sob.

He blamed himself for wanting it, for asking, for pushing her if he did. And Helena’s silent reassurances that it was _her_ and not him only made him worry more that he’d been pressuring her into it.

He didn’t turn on the lights expecting to find the bruises, he turned them on because he wanted to better see her face, he wanted _her_ to see _his_. But when he saw the fading marks along her legs and her abdomen, and the newer bruises on her back, he turned ghost white, he backed away, and, for the longest time, he refused to touch her.

He didn’t think he possibly could without causing her pain.

He was angry and upset. He begged her to tell him what happened. He wouldn’t let it go, he wanted to help, he just needed to know _how_.

But he already knew the answer.

“Charlie,” was all Liam had to say. Helena was quiet. She continued to cry.

“I fell apart, Myka,” Helena cries now, covering her face as the tears just fall and fall, “I fell apart and I wish it had been you there with me. I wanted more than anything for it to be you. But it couldn’t have been,” she shakes her head, “Charlie has been very clear about what he would do if he ever saw you again. It couldn’t have been you.”

So the sex Helena has with Liam isn’t part of the lie. It is a real reaction to what she’d been through. They were open and honest and their feelings raw, and all of that had bubbled over into an intimacy that Myka was never given the option to know.

Myka _knows_ it is a selfish thought and she keeps it to herself but that doesn’t lessen the betrayal she feels over it happening.

Helena is pushing her hands up, wetting her face and her hair as she draws her fingers through it and away from her eyes. She tucks strands behind her ears, they barely stay with her hair so short, and she turns away again. She brings her hands around herself, rubbing her arms to shield against the cool air of the hotel room, against the chill that seems to set in.

“Liam played the part well,” Helena sighs, smiling as she appears to lose herself in a memory of that year, “I tried to stay in contact with you as much as I could without Charlie finding out and I never wanted you to know Charlie was home. I never wanted you to _want_ to visit me, even if it meant making you hate me. Even if it meant pushing you away. I think I’m better at it than I thought. We’ve had a lot of practice hating each other.”

Myka wants to go to her but Myka can’t bring herself to touch her when two years ago Helena needed saving and Myka wasn’t there. When a year ago, Helena _needed_ her and Myka just… let her go.

“I don’t hate you,” is all she can say. It’s all she can offer Helena now.

She can’t stand anymore. She let’s herself fall. With her back still pressed against the door, she slides down to the ground, her legs are nothing beneath the weight of everything Helena is saying. She falls and she sits and brings her hands to cover her face, to hide her tears and her anger, hide all of her fear and shame.

“I didn’t know,” Myka says on a whisper, taking in a deep breath. She brings her knees up to her chest, drapes her arms across them and buries her face so Helena cannot see her cry.

But Helena won’t have it, she moves closer to Myka and whispers back, “I didn’t want you to.”

A little louder, a little angrier, and lifting her head up just enough for Helena to hear, Myka says, “I would have come for you. If I had known. I would have flown to London and I would have brought you home.”

She closes her eyes, lowering her head again.

“I know that you would have,” Helena says much closer now, casting a slight shadow over Myka. It is a moment more before Myka feels Helena’s hand in her hair and moving against her cheek. Helena’s other hand is on her arm, she is lowering herself to her knees, on the floor just in front of Myka.

“I would have killed him,” Myka says looking up at Helena again.

Helena smiles and shakes her head, more tears are cascading down her cheeks. She is moving gentle hands back into Myka’s hair at her temples, running her fingers through Myka’s curls, pushing all of her hair away from her face, brushing her thumbs over wet cheeks.

“I know,” she whispers, inching her way forward, slowly moving her legs into the space below Myka’s, “I know you would have wanted to and I know you would have tried.” Helena’s hands are soft and warm on Myka’s cheeks. “I know you could have been killed in the process.”

Helena moves her arms over Myka’s shoulders and moves herself closer, to sit sideways between Myka’s legs. Helena moves her arms around Myka’s neck and she is leaning her forehead in against Myka’s. She is closer than she has been in a year and it is almost too much for Myka. Myka still cannot bring herself to touch that girl. She balls her fists and crosses her arms tight over her chest.

“Myka?” Helena questions softly.

Myka shakes her head and lowers it, even as Helena is trying to get her to look up. Even as Helena is, with a hand under Myka’s chin, lifting her head to look up at her.

Myka shuts her eyes tight, trying fruitlessly to hold back her tears, to maintain her breathing, and be somewhere else. Anywhere else than where she has found herself. Any other timeline than this one where she has gone from feeling betrayed and alone to feeling like the betrayer, alienating not just a girlfriend who loved her but a best friend who needed her. A sister who suffered like she suffered, without anyone. Her own kindred spirit.

But she wasn’t alone. At all. She had Liam. And Myka is fighting all of the selfish thoughts in her mind and her heart that want her to be jealous and angry. About Helena choosing _him_ over her. About Helena trusting _him_ over her. Giving herself to _him_ over coming home to _her_.

_You either support Helena or you don’t._

Kelly’s voice is in her head, reminding her that this isn’t about her. Maybe it isn’t about Liam either. Maybe it’s just about Helena doing what she had to do to survive her brother for however long she’d had to. Maybe this is just about Helena doing everything she can, with everything she has, to keep Myka safe.

“Myka--”

“Why did you ever leave me?” Myka asks, opening her eyes to Helena again.

Helena shakes her head. She is closing her eyes, moving her fingers back through Myka’s curls and her forehead against the bridge of Myka’s nose. Nuzzling closer, warm breath hitting Myka’s neck.

“You were better off here. With me. _Home_ ,” Myka whispers. Her lips are brushing the side of Helena’s nose, grazing softly against her cheeks as Helena moves closer and further against her, “Imagine what our lives could have been like…”

“I have imagined it, Myka,” Helena says without hesitation. She sighs and straightens, eyes open now, gazing sadly at Myka, tears falling down her cheeks. She nods and says, “A million times, I have imagined what our lives would have been like, starting out so young.” Helena’s hand is back against the warmth along the side of her face, her other arm is circling over Myka’s shoulder. “You realizing that I’m not worth it. That I’m no good for you. Our relationship ending, our friendship right along with that. My whole family… the only family I care about...”

Helena blinks several times, looking away from Myka momentarily as more tears fall. She looks back and what Myka sees in her eyes now is guilt. It is so much more than the sadness.

“I have imagined everything between us, everything we have ever had together, _gone_. Being left with memories that I can no longer stand to think about. Being a memory you can no longer stand to love.”

“Where do you get this shit from?”

“I thought putting distance between us would give our love time and space to grow. To get a little older. To _mature_.”

“Your plans always sucks.”

Helena laughs softly, wiping away Myka's tears. Wiping away her own.

“Charlie burned my box,” Helena smiles softly, sitting straight. It isn’t a happy smile. It is the smile of someone who has come to terms with everything she has lost. The smile of a person who has moved far beyond the loss of so many _things_ and so many of her attachments to those things. “Everything you’ve given me. Everything I ever had,” she shakes her head, wiping away more of her tears, “ _gone_.”

Myka watches her quietly. Not bothering to wipe away her own tears. More will fall in their place. She will not be done crying about this night anytime soon.

“And for a very long time, Myka, I truly believed he would do the same to you. I am not...” she is laughing softly again, incredulously. At herself? At Charlie? Myka cannot tell. She suspects it is a laughter to abate the pain, to mask all of the hurt. She suspects Helena has been laughing like this for the past two years, “I am not entirely certain that he won’t. I have no idea where he is but I know, too well, what he’s capable of.”

Helena is still shaking her head. That smile is gone now.

“But he promised me that he would. In vivid detail. Hurt you. If he had the chance.”

Myka has rarely, all on her own, been impulsive. About anything. If given the opportunity and the motivation, she’s sure she could find a way. If she’d known about Charlie, she certainly would have found a way. If she’d known the truth about Liam and Helena and Charlie, she would have been in London, she would have packed Helena’s bag, dragged her to the airport, and demanded she return home.

Myka is otherwise not very impulsive. She does mostly things that are expected of her. She knows Helena thinks her predictable in this way.

But Helena doesn’t predict Myka leaving. She can tell from the look Helena gives her when she tells her, “I can’t.” Helena doesn’t ask why not or what’s wrong, she doesn’t even ask her to stay. Myka just tells her, “I can’t hear anymore. I can’t do this right now,” and even more honestly, “I need… to process…” and Helena moves away, gives her space, lets her stand. She doesn’t follow her, she doesn’t even stand _with_ her.

Myka goes. Out the door. And she doesn’t look back.

Helena just lets her leave.

Myka leaves her hotel room in a blur of anger and tears and Helena, horrified and crying at being left alone again.

***

They let her vent and she doesn’t know why but they do. She is loud about it. She is yelling and angry, she is crying all over again. They don’t say a thing, neither Jane nor Jean, they just sit there in their hotel room and listen, still dressed up from the wedding.

Myka has questions she can’t answer, she has feelings she cannot properly define. There are things in her mind that she cannot make sense of, timelines and words they’ve told her that never made sense until today.

They are quiet. They are watching. And when Myka is done, when she doesn’t have anything else to say, when she can’t find anymore words or think anymore cohesive thoughts, she's cries.

She cries loud and hard and uncontrollably and all they have to do is hold out their arms and she is there. Falling onto the couch in-between where they sit, into their grasp as they hug her and hold her tight. Their hands wiping tears, their mouths whispering apologies. They are saying soothing things against her hair and into her ear as she sobs and the most important thing of all is that they tell her to cry. They tell her to let it go, to let it all out. They tell her not to stop.

Myka isn’t even sure that she can stop, so she doesn’t. She is lost and she is letting go of control.

This isn’t just about Helena and Liam and Charlie, it is her and Sam, it is Sam and Allison, it is Pete’s scars and Claudia’s custody hearings. It is everything that happened or didn’t with Abigail and Leena. It is death coming for her father. It is his book, its expectations, and all of those women who ever thought that they could _save_ her. It is him in all his longing for forgiveness while burdening her with so much more than she can manage.

It is everything around her, even the tiniest things that pile up on top of that.

It isn’t just tonight but tonight is the breaking point. All at once the realization that her life hasn’t really changed, that things haven’t really gotten better, that she is still the same old Myka, that everything still hurts the same way it used to and that she still hurts everyone the same way she used to, comes crashing down all around her.

And she can no longer carry the weight of any of it.

***

They make her lie down in their bed in the dark. Claudia lies down beside her. Jane and Jean kiss Myka’s forehead and cheek and tell Claudia to keep on eye on her. They leave a glass of water on the nightstand nearby. Claudia’s tiny voice tells them “I’ve got her” and they leave the room, leaving the door open just a crack. Allowing a sliver of light to shine through.

Myka can hear their voices speaking low to one another but she doesn’t know what they’re saying. She doesn’t try to make any sense of it. Soon, the hotel room door is opening and closing, followed by stillness and quiet. No more movement comes from outside of the bedroom door.

Myka closes her eyes and lets her tears continue to fall.

Claudia, moments later, is leaning over her, upside-down face in her face, asking Myka if she’s okay. Myka doesn’t say anything but she rolls over, onto her other side, to face Claudia now and Claudia lies down across from her.

“Did your dad die?” Claudia whispers.

Myka shakes her head and smiles a soft smile at the almost disappointed look that seems to take over Claudia’s expression. She reaches a hand to that little girl’s forehead to push wisps of red hair, of an already-overgrown pixie cut, out of her face. Myka playfully taps Claudia’s nose with a solitary finger before moving her hand under her own cheek and lying still again.

“Is it H.G.?” she asks now.

Myka doesn’t answer but more tears are burning in her eyes, cascading down her face. And that seems to be answer enough for Claudia.

She whispers, though no one else is here, “I wish Giselle could have come.”

Myka smiles again and shakes her head. She whispers back, “Disaster,” to that young girl because it’s all her voice can manage. She’s sure if Giselle had been here, things would have been exponentially worse. But the thought of it now, looking back, makes her smile. That Claudia is the one bringing it up, makes her smile more. Because it wouldn’t have been Myka hoarding all of Giselle’s time away from Helena. It would have been the red headed little pipsqueak lying in thought and concern across from her.

Myka’s eyelids are heavy. They close for a moment only to open again. When she yawns, Claudia yawns too and begins rubbing at her eyes. Myka isn’t wearing her watch so she lifts Claudia’s arm and taps the light at the side of hers.

It’s not yet eleven o’clock but she’s been up since dawn. She cannot keep her eyes open, even as she lets go of Claudia’s arm and tucks her hand into the warmth between her cheek and her pillow. And what a waste it will be for her to fall asleep, when Helena is flying home tomorrow. She could at least try to fight the sleep. She could at least try to make the conversation work. Without breaking down and falling apart.

Without running away.

But the lull of sleep, the pull of exhaustion, and all of the energy she has lost today sweeps her swiftly and quietly under.

“Are you falling asleep now?” Claudia asks. Myka opens her eyes to that tiny growing voice again and nods. Claudia moves closer to her, lifts Myka’s arm up, pulls it around herself as she rolls onto her other side, her back to Myka’s front, and lies down in Myka’s hold.

She doesn’t say anything more than that, as she adjusts her positioning and makes herself at home. Myka hears her yawn. Myka yawns, too. She squeezes her arm around Claudia and closes her eyes tight.

In Myka’s dream, Claudia is just an infant, wrapped in a blanket in her arms. Someone she doesn’t know takes that tiny baby away from her. They disappear into the night and they don't care that she's crying.

***

Myka awakens to the warmth of a palm moving against her cheek. To slender fingers moving slowly through curls and fingernails that scratch delicately over her scalp. A solitary finger catches the small dip that exists at the top of her skull and stills the motion of that hand in her hair.

“Myka.”

Her name comes out so breathless Myka can feel the ache beneath it.

It’s Helena's voice but Myka is struggling with her perception of whether this moment is real or a dream because it feels like a dream, the way that hand touches her, how close that voice sounds. But it could be a reality because Helena is _here_ and wherever here is, Myka has some memory of being there, too.

The figment or reality that is Helena draws nearer to her on the bed, she can feel the shift of Helena’s weight, the way her own body moves slightly against Helena’s. On the other side of her, she hears Jane say, “Let me get this girl into bed,” and the weight that was in her arms is lifted, the warmth of a tiny body, that had been pressed against the front of her, is gone.

“Myka,” Helena says again and this time that voice is much more certain, this time Myka is much more inclined to believe it is actually Helena, “wake up.”

That bedroom door opens and then it closes but Helena is still there. Jane, with Claudia, has gone now.

Myka is on the cusp of lucidity. She is lifting her right hand to the hand that moves from her cheek, across her forehead, through her hair and to her cheek once more. She catches that hand as it rests against the side of her face and she holds it there for a moment before she moves that hand, still in hers, over her heart, to rest against her chest.

“Myka--” Helena starts again.

“I’m awake,” Myka tells her, more annoyance comes through in her voice than she’d intended, and Helena’s frustration is evident, the way she sighs in response.

Helena whispers, “Myka, what was I supposed to do?”

Myka is quiet.

“I couldn’t leave. Should I have just told you and let you come to me? What if you had? What if he hurt you?”

Myka sighs and says, “It’s my life to lose, Helena.”

Helena doesn’t say anything but she moves her free hand to her face and wipes at her eyes and cheeks. Myka can see the outline of Helena shaking her head. Her eyes can almost see the expression on Helena’s face through the darkness. Still sad. _Always_ sad.

Myka wonders if Helena will ever be happy again. If she even knows how to be anymore.

“I’m okay with you hating me,” Helena speaks softly, “if it means keeping you safe. _Alive_.”

“Even if I hated you,” Myka is moving her hands away from Helena’s and over her own face, she is pressing the heels of her palms against closed eyelids and further moving her hands, in all of her exasperation, through curls, “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself, knowing what was happening to you over there while I was just… _here_ playing pissed off. So at the end of the day, what does it matter? Let him kill me. At least I’d die knowing I did _something_.”

Helena is quiet but tears are cascading down her cheeks. She is trying hard not to visibly cry but Myka can see her face through the darkness now, and she is falling apart.

Her voice breaks when she tells Myka, “Do _not_ talk like that.”

More quiet lingers between them.

“ _Myka_ ,” Helena’s voice is louder and scolding now. Myka knows she’s saying all of the wrong things. She knows she’s pushing Helena to a place neither of them needs to be in and especially not Helena. Especially not _now_.

“I’m sorry,” Myka says softly, sighing.

She sits up and back a ways on the bed so that they are facing one another and Myka puts her hands over Helena’s cheeks, fingers nestling just behind her ears as the older girl begins to sob, still shaking her head. Still saying Myka’s name in this inconceivably _sad_ way.

Touching her this way, comforting her like this, is almost unreal. It has been way too long.

“I’m sorry,” Myka repeats, “I didn’t mean it like that. I just…” she closes her eyes and brings her forehead to rest against Helena’s, “I’m useless. I am nothing… and to you, of all people. All this time I have spent being mad at you about Liam, hurting you in the same way I thought you were hurting me… and he was just there to protect you. You were just with him to protect yourself. You held onto this to protect _me_.

“I just…I didn’t know and it kills me that I didn’t know. It kills me that I didn’t bother to think something was _wrong_. That I never do. I always just… get angry. I am my father’s child.”

Myka falls quiet. She doesn’t know what else to say. She pulls Helena into her, wraps her arms around her, and hugs her close, nestling her face further into the crook of Helena’s neck. She presses her lips to an exposed shoulder and kisses warm skin. She presses her lips to Helena’s collar bone and kisses her there, too.

“I don’t hate you,” Myka whispers, lifting her lips to Helena’s neck. She kisses just beside her throat, exhales a warm breath against it. Helena’s entire body shudders in her grasp. She says quietly, reassuring the woman who cries fully now that she is in her arms, “This isn’t the thing that makes me stop loving you.”

She moves her cheek to Helena’s cheek. Warm and soft and wet from tears. She presses her cheek into Helena’s and closes her eyes. She moves her lips to Helena’s ear and whispers.

“But I completely understand if it makes you stop loving me.”

***

Helena is lying beside her, head resting on Myka’s shoulder, an arm draped across Myka’s waist. Myka has a hand in her hair and she has been steadily running her fingers through it for however long they have been lying this way. Helena is breathing softly, occasionally turning her face into Myka’s chest to stifle a yawn or a cough or a cry. Myka isn’t sure which. It doesn’t matter now. To have Helena nuzzling against her and squeezing her grasp around Myka’s waist, is already more than Myka’s heart can handle. It’s already not close enough.

There is a knock on the door shortly before Jane announces, “Okay ladies, I’m coming in. My eyes are closed and you have approximately ten seconds to cover up before I turn on the light. Ten… nine…”

Myka feels Helena’s soft laughter in the way that girl’s body moves against hers and she cannot help but smile, too.

“You can turn on the light,” Myka tells her.

Jane stops counting, she flicks on the light. Myka and Helena are simultaneously shielding their eyes from sudden brightness and moaning their discontent.

“Well,” Jane smiles, sighing and tilting a head at the sight of them, “as happy as it makes me to see you two getting on this well, _we_ are ready for bed.” Myka’s mother appears just behind Jane and playfully pushes her way past the other woman and into the bedroom.

“Out,” she tells them along the way, “and Myka,” she pauses for a moment, only to turn back and say, “I promise, we’ll talk about all of this tomorrow, okay? When we’re back in town and I can finally lay this wedding to rest.”

“Okay, Mom,” Myka nods. Her mother disappears into the restroom.

“I’ll give you guys a minute,” Jane says, heading back through the bedroom door and closing it a crack behind her.

They are, for the most part, alone again.

Helena moves her hand over Myka's chest, just below her neck, then moves her fingers to tap gently at Myka’s chin to get her attention. When Myka turns to her, Helena is opening her mouth to speak but nothing comes out. She tries a second time and all she says is, “Would you be opposed…”

Myka’s smile at her hesitancy, at her inability to say exactly what she knows she’s going to say, is soft and amused. She is happy but she is still terrified. There is only so much joy she can manifest in the aftermath of this situation… these _revelations_. But Helena in her arms, Helena looking at her the way she is now, worried and hopeful and trying to find all the right words… it is some glimpse into the far past. It is some hint of the happiness they used to share.

“I mean to say that I have room…” Helena eventually manages, “in my room, if...”

Myka’s smile grows wider now and Helena turns her face back into Myka’s chest to hide her embarrassed laughter.

When Helena looks back up at her, reddened cheeks and furrowed brows, Myka says softly, “Okay.”

Helena seems surprised.

“Okay?” she asks.

Myka nods, “Okay. I just… need to get my things.”

Helena takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly as she settles back into Myka’s hold, “Okay.”

***

Everyone is in the hotel room Myka shares with Pete and Kelly. Everyone except the bride and the groom but everyone _else_ is here including Sam and Allison, Kurt and Bennie. Tracy and Kevin and Jeannie’s _other_ bridesmaids, too.

They are playing card games and drinking, save for Pete and Tracy who don’t drink. They have the music up loud, there is laughter and joking and even Kelly seems to be enjoying the company of certain other women that she would not normally enjoy the company of.

There is only a moment of quiet when Myka and Helena walk into the hotel suite together but mostly there are mischievous and suggestive smiles. From Tracy and Pete and Kelly and even one from Sam. If it weren’t considered rude, Myka would tell them all to shut up. They aren’t saying anything but those expressions are screaming a thousand innuendos all at once.

Instead she says “hey” and “don’t mind us” and “just pretend we’re not even here” before she tugs Helena, still waving hello to everyone, into the bedroom on the left.

***

Myka is pulling, from her duffle bag, something to wear that isn’t _this dress_.

“I need to shower,” she tells Helena who smiles and waves her off. She takes all of her things into the bathroom to undress, to shower, to change into something more comfortable. Jeans, for now, and a shirt loose enough for her to sleep comfortably in, if she sleeps in anything at all.

If she _sleeps_ at all.

In the room, when she’s done, Kelly is talking to Helena. They are quiet when Myka exits the bathroom and Kelly is looking at her accusingly, arms crossed, but still with that suggestive smile on her face. She doesn’t say anything when Myka walks past her, watching her suspiciously. Trying to figure out what exactly that smile is for.

“Do you mind if I…” Helena points to the restroom and Myka shakes her head.

“Go ahead.”

When Helena is in the bathroom, Myka sets her duffle on the bed and turns to Kelly to ask, “What?”

“ _What_?” Kelly asks in return.

“You have that _look_ ,” Myka accuses.

“This is not a look,” Kelly says pointing to her own face, “this is my face.”

Myka squints her eyes at Kelly but she resolves not to go there and continues packing her toiletries away.

“I’m just happy you guys are back together,” Kelly says quickly, under her breath.

“Don't be happy,” Myka tells her, not bothering to turn to her.

“Why not?” Kelly asks.

Myka closes her eyes for only a moment before opening them to Kelly. She points between the bathroom door and herself saying in a hushed voice, “This is not us back together. This is us _coping_ with the rampant epidemic of miscommunication that has perpetually plagued this entire family.”

Kelly says, “ _Together_ ,” at the end of Myka’s statement. “Coping _together_.”

The toilet flushes and Myka shakes her head and returns to packing.

“I’m staying with Helena tonight.”

“That’s definitely _not_ together,” Kelly says sarcastically, smile growing wider.

The bathroom door opens and Helena reappears. She smiles awkwardly across the bed at Myka, Myka gives her a soft smile back and side-eyes Kelly, it’s a warning, who is still standing with arms crossed by the door.

“Well, you kids have a good night,” Kelly grins, clapping her hands in front of her before adding, for Myka’s benefit, “ _together_.”

Helena is arching a curious brow at the other girl and when she looks back to Myka, presumably for answers, all Myka can offer is a shake of her head and a gentle reminder, “ _You_ brought her into our lives.”

“And you're both _clearly_ better off for it,” Kelly assures them, turning to go. “Oh, before you head out,” she turns back, halfway through the doorway, “should I just assume you’ll be taking our darling _Julieta_ to the airport tomorrow afternoon?”

When Myka looks to Helena she finds her already gazing at her expectantly, hopefully. She doesn’t say anything. She just watches and waits.

“Yeah,” Myka says softly, eyes still on Helena as a visible relief seems to settle into her body, “I can do that.” Myka turns to Kelly, “I’ve got her.”

“In that case,” Kelly says, re-entering the room and making her way to Helena with her arms open wide, “if I don’t see you in the morning…” Helena is all smiles and cheek kisses when Kelly pulls her into a hug. They are that way for several seconds, Myka smiling that crooked smile of hers at the sight of them. “I love you and I have missed you and you need to get your ass home already.”

“I love you, too,” Helena says in response.

“Fly safe, my _commadre_.” Kelly squeezes her tight.

They are in tears by the time that hug concludes. Kelly seems overcome by her own emotions but rather than stick around and let that show, she tells them goodbye, tells Myka off with a wave of her hand and a playful, “I’ll see your ass tomorrow,” and then she is out the door and rejoining everyone else in the living room.

Helena sits down on the bed. Myka finishes putting the last of her things into her bag and sits on the opposite end of the bed to brush out her hair. She doesn’t know Helena is watching her until she hears her asking softly, “Myka… can I…” and when she turns, Helena is gesturing to her hair brush. The look she gives Myka is timid and uncertain.

“Sure…” Myka says, holding the brush out for her.

Myka is at first confused because Helena’s hair is in perfect order as always. Even with her hair cut short, in such a way that the back is just above her shoulders and the front almost touching her shoulders, her hair is perfect. There isn’t a single strand out of place. But Helena is making her way across the bed to Myka and taking the brush gently from her hands.

Helena positions herself behind her, she says softly, “Turn.” With her hands on Myka’s shoulders, she directs Myka to turn away from her and Helena settles where she sits behind her. She brings her hands into Myka’s hair and begins brushing still-wet curls for her. She brushes slowly and with care and where the brush tends to snag, she gently tugs it through. Her touch is so delicate, the motions of the brush in Myka’s hair so soothing, that she almost falls asleep sitting straight up with Helena’s hands in her hair.

Her eyes are closed when Helena stops brushing, her head tilted slightly back. Helena moves from behind her to sit beside her and when Myka opens her eyes to Helena once more, the older girl is putting her brush into her bag, zipping it closed. She turns back to Myka with a soft smile on her lips and reaches a hand into Myka’s hair, to brush damp and curling hair away from her shoulder.

“I have wanted to do that… for a very long time,” Helena whispers.

Helena doesn’t look directly at Myka, she seems to want to avoid her gaze. Myka moves her hand against the bed at Helena’s side and leans into her line of sight, breaking Helena’s gaze away from her shoulder, from where her hand stills against Myka’s hair.

“You flew five thousand miles to brush my hair?” Myka asks softly, teasing, smiling her crooked smile when Helena bites back her own laughter.

“No,” Helena says this finally allowing herself to look at Myka, allowing Myka to really look back into her eyes. Helena lets her hand rest on Myka’s shoulder, running a finger across her skin. It’s a touch that Myka can hardly withstand. It is an intimacy she hasn’t had in a year and it is just Helena busying her mind by drawing her finger across Myka’s shoulder. But it is drawing Myka closer to Helena. It is making everything about Helena in this moment irresistible. “I flew five thousand miles,” Helena says, just as Myka moves close enough to kiss her, “to be sure that Charlie hadn’t.”

Myka stills with that admission. Another confession of sorts.

“I know Jeannie didn’t want me here,” Helena adds, lifting her finger now to stroke the top of Myka’s ear, “because of Jules. He’s been avoiding anything that has to do with me ever since he found out…”

“Since he found out about what?” Myka questions softly. It takes her a while to figure it out. She wants to say he found out about Charlie but Jules had always known about Charlie. He had been one of Charlie's friends long ago. But Myka has never really forgotten the catalyst for her breaking up with Helena, it’s always been sitting in the back of her mind. She has wondered, over and over about what happened with that information and now she knows. She sits straight again and says, because it’s not even a question, “You told him about the miscarriage.”

Helena’s confirmation comes in a soft, uneasy smile.

“ _Helena_ \--”

“It doesn’t matter, he doesn’t care. Just like you said,” her smile grows, even as tears form, “there is no baby. What responsibility does he have to me or how I feel? About things I am apparently refusing to let go.”

“Helena, I--”

There is a boisterous eruption of laughter and teasing from the living room, it has been going on all night but now it is so much louder, they are so much rowdier just on the other side of that door that it diverts their attention, breaking through Myka’s thoughts and whatever else she was going to say about it slips away from her mind.

Helena turns back to Myka and, with little to-do, presses a quick kiss to her lips.

“We should go,” Helena whispers, still closer than ever, “somewhere we can talk.”

Myka nods, “Okay.”

They stand. She takes Helena’s hand, picks up her bag. And leads her out of the room.

***

They say their goodbyes and good nights. When they leave the room they are no longer holding hands. They are walking at opposite ends of the hallway, toward the elevators. They don’t look at one another, they don’t speak.

Everything seems so much more fragile out in the world, away from the semi-seclusion of a hotel bedroom. But when they reach the elevators and Helena calls it up, Myka reaches for her hand again.

They don’t look at one another or say anything about it. They just stand there together, shoulder-to-shoulder, hand-in-hand in wait.

***

When the elevator doors open, two men come tumbling out. They are facing one another, arms around each other, not looking where they’re going, walking without seeing. Their lips are locked and moving wildly, they are in such a rush that they don’t know or care or bother to look at what and who is around them. They walk right between Helena and Myka, forcing them to break their contact as the two careen past them and into the wall just opposite the elevator doors. They move onward, still making out, from there.

“We weren’t standing here or anything,” Myka calls after them as they go.

“Sorry!” one calls back hurriedly, managing to remove his lips from the other, and before they disappear down the hallway, he looks back at them with a foolish smile, gestures to Helena and says, “well, you understand.”

They disappear into the hallway without another word.

Myka looks back to Helena who is already making her way onto the elevator.

“Did that really just happen?”

“At least they’re having fun,” Helena says, holding the door open as Myka steps into the elevator. The doors close. Myka moves to the back, Helena lingers at the front. “Correction. They were in fact having a _lot_ of fun,” Helena smiles, pointing at the elevator panel where at least ten of the floors, all in one collected area, are lit up, “they've depressed half the floors for us.”

“And every single one between this floor and yours,” Myka sighs heavily her frustrations, “maybe it’s a sign.”

***

It takes everything in Myka not to fall and bring Helena down with her to the elevator floor. It takes all of Myka’s strength, every last ounce of will power, to push forward. To get all of her and Helena and the duffle bag she’d abandoned long ago, through that door, out of that elevator, and quickly, very quickly, onto floor number nineteen.

Into room 1901.

***

Helena is lying on her side, facing away from Myka. She is naked in a hotel bed, in the suite they now share, a thin sheet covers her legs and nothing at all above that. She is half asleep, if she is awake at all, and her breathing is soft and slow, calm and relaxed. But when Myka presses her lips further against a scar on Helena’s back, that is just above her waistline and closer to her exposed hip, Helena’s breath deepens. She exhales unsteadily.

Myka has been kissing that spot for ten minutes. That is the amount of time that has passed between the moment Helena’s muscles went into recovery mode and this very next kiss Myka presses against her skin.

She kisses once more and Helena, definitely awake, rolls onto her back, exposing breasts and belly and curls of dark hair before crossing one leg over the other and moving onto her other side, toward Myka.

Myka, still lying near the bottom of the bed, is now facing a perfect hip. There are no marks, bruises, or scars here.

She kisses that hip anyway.

Helena brings her hand to her side, just over Myka’s head and pushing fingers into Myka’s hair.

“The scar,” Myka begins softly, “on your back? I never noticed it before.”

She’s not sure how she could have missed it. Had she not been paying attention? Had she been so engrossed in herself and her own needs last they’d been together, that she never saw the evidence of Helena’s pain from the year before?

She looks up at Helena from where she still lies on her side. She waits.

“It wasn’t there before,” Helena tells her softly, letting her hand fall away from Myka’s curls and to the bed just below Myka’s chin. She sweeps her thumb gently across Myka’s bottom lip then sighs a fantastic sigh, turning to look the other way.

Myka finds herself hesitant in asking Helena to elaborate. Myka finds that suddenly she wants to know more. She has questions about what happened in the end, with Charlie. If there had even been an end. But she doesn’t want to ask these things of Helena, she doesn’t want to force her to relive all that had happened. Not when she’s content right now, living in this moment.

 _Together_.

In Kelly’s very brief version, Charlie was gone when Helena returned home from Brazil and for several months to follow, Helena was sure he was dead. She was sure he’d taken one too many hits off far too many drugs and finally lost himself to the only thing she was sure he’d ever love.

Kelly had ended there to say, “Talk to Helena.” At the time she'd taken that to mean that was the end of the story and now it was time to make her peace with the other woman but now... Now she sees there is more to it that Kelly just didn't want to tell her. Telling her she'd have to ask Helena, if she wanted to know anything more.

Myka is looking to Helena, doing just that. She is propping herself up on her elbows, facing a woman she’s convinced herself not to love for a year. She’s asking this woman she hasn’t seen, hasn’t talked to, has tried so very hard not to think about, to finish telling her what happened, knowing she doesn’t really want to know. Knowing Helena doesn’t really want to say.

Helena turns her head back toward Myka, they are watching each other for some time in silence, then Helena moves to sit up, gestures for Myka to sit up, too. When they are face-to-face, Helena pulls Myka closer, moving her arms around Myka’s neck and bringing their foreheads together.

“Lie down with me,” Helena whispers and pulls, moving to lie back down on that bed and, this time, she brings Myka down with her. Myka does not hesitate to follow. She moves to stretch out along the bed half beside and half over Helena, an arm draped over Helena’s abdomen and wrapping tight around her waist. The other moving just below the pillow where Helena brings her head to rest.

Myka moves down into a kiss, pressing her lips against Helena’s once and then twice. Moving her lips to that space just above Helena’s chin and kissing her gently there, too.

“Where is he?” she asks, moving her free hand up Helena's side, furrowing her brows as Helena closes her eyes tight and shakes her head softly.

Myka kisses the small crinkle of skin that forms just between Helena’s eyebrows, that shows all of her frustration and masks only so much of her pain. She kisses the bridge of her nose, the tip of her nose, her cheek, then Myka’s lips are on Helena's lips again. When they part she asks once more.

“Charlie? Did he come back to the states? Is that why you came to check up on me?”

Helena opens her eyes to Myka. She pulls herself up, just the tiniest bit, only enough to close the space between them again. Helena kisses Myka and when she lies back into the pillow, she tells her, “I need you to know that I’m safe now.” Helena moves her hands to Myka’s cheeks, into Myka’s hair, and pulls her down to her, into another kiss. She repeats once more, and Myka isn't sure if, this time, it’s for her benefit or Helena’s, “ _You’re_ safe.”

***

Kelly didn’t know, when she booked her trip to London, that she would be, for the second time in the years that they’ve known each other, saving Helena’s life. It’s beautiful, when Myka thinks about it _after_ the anger, that Kelly and Helena are always there for each other in this way. That they have become each other’s support when they cannot rely on their own families. When their family has proven, again and again, that they aren’t there for them when and how they need them.

It makes Myka long for those much simpler times with Helena. Back when they'd just been friends. When Myka had loved her and Helena had loved Myka but nothing official had ever happened between them.

Their love had been so different then. Manageable. Tolerable. Unwavering.

It’s strange to her now to think back on those days and know they were closer and friendlier and maybe even happier before they were ever together. She imagines being able to go back in time and tell her fifteen-year-old self to chill out and settle for Helena’s friendship, for the thing that is or isn’t not a thing just because they’re not calling it a thing, and to be the best friend that she could possibly be.

She’s sure there’s a moral somewhere in their past. She’s sure she doesn’t have the energy right now to seek it out.

Helena is soft spoken, in her arms. Tears are falling but her voice doesn't break when she speaks. She pauses several times to collect her thoughts, to pull it altogether, and get it all out. Myka is ready to listen. She is more prepared now than earlier to hear what Helena has to say.

Charlie is still alive. He was very much alive then. And he came home at exactly the wrong time. Because he didn’t know Kelly was visiting Helena but even if he had, he didn’t know Kelly at all. And he didn’t know that Kelly was _Kelly_.

He didn’t know Kelly wasn’t Myka.

“It was dark. Late. We were asleep in my room and I… I think he got the wrong impression.”

Helena is moving her hands back through curls, raking fingers across Myka’s temples, as Myka rests over her, looking down at her, slowly moving her leg further between Helena’s. It’s a comfort thing. It feels like home to lie with her like this. To feel the warmth and strength of Helena’s inner thighs as they move and wrap around Myka’s tightly.

Myka continues watching, waiting. Listening.

“It didn’t register at the time but I realized after that he genuinely believed she was you.”

Now her voice breaks when she speaks. She closes her eyes and tears fall. She pulls her hands out of Myka’s hair and moves them to Myka’s shoulders, lowers one to grasp at Myka’s forearm, the other to snake around Myka’s back.

“We were still asleep when he pulled me out of bed by my foot. Onto the floor.”

Helena’s eyes remain shut tight. Myka lowers her head to Helena’s. Rests her forehead over the bridge of Helena’s nose. Lightly kisses her chin as she goes on.

“I remember grabbing onto the covers. I remember pulling them down with me. The sound of my head hitting the bed frame and the ground. Sheets falling over me, making it hard to breathe. The sound of my own scream, muffled.”

Now Myka’s moving to prop herself up on her elbows, an arm at either side of Helena. She is moving her hands into Helena’s hair. Wiping tears with her thumbs from where they fall, just at the corners of Helena’s eyes and down to her ears.

“The sound of Kelly waking up. Yelling my name.”

Helena puffs out a soft laugh through her tears.

“Yelling other things, too.”

Myka tries to smile but she can’t. She tries not to cry but she can’t manage that either.

“He flips me over. I think he steps on my back. I _think_. It’s not…”

Helena’s hands are at the sides of her head now, grasping at air.

“…very clear. In my head. It was just darkness and then pain and confusion and then the realization that it was Charlie. He’d been gone for so long. He had come back. _Again_.”

Helena brings her hands back to grasp Myka’s forearms, as if needing something to hold onto.

“I thought he was Leo, that perverted _fuck_ ,” Helena cries, “and then I thought, as I realized it wasn't, _at least it isn’t..._ ”

Helena clamps her mouth shut tight, as if simply saying his name will summon him forth. It’s the first time, in a long time, Myka has heard that name from the woman below her. She presses a quick kiss to those lips. Anything she can do to erase the way that name sounds from this broken voice. Anything she can do to help rid Helena of the way it must feel to say it out loud.

“I can’t believe I ever wanted Charlie home.”

“He is your brother,” Myka says softly, _trying_ even though she herself has never understood why Helena tries.

“He is my brother,” Helena echoes, her voice laced with guilt and regret.

Helena’s eyes are not on Myka’s but somewhere over Myka’s shoulder, gazing up at the ceiling, looking into the past.

“He drags me out into the hallway. A light comes on. Our father is home. But useless. As always.”

Helena licks her lips and presses them together momentarily. She inhales before continuing.

“Charlie says, _I told you what would happen_ …”

Helena pauses. Her eyes drift slowly to Myka's.

“… _if I ever saw_ her _again_. And that look. I still cannot forget that look in his eyes…”

She closes hers.

She takes in several steadying breaths.

“He shoves me down and goes into my room. Closes the door… locks it.”

Kelly’s still in there but he thinks she’s Myka and doesn't know Kelly at all. Myka's only comfort in listening to this story is knowing that Kelly is still alive. That she must have come out of this relatively okay. Because she’s never mentioned what happened and doesn’t appear to be scarred by it. She didn’t return home from London broken. She’s always just said she had an amazing time.

Does Pete even know? Myka’s sure he’d have flown to London if he did. Killed Charlie himself. Recruited Myka to assist him. At least when the time came for a trial, they’d get to see each other one last time.

Helena’s voice pulls her away from her foolish thoughts. Back to the reality of everything Helena is saying.

“I can’t stand, there’s too much pain. Charles is at the door making demands for Charlie to open it. All we can hear are _things_. Everything. Being thrown _everywhere_. All I can imagine is him. Doing God knows what to Kelly. And thinking he’s doing all of those things to you. But she isn’t yelling or screaming or… _saying_ anything.”

Helena’s first thought is that he’s smothering her and she just can’t hear. He’s done it to her before. She knows how impossible it is to scream.

"Charles eventually calls the police."

Helena is on the floor crying outside of her own bedroom door. Banging on it. Screaming into it. Pulling and pulling at the doorknob, willing herself to have the strength to break it. But she can’t stand so she can’t kick it. She can’t even begin to try.

What feels like hours is less than two minutes before that door comes swinging open.

“It’s Kelly,” Helena says crying and smiling.

Kelly falls onto her knees and scoops Helena into her arms. Asks if she’s okay. Helps her to her feet. Carries her downstairs and out of the house with Charles’ help.

They are out on the street when the cops arrive. An ambulance follows soon after. When they eventually get Charlie out of the house, he is on a gurney, restrained, barely conscious, and bloodied. When they load him into the back of an ambulance, he is fighting against the restraints. He is screaming obscenities at _Myka_.

He still doesn’t know she’s _Kelly_.

Kelly threatens Helena’s father, in so many words, in both English and Spanish. He knows both languages fluently, so he cannot feign ignorance when she _tells_ him Helena is moving out. She's moving out and he’s going to arrange it, pay for it, and make it happen in less than a week or else she’s taking Helena _home_ and they are never coming back.

Even Charles knows that home for Helena isn’t there, with him and Charlie in London.

They spend two and a half nights with Wolly, whose heart is far larger than his home, then a car arrives to pick them up, to take them to Helena’s new flat. All of her things are there already or new if Charlie broke them. And it is that very first night they stay there, in Helena’s new place, when she calls Myka.

She is lying awake in bed at two in the morning. Kelly sound asleep beside her.

“I love you,” Helena had told her over the phone, “I miss you.”

Myka remembers hearing that sadness in her voice and she remembers trying to reassure her.

“He can’t hurt you, Helena.”

She was right, _Leo_ didn’t hurt Helena that time. He couldn’t possibly. But someone else definitely had.

***

At three o’clock in the morning, they are still awake. Helena lying in her arms, Myka holding her close.

She still finds it hard to believe in this moment, these several moments. She still finds it difficult to convince herself Helena’s here. So she presses her lips into Helena’s forehead and kisses to remind herself this is happening. She kisses an eyelid and a cheek. She presses a quick kiss to Helena’s lips.

They don’t speak anymore, not now. It’s unnecessary. They’ve said everything they needed to say. Helena has told everything she needed to tell and Myka has heard more than she had ever wanted to know. She is trying not to spend every second of their limited time thinking about it. She wants to file it away and save it for later. For when Helena is gone back to London and Myka has no choice but to think about all that she’s said.

They are quiet and watching each other now, in silence and almost unblinking. Myka wonders if, like her, Helena can’t pull herself to look away, to close her eyes, because it almost feels like letting go. It feels almost like giving each other up too soon.

There are only so many hours in the night, so many more in the day, before Helena has to be at the airport, flying off, back to London. Away from home for who knows how long this time. All over again.

Myka doesn’t want to acknowledge that she’s leaving so soon, they’d only just figured so much of this out and to let it all go before they could fully work through it is almost more frightening to Myka than being told about everything she never knew.

_Stay awake._

She is saying it over and over again, in the back of her mind, in the forefront of her mind and now in a whisper, as Helena’s eyes begin to close.

“Stay awake.”

It is almost a plea.

The smile Helena gives her is lazy but genuine, a gentle protest escapes her in the tiniest whimper. It is one of the sweetest sounds Myka has ever heard. It makes her heart ache for the woman in her arms. It makes her want to keep her and never let her go. Never let her leave again.

Myka trails a hand down Helena’s back, her fingers tracing Helena’s spine, moving tenderly over scarred skin, and further down to and over the curve of Helena’s ass. Her hand cups flesh, her fingers moving gently up and then down the space between the backside of her legs. Against warm skin beneath sheets. Through soft and barely-there curls. Over and gently, with just her middle finger, into the start of tender, wet flesh.

Helena moves slowly closer, moves her legs slightly apart. She is nuzzling against Myka, nose to nose, lips brushing lips. Eyes closing tight.

Helena presses her lips into Myka’s, gently at first. A simple kiss. A small peck. Then again for just a little longer. Another kiss that is just a little harder, a touch needier, as Myka’s hand trails up over Helena’s thigh and down between her legs.

A soft moan escapes lips still on Myka’s, still kissing hard and now deeper. Myka pulls her nearer with the arm that rests just under Helena’s head. She lures Helena’s hips closer with fingers gliding higher between still parting legs. She parts lips with fingers, catching the slickness of Helena’s need. She runs the tips of her fingers up and over Helena’s clit. Moves her middle finger swiftly back down, just over then too-quickly, judging by Helena’s moan of disapproval, out of place.

It’s a tease, though not an intentional one. Myka wouldn’t do that to Helena. Not right now, not in this state. Not after everything she’s learned.

Helena breathes out another soft sound, tilting her head back and away from Myka’s lips but they find new perch against that girl’s neck. Myka’s kiss is at first just a press of her lips and next it is her mouth, open and wet, sucking and biting sensitive freckled skin. Helena becomes slightly more vocal as Myka’s teeth press down just the tiniest bit harder. When Helena’s hips thrust involuntarily forward, further against Myka’s hand, Myka smiles into the wet spot on Helena’s neck. She kisses it gently.

Helena’s lips are back on her face, seeking hers out, demanding her kiss, and kissing her deeply. Helena’s hips are moving closer now, begging for more of her touch, pushing forward until Myka’s fingers fall into their place. A place they know so well. A place they had, before this night, still very much longed to be.

Myka has made due in Helena’s absence. She has not lost that touch. But nothing she could ever do to herself has come close to arousing her the way Helena’s arousal does.

She has never been delicate about this, giving Helena everything she needs, but tonight Myka takes her time and she takes Helena with extra care. She is gentle in her initial touches but firm when Helena’s body responds. She is trying not to think of all the places on this woman that Charlie has grabbed and hit and bruised, yet trying to find a far more gentler touch so as to not remind her of his grip.

But Helena is in a world all her own. She isn’t thinking about everything that’s happened and Myka’s guessing she’s had a lot of practice emotionally removing herself from that part of her past, regardless of how recent it occurred. Helena is right where she has waited, and waited for so long, to be. She doesn’t move slowly or with caution, despite Myka’s gentle care. She doesn’t hold back or try to save or savor this moment.

For once, this girl moves quickly. She wants it. She _takes_ it. Myka gladly hands it over.

She doesn’t take her time, not like she used to. And it doesn’t take long, not like it used to. For breath to escape her, hot against Myka’s mouth. For loud cries to be reduced to tiny whimpers as they hit the back of Myka’s throat. To come wild and free and untethered from _everything_ that has happened.

To both come and come home to Myka’s touch.

***

“What time is your flight?”

Myka’s heart somehow still aches for the woman she’s not yet removed her lips from. She asks this question not really wanting to know the answer and kissing that mouth before it can respond.

“Six,” Helena manages just before Myka’s lips catch hers again, before Myka's lips move to follow a trail of running water, cascading down Helena’s skin, “but I should probably be there… closer to four.”

The latest checkout they could get was noon.

Water is falling over Helena’s cheek, down to her neck, and pooling at the dip in her collar bone. Myka laps it up, drawing her tongue over cool skin, drinking away water as it rushes down and between her lips. She is moving her lips to Helena’s throat, sucking away at already sensitive skin, swallowing the reverberation of soft moans that narrowly escape the other woman.

Myka presses her body against Helena’s, they are breast to breast and still somehow moving closer. Helena’s back to the shower wall. Myka grasping with one arm around Helena’s waist, her other hand holding tight to the shower rail and steadying them both against the too-slippery shower floor. Helena’s hands are busy. Raking fingers into fallen wet curls. Moving fingernails less than gently across Myka’s back.

They have been this way for several minutes. Myka has no intention of letting go and, by her grip, neither does Helena.

Myka’s unsure how she managed to wake up an hour before that or how she pulled herself out of bed. Away from Helena, sleeping almost peacefully, nude and shivering by her side. She’d drawn a sheet up over Helena and slipped carefully out of her arms, so as to not disturb her sleep, and into the restroom for just a minute. Helena was awake when she’d returned, sat up in bed with tears on her face. Openly admitting she’d thought Myka had left.

She’d smiled, Myka at Helena, and sat in front of her, facing her on the bed. She leaned in close, into a kiss, just a small peck on her lips, and told her she’d never do that to her. She apologized for running away last night. Helena apologized for giving her a reason to run.

And then silence. They were quiet. Helena holding a sheet up above her breasts, still naked in bed. Myka dressed only in the shorts that she’d recovered from the floor.

“I need to shower,” she’d told Helena, “and brush my teeth.”

“Likewise,” Helena said softly, unsure, hesitant, just barely looking up at Myka while running her fingers across Myka’s bare arm.

Myka had smiled, reaching her hand to Helena’s short hair, pushing it out of her face and behind her ear. The motion brought a fleeting thought to Myka’s mind, of blonde strands and forgiving blue eyes, forever putting up with all of her bullshit. She wondered, only for a second, who those eyes were looking at in that moment. This early in the morning, still lying in bed. _Somewhere_ in this very same hotel.

Her thoughts wandered to the possibility of Sam doing _that_. Doing _this_. Having sex. Spending nights like the night she and Helena had shared. Spending nights like this with anyone at all but Allison in particular.

He’s never talked about it, not to Myka. He’s never joked about it or suggested it or brought it up in any way. Not intimacy or sex or any of his feelings toward women. Myka has only ever assumed he’s had them. She has only ever assumed he does.

But she finds it hard to imagine... or she's trying not to imagine it at all.

“Shower with me,” Myka whispered to Helena, more a statement than a question. She’d only expected one answer. And the answer that she’d received is exactly where they are standing now.

Teeth brushed. Breath laced with mint. Shower water running hot. Mouths kissing hotter. Hands touching and traveling and seeking out the other’s body. Fingers raking across wet skin.

Their smiles are relentless against hungry kisses, setting loose soft moans and whimpers that Myka won’t even begin to claim.

“I’ll be a prune before we’re done here,” Helena says softly against Myka’s mouth.

Myka arches a brow, a small smile forming between their lips.

“I like prunes,” she whispers, kissing and reaching beside her to shut off the water.

***

They are quiet and still, sat side-by-side on a hotel bed and facing but not quite looking at each other. Their hands rest, fingers tangled together, on the bed just between them. They are taking their time and taking in the proximity of their closeness. The sudden reality of where they are.

For Myka, it feels different now that the sun is up. Now that the darkness of night has lifted. Now that the curtains are wide open and light is spilling all around the room. Now that they can see each other, wide awake and sober, and mostly satisfied. Dressed and readying themselves, emotionally, to leave this place.

 _Together_.

For Myka, this feels like something entirely new. It feels like something unfamiliar.

Helena must be reading her mind when she asks, “Does it feel strange? Does it feel different now?”

“I don’t want to say yes,” but saying no would be a lie. Pretending nothing had changed would be a lie. Making Helena believe that everything about this feels exactly the same way as it did before would be a complete lie.

The other woman moves closer to her on the bed, moving her hand further into Myka’s, interlocking their fingers. Helena leans in against her, their shoulders touching. Her mouth is almost to Myka’s ear when she whispers, “This doesn’t have to mean anything more than this,” and squeezes her hand, “I don’t think _us_ is a thing we can just jump back into.”

Myka is about to respond to that when the room phone rings cutting her off and Helena turns away. She sighs. She looks utterly defeated. Myka is reluctant to answer to the demands of ringing, to break the contact between her and Helena. The comforting warmth of another body beside hers, leaning into her, needing her support. But she answers and it’s Jane on the other end of that line. She is talking to Myka’s mother in the background when Myka says hello.

“You ladies decent up there?”

“Yes,” Myka says. What she doesn’t say aloud is _unfortunately_ because all of this would be more familiar to her if they’d not been dressed. All of this silence would be more bearable if nothing else had existed between the two of them. Not distance. Not drama or _more_ abuse. Not words or clothes or feelings. Not unexpected phone calls from your _other_ mother.

“Claudia wants to say bye to Helena before we head out, if she has time? Since she didn’t get to see her after the reception.”

Myka turns to Helena, leaning further into her with her head on Myka’s shoulder, and says, “Sure, we have time,” into the phone just before setting a kiss against Helena’s hair. “We were just about to head down to the lobby, we can meet you guys in ten minutes?”

“Ten minutes,” Jane echoes, “see you girls then.”

***

In the lobby, Claudia has her arms wrapped tight around Helena’s waist. She is telling her she misses her, that she should come back again when she can stay for longer than a weekend. It's too far to travel, she tells her, to only stay for five days.

“It was a special occasion,” Helena smiles hugging Claudia close. Myka knows, when Helena’s eyes are next on her, that the special occasion she speaks of wasn’t a wedding.

The wedding was the excuse. Myka was the reason. And it had almost been for nothing, if Kelly hadn't intervened. Broken her promise to Helena. Brought Myka back down to earth, or hovering somewhere just above the dirt. That seems a more accurate description of what this weekend had become in Myka’s mind. Not quite grounded in reality. Falling just short of heaven.

Helena is beautiful even now as a defeated expression settles into her face. Even as Myka realizes that the look she’s giving Helena isn’t happy but pensive. It is more thoughtful than not. It is lingering precariously on the line between accepting all that has happened and regretting ever allowing it to.

She is trying not to miss the relationship she had with a Helena she loved almost two years ago. She is working hard to give _this_ Helena all of her love and support, to not ask for anything in return despite all that’s been on her mind.

Jane and Jeannie are emotional when they say goodbye to Helena. They remind her to call when she makes it back safely, they tell her she’s welcome home absolutely anytime she’s ready to return. She’ll always have a place to stay with them, she’ll always have this family behind her. But Myka knows, even as they are making all of these reassurances, that Helena would never return home if it meant living by any means other than her own.

They love her, they miss her. Tell her father hello if she sees him.

They don’t say a word to her about Charlie. Myka realizes now, they never do.

***

“It does,” Myka says once they are settled into the car in the hotel’s parking garage, “feel different.”

They’d established that long ago.

Helena is wiping away her tears after saying goodbye to Jane and Jean and Claudia. They hadn’t been speaking before now, they’d just been coasting through the silence, hand-in-hand, on their way to the car. Now Helena is looking up at Myka, waiting for her to finish her thoughts.

“Before, it was like quicksand. The more we _tried_ , the further we sank. This past year has felt like hitting absolute rock bottom with our heads still just barely above the surface. And now? Now it feels like we’ve finally found a way out. But we’re covered in…absolutely _everything_ that has happened, everything we’ve been through, and we’re both still too afraid to move. To move forward. Or… maybe that’s just me. Maybe that’s just how I feel about all of this.”

Helena lowers her head. She says softly, “It isn’t just you.”

“It does feel different,” Myka says once more, finally moving her eyes away from the wall of concrete before them and to the woman, beautiful even in her sadness, sat beside her, “Maybe it’s a good thing.” Myka reaches her hand across the console and sets it gently over the back of Helena’s on her lap. This not much older woman doesn't look at her, she turns away, but she moves her hand further into Myka’s, she moves her fingers to twine between Myka’s fingers and grasps gently. “Maybe this time we pay attention to where we’re going so we don’t just… fall into everything all over again.”

“So what do we do,” Helena questions bringing her gaze to Myka now, “where do we go from here? Quicksand metaphors aside.”

“It’s too early to worry about it,” Myka tells her, squeezing her hand gently, “It’s like you said Helena, _us_ isn’t a thing that you can easily jump back into. We just need to take our time, take care of ourselves. Each other?”

For the longest time they are still. Unmoving. Myka is watching Helena as she looks away again, as she seems to take in everything Myka has said. As she seems to be searching for anything at all to say in response.

“Helena…” Myka starts but stops when Helena turns back to her, leans in close and tugs Myka closer with a gentle tug of her hand. Helena slips her other hand around Myka’s forearm and pulls her gently closer as she leans in across the center console, as Myka leans, too.

Their lips come together in a kiss so tender, so sweet and yet so full of sadness, that Myka has to catch her breath. She inhales deeply through that kiss, exhales against Helena’s lips when they part. But she is still close. They are still _gazing_. Helena is still quiet, her eyes still red and watery and searching.

She smiles, just a gentle curl at the corner of her lip, before pressing her lips to Myka’s and kissing her again.

“You're right,” Helena whispers, her lips still so close to Myka’s they almost touch again, “and I trust you, Myka.” Helena moves her hand to Myka’s cheek and up through curls. “I apologize if I ever made you doubt that. I just thought…” she moves her hand to palm Myka’s cheek one second more, then further down to the side of her neck, thumb trailing over Myka’s lips, “I thought I was keeping you safe. But I trust you. More than I trust anyone else. More than I trust even myself.”

Myka kisses Helena’s thumb. She tells her, “You were keeping me safe. You _did_. Because I would have flown to London to get you and I’m not…” Myka smiles, puffing out a soft laugh, “I am no Kelly. I’m not sure I would survive standing up to Charlie but I would have gone down fighting.”

“I know you would have.”

“You know me well.”

Helena's smile is growing as she wipes away moisture from Myka’s cheeks. She leans in to close the space between them, pressing warm lips to warm lips, moving her hand further down Myka’s neck to the exposed skin at the collar of her shirt. That touch against Myka’s chest, over where her heart beats at a quickening pace, brings Myka _so close_ to feeling the way she used to.

But it is just at the edge of perfect. It is not quite ready to take the plunge.

_It is love but it is different. It is a different kind of love._

***

“When was the last time you ate?” Myka asks.

“Yesterday,” Helena says quietly, “at the reception.”

Lunch is one commitment that Myka can make today.

They are leaving the hotel, en route to the other side of the city, closer to the airport and a neighborhood they’d once shared their lives in. They are passing the college campus, the street that leads to the apartment where Myka used to live, when Helena slips her hand into Myka’s lap, her fingers resting on Myka’s inner thigh.

Myka isn’t expecting that touch. It takes her off guard. She doesn’t almost crash but the car sways just a little off course and this causes Helena to remove her hand quickly. To whisper a soft apology.

She tells Myka, “I’m sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. It’s just…” Helena sighs, “it’s beginning to feel so much like home.”

It’s been years since they’d driven this road together. But old habits die hard.

Myka reaches her hand across to Helena’s, capturing it in hers and pulling that hand back into her lap. She lets her hand stay, resting over Helena’s. Moving her fingers through Helena’s. Squeezing gently around Helena’s.

“It should feel like home,” Myka tells her softly, giving her a momentary glance, a small smile, before looking back toward the road, “it _is_ home.”

She feels Helena’s gaze linger upon her but she is quiet and unspeaking. She feels Helena’s fingers tighten around hers.

Minutes later, they are pulling up to a café.

***

“I remember this place,” Helena smiles, looking around at the décor.

It is a small café in their old neighborhood, not far away at all from the college. Myka knows, but she doesn’t say, it’s very near to Vanessa’s old townhouse, too.

She’d brought Helena only once before during that summer they’d shared her apartment. They could walk from where they lived, the entire street along the way lined with beautifully restored historic homes and locally owned businesses. But they’d rarely had the chance. They only made the walk a handful of evenings.

“It’s healthy,” is Myka’s only explanation for picking this location again. It doesn’t hold any significant meaning to them but she does remember, very well, the last time they were here.

They are settled in a booth near the large window at the front of the café. The sun coming through spreads just the right amount of warmth to combat the cold winter air outside. Helena is sat across from her, a mug filled with tea warming her hands.

“I’ve missed this place so much, I would have settled for a burger with crisps on the inside,” Helena sighs, gazing out of that window.

It is surprisingly busy for a Monday. For a Monday as cold as this.

“I’m not keeping you from class today, am I?”

Myka shakes her head no. “No classes. I’m going easy on myself this year.”

“That’s surprising.”

“I didn’t want to burn myself out trying to finish two degrees by summer.”

“I suppose that’s a good idea,” Helena smiles, “and plans for after graduation? Or are we just jumping right into the doctorate program?”

“I need to take a break from school. I need to have time to do other things. Maybe go somewhere. Or nowhere…” Myka shrugs, “focus on the bookstore for a while. Make it better. Less Warren-y, as Pete says, and more… Myka-y.”

“Myka-y?” Helena questions with a smile.

Myka shrugs a single shoulder, wholly uninterested in the topic.

“Myka, that bookstore--”

“Is my heart and soul and currently my sole source of income. My only work experience.”

“Well, what else would you _want_ to do? Teach? Write, perhaps? You are quite good at it.”

Myka gazes long and hard at Helena, silently asking why they are having this conversation. There are so many things that they could be discussing. So many more important things. The sort of things that should be talked about after you have sex with the woman you broke up with a year ago.

A woman who is leaving indefinitely, all over again, in less than four hours.

Myka reaches her hand across the table and rests her fingers over Helena’s. She moves her fingers between Helena’s fingers and lowers her forehead to the palm of her free hand.

“I want to talk about something more important to us than this,” she tells her.

Helena arches a brow and sits straight. It’s a sort of defensive position that she hasn’t seen in a while. Myka knows her bluntness stings but so does carrying on a conversation that neither of them is emotionally invested in having.

“Point received,” Helena says, looking away from Myka and pushing hair behind her ear, “although I don’t know what could possibly be more important to _us_ than school… and the future.” Helena turns back to Myka, expectant. Brow arching higher. Myka wants to roll her eyes at how quickly they’d reverted back to a place they know all too well.

She knows exactly the point Helena is making by drawing attention to their school careers. That is the one thing that has kept them steadily apart for the past several years. Her first instinct is to respond defensively because it hadn’t been Myka’s schooling that took her out of the country. It hadn’t been the demands of Myka’s family to play the part of _royalty_ that kept them away from one another for all of these years.

But Myka is still tired and she still misses Helena, even after everything they had done and said last night. She is sick and exhausted of thinking about things and overthinking things and she doesn’t want to think about anything anymore.

Especially when it comes to Helena, to their relationship to one another, to the things about them that they are still learning, that the other knows nothing about.

Myka doesn’t want anymore theatrics. She doesn’t care so much about the things that hurt her feelings and if she does care, she doesn’t want to say anything because it isn’t worth all that they’ve put each other through. She just wants her friend back. She wants her girlfriend back, too, but she’s allowing her mind to lead her heart on this one.

She’ll focus on just getting her friend back for now. On keeping this friend of hers _safe_.

Helena is up and sliding into the booth beside her, Myka slides closer to the window to make room. When she is settled, Helena leans in, pressing her lips to Myka’s and kisses her gently.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to--”

“I want you to tell me,” Myka says softly, cutting her off, “that when I take you to the airport and watch you walk away from me and fly back to London, that I’m not going to regret letting you go. That I’m not letting you walk back into all of this utter bullshit that I just found out about. That _your father_ has forced you to live through.”

Helena doesn’t seem to expect this. Myka looks up at her with all of the concern and worry she can possibly muster and Helena moves her hands into Myka's lap, to rest over her thigh.

“Helena--”

“Charlie’s gone, Myka.”

“Charlie is always gone,” Myka tells her, “he is always gone and then he is always back. That’s what he does every single time--”

Helena cuts her off with another kiss, moving her hands into Myka’s and pulling their hands into her lap. When they part she says it again. “He’s gone. Charles won’t tell me where he’s gone to or why or for how long but it doesn’t matter, Myka. I used to think he was worth saving because he’s my brother but it doesn’t matter now. I have my own flat, Charlie is gone, and Charles has assured me that Charlie doesn’t know where I live. That I’m safe. That you’re safe, too.”

Myka’s not sure what this new thing is, Helena calling her dad by his first name but it saddens her. That Helena means to distance the last remaining family member she has. That Helena _has_ to distance herself from him, just to stay afloat. She does the same thing just to feel like she can breathe around her father. Just to separate herself from the man who didn’t quite raise her right.

“Why are you here, if you really believe that? If the only reason you came was to make sure I was still alive?”

“In two years,” Helena says softly, “I have had less than five days of being with you. Stacked against everything Charlie has said, Myka, I just… I needed to see you,” Helena’s hands are on Myka’s cheeks, “I needed to see you for myself and know that you were okay. Logically, I know Charlie can’t come back but… I needed to be sure he hadn’t found a way.”

“He hasn’t,” Myka says quietly, bringing her hands up over Helena’s and pulling them back into her lap.

“Charles just says I should be happy. He says that I _won_.”

Maybe Helena wants to be alone. To have no one holding her back, no one to worry over. To fly thousands of miles to check in on. Maybe that’s why she pushes so hard and so often to put distance between them, too. Maybe that’s why Myka does the same exact thing to just about every person she loves.

“I hate your father for treating you like you’re some kind of chess piece that he can just move around wherever he likes. Like your life is all a game.”

Helena kisses her again and whispers, with a soft smile, “Check mate.”

They are both just trying to stay ahead.

***

“Hey stranger!”

They are outside of the café and almost to the car when Myka hears the familiar call and even Helena, who has stopped walking, lends her a curious glance. They turn together to find Abigail, Myka is fairly certain that is _her_ Abigail, approaching them with a hand in the air, waving.

She is tugging a very reluctant-to-be-seen Giselle along behind her.

“Abigail?” is how Myka greets her, first with confusion and then with a wide smile. There is no hesitancy in their approach, when Abigail reaches her they embrace. She is warm and holding Myka tight. Myka is overwhelmed with feelings and smells she hasn’t felt or smelled in a long time and she squeezes Abigail closer, inhales a little bit deeper.

This is her talker. This is the girl who is always right. And Myka doesn’t know just how much she has missed seeing her until Abigail is in her arms.

Behind Abigail, Giselle stands awkwardly for only a moment before she is greeting Helena in much the same way. And when they have parted, Myka greets Giselle with a silent arch of her brow. Abigail greets Helena, at first with a soft and pleasant hello, next with joyful resignation as she pulls Helena too into a big hug.

It is the most cordial Myka has seen them since the last time she saw them together but they’d had no choice then. It was at the Donovans grave sites and absolutely no one had the nerve for disdain.

“What are you two doing here?” Myka asks.

“Not to sound rude,” Helena supplies, giving Myka a cautionary glance.

Helena correcting Myka’s tone with both of their ex-girlfriend’s is a sight Myka never thought she’d ever see.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” Myka apologizes, laughing softly, “it’s just that… I see Giselle every week and she’s never mentioned…”

Giselle’s eyes are wide and full of guilt. She is giving a look at Myka and Myka knows that sort of look well, even if she’s never seen it on Giselle before.

“Never mind,” Myka says, not finishing her original thought but smirking mischievously at Giselle. The look she receives in response is bordering on menacing.

“You haven’t told Myka that we work together?” Abigail asks, glancing back at Giselle suspiciously as Giselle’s expression shifts back to one of guilt.

“ _Well_ …” Giselle starts but doesn’t finish.

“You work together,” Myka asks, smile growing, “at the hospital?”

“Well, not _together_ ,” Abigail clarifies, “but in the same building, with the same kids.”

“I’m on a different floor,” Giselle insists, as if _that_  makes all the difference.

“Not that you’d be able to tell, as much time as you spend on mine.”

“ _Well_ …” Giselle says, allowing that word to linger again.

A younger Myka, a Myka that existed before the Myka who dated Helena Wells for three years, would not think twice about this interaction. Would not question the proximity of these two old friends of hers. Two old friends who had known each other long before Myka ever knew them. But _this_ Myka, a Myka that has always known Abigail well, that has gotten to know Giselle quite well too, cannot be so easily fooled.

She makes a mental note to ask Giselle, much later and when they’re alone, exactly how long she and Abigail have been _working_ together.

In her mind, she's maging the air quotes.

For now the conversation will have to wait because Abigail is yawning. She apologizes and tells them their shifts have just ended. That they’re going to grab a quick bite to eat before they head home.

Myka assumes she means their _respective_ homes but she doesn’t actually know. She intends to find out.

Abigail asks how long Helena is in town for and suggests that they all do dinner sometime. She looks genuinely disappointed when Helena tells them she and Myka are on their way to the airport now. There is a blur of conversation that Myka thinks should be awkward but doesn’t actually feel awkward, when Abigail tells Helena, “Next time you’re in town, let’s all make plans to go out and catch up,” and when Helena responds genuinely with, “I would love that.”

And then Helena, who has obviously been thinking the same thing Myka is thinking about Giselle and Abigail existing in the same small space together, says, “Let’s make it a double date.”

Myka has never seen Giselle _pale_ before but when she sees it now, she has to stifle her own laughter. She makes a mental note to tease Giselle about that later, too. Abigail, for her mart, just beams out a smile and says, turning a look on Giselle, "Double date it is."

There are hasty goodbyes. Giselle is in a big rush to _get away_. But she still has enough time to hug and press her cheek to Helena’s cheek. To whisper something into Helena’s ear. To kiss Helena’s cheek softly before heading off with Abigail, in the direction of the cafe.

“That was… peculiar,” Helena says as they watch them go. As, just before they walk through the doors, Abigail moves her arm to link with Giselle’s.

“I think our ex-girlfriends are dating,” Myka laughs softly and when Helena turns to her, brow arched in what Myka believes is both curiosity and amusement, she adds, “the weirdest thing about it is that I’m kind of happy for them.”

Helena’s smile grows just at the corner of her mouth and she moves her arm to lock with Myka’s, much like Abigail had with Giselle.

"What did Giselle whisper to you?"

"Wouldn't you like to know."

"Yes, actually, that's why I asked."

With a roll of her eyes and a broadening smile, Helena tells Myka, "She said you make me happy--"

"You make her happy?" Myka questions.

" _You_ make _me_  happy," Helena clarifies, "and I make you happy, too."

"Huh, I guess I stand corrected," Myka says thoughtfully.

"On what?" Helena asks, pressing her body closer to Myka's to shield herself from the cold as they set off for the car.

"The weirdest thing about this is that... _they've_  always been happy for _us_."

“How far we have come."

***

“You missed the turn off for departures,” Helena says softly, unsure of herself, as Myka is pulling into the airport parking lot.

“I wasn’t aiming for it,” Myka tells her, flashing her a soft smile, “Helena, did you really expect me to drop you off on the side of the road and drive away?”

“After this weekend, I’m not sure what to expect anymore.”

***

“Did you really want to take me away from my parents?”

Helena, when she looks to Myka, looks perplexed by this sudden conversation. They are sat side-by-side in the airport, just outside of security, and they have said very little before now.

“When you thought there was a chance that we could be sisters,” Myka clarifies.

Helena’s expression softens now into one of familiarity. A soft, nasally sound escapes her as her lips curl into a half-hearted smile. She seems to be remembering something. Thinking about the moment Myka’s mother had spoken of. Finding some sort of humor in it now.

“That was a long time ago,” Helena says quietly, reaching her hand to Myka’s hand that rests in her lap. When their hands are together, their fingers link, and Helena sits further back in her seat. “I don't know if I ever truly believed we were sisters but if it would get you out of that house... I begged Charles to try. He insisted he had no grounds to.”

“For as long as I can remember, Helena,” Myka sighs and lowers her head to look down at their hands in her lap, “you have been looking out for me. Sometimes in ways I never knew.”

Helena looks away from her now.

“And I have been _so mad_ about it for so many reasons but it has taken me this long to realize that my anger toward you is… _selfish_.”

Helena’s hand squeezes hers gently but she doesn’t turn back or say a word about it.

“You were fighting to keep me in the dark, to protect me. To give me some sense of a childhood where my father gave me none. And I was mad at you for keeping secrets because of… a relationship. A relationship that… maybe we never should have been in.”

Helena turns to Myka now and Myka smiles softly at the older woman beside her.

“Maybe I was never truly ready for us.”

“Myka…” is all Helena manages before lowering her eyes again.

“I know now, Helena, that I still have a lot of growing up to do. I know it because I’m still mad and I still have to tell myself that I shouldn’t be. In my head, I know you have been through hell, that you were just trying not to drag me down with you, but in my heart… I’ve missed you. I have been so alone without you. And knowing you didn’t need me through all of that? It hurts. Whether I can justify it in my head or not.”

Myka is turning to Helena now, moving her hand to Helena’s cheek and urging the older woman to look up and face her.

“I am exhausted by my anger for everything that has happened between us. I am tired of being mad at you for what has basically amounted to you making all of the hard decisions. Everything that we have been through, everything we have survived both together and apart, isn’t your fault… and it isn’t mine, either.”

“Then who is at fault?”

Myka says quickly and firmly, “My father, your father… Charlie and…”

She doesn’t say Leo’s name. She doesn't need to say it ever again. Helena closes her eyes and closes them tight. Tears falling down her cheeks and Myka lowers her hand from Helena’s chin. She lets Helena turn away again.

Myka exhales slowly.

“I’m sorry, Helena,” Myka says softly, wrapping her arms slowly around her friend from beside her as Helena still refuses to turn. Helena refuses to allow Myka to see her face. “I am sorry for everything that you have been through without me and everything we’ve been through together that I have blamed you for.”

Helena is sinking further into Myka’s hold, she begins sobbing into Myka’s embrace. Almost too quiet for Myka to hear when Helena whispers, “I needed you,” and moves her face against Myka’s shoulder, moves her arms around Myka’s waist, “I have never not needed you, Myka. I have just barely survived without you. Please,” she continues, “don’t ever think, for a single second, that I didn’t need you or that I don’t still...”

Myka moves her mouth to Helena’s ear and whispers through her own tears, “I’m sorry, Helena. For leaving you. For letting you walk away from me. For never knowing what was going on. I am sorry for everything. You are my best friend, Helena, and I absolutely need you too.”

***

Myka shouldn’t be driving.

Not with so many tears in her eyes. Not with so much hurt and simultaneously so much of what is just at the edge of love competing for space inside of her heart. Myka is on the freeway, she is wiping away tears and sniffling and trying her best to see through the blur and fog of her glasses.

She shouldn’t be driving at all.

In her mind, she is replaying their goodbye. She is thinking of how quickly things had escalated from not talking about anything to do with them at all, to the two of them sobbing in each other’s arms and kissing each other’s faces. She is thinking of herself wiping tears from Helena’s face and willing herself not to beg Helena to stay. She is thinking of the look Helena gave her in return, the one that seemed to plead with Myka to ask her not to go.

But they need this separation almost as much as they needed to be brought together. They need time apart to collect themselves and their emotions and figure out what any of this really means for them. For their future. Either together or apart.

Myka is sure they need this.

They need all of this distance and for once they both agree that it will bring them closer together.

Helena’s voice from earlier echoes in Myka’s thoughts and then on her lips.

“How far we have come.”

***

Myka has only just returned home to the sedating smell of Kelly’s cooking and somehow Kelly doesn’t register Myka’s presence when she comes up the stairs and through the door. Kelly is digging in the refrigerator, pulling out vegetables and by the time she sees her, Myka has already descended upon her from behind.

She wraps Kelly in her arms.

“What is happening?” Kelly asks cautiously, body tensing against Myka’s embrace.

Myka says nothing but squeezes her tighter, holds her closer. She closes her eyes and buries her face in Kelly’s hair.

“Are you okay? You’re starting to scare me.”

Myka opens her mouth to speak but Pete is suddenly behind them.

“It’s finally happening,” he declares.

Myka and Kelly both turn to him perplexed. Kelly still wrapped up in Myka’s hold. Myka still not letting go.

“She has finally lost her mind and started hitting on my girlfriend,” Pete says it only half-joking, “Mykes. Step away from my woman.”

Myka turns to Kelly and whispers, “Does he know?”

“Does he know what?” Kelly asks aloud, annoyed.

“About Helena and London and Charlie? About you?”

Pete grunts, catching both of their attentions again, his face falls completely straight. Any playfulness that had resided there has given way to the anger that now settles into his expression.

“Never mind,” Myka says cautiously, slowly releasing her hold on Kelly, “think I just got my answer.”

Kelly rolls her eyes and gently pushes herself away from Myka and moves to the counter with the items she’d retrieved from the refrigerator. She tells Myka, “Of course Pete knows.”

“Wish I didn’t,” Pete says aloud and then, just under his breath, “he’s lucky I had orders, I’ll say that much.”

Myka sighs heavily. Slowly exhaling away that old familiar feeling of being left out of the loop and needing to blame it all on Helena. It isn’t Helena’s fault.

“We talk to each other, Myka. That’s what people in relationships do. Especially when one of those people might actually need the other one to be there for them. _Emotionally_ ,” Kelly explains and Myka won’t bother bringing up all of the not-talking they’d done when Pete had just returned home. All of the denying of problems that led to fighting because Kelly refused to talk to Pete about the scary things she didn’t want to know.

Myka is smart. She knows better. She’ll just keep all of that to herself.

“That's what I’ve been trying to encourage Helena to do with you and you with her.”

“I think we’re getting there,” Myka says softly.

She is not quite letting go of the anger but she isn’t allowing it to move through her in the same way it always has. She is acknowledging her fears and doing so with caution. She is doing what she thinks she has needed to do for a very long time. And only by the sudden weightlessness of her soul does she know that this is a step in the right direction. That this new thing they are trying, where she gives Helena a chance and Helena gives her _anything at all_ , is exactly the thing that they need to be doing to get to wherever they need to go.

“Thank you, Kelly.”

“Why are you thanking me non-sarcastically?” Kelly asks skeptically, “Why do you sound so serious?”

“For being there,” Myka clarifies, “for Helena. When I wasn’t. When she didn’t want me to be or when I didn’t think that I was needed… _whatever_. However that story goes.”

“Helena likes thinking she’s alone. That she can push everyone away. That she has a good reason for doing so.”

“Sometimes it’s easier,” Pete interjects softly, taking a seat at the dining table.

“I get it,” Kelly acknowledges his statement before turning to Myka again, “but she’s not alone and she can’t possibly push all of us away, no matter how hard she tries. When it wasn’t me, it was Liam. When it wasn’t Liam, it was William. And, I know you’re going to hate me for saying this but even Maggie did her part.”

“I know,” Myka says, trying very hard not to grumble at the memory of Maggie taking a too-intoxicated Helena to Wolly’s house one night. Myka sighs, “And you guys pushed back. You _more_ than pushed back. You saved her. When she told me everything that happened? Even knowing that you’d made it out of that room…” Myka allows her voice to trail away.

Pete is standing and shaking his head. He says, “If we’re talking about Charlie, I cannot be here,” and without another word, he disappears into the hallway. A bedroom door slams closed seconds later.

Myka turns to Kelly again who is busying herself with cooking and not acknowledging Pete’s disappearance, so Myka walks to her side in the kitchen and leans against the counter.

“I can't believe you were worried about me,” Kelly says with a small smile and glance in Myka’s direction, “especially _after_ the fact.”

“He _attacked_ you.”

“No,” Kelly laughs softly, “he tried to attack _you_. What he got, instead, was _me_. If you think that’s the first time I’ve had to fight off some high-as-a-kite dumb fuck trying to have his way with me, then you and I need to take a little road trip down to south Texas. I have a couple of stories to tell you along the way.”

Myka is quiet. She doesn’t know what to say to that. She’d always known and teased Kelly about being scrappy. She’d always guessed part of that had developed out of necessity. But she’d never known why. She’d never bothered to ask. And at this point in her life, with all that has happened with Helena, she’s beginning to see how it could be difficult to talk about. How it is easier, especially for Kelly, to not take those things that might have happened to her all that seriously.

“Was it selfish of me to be mad at her for not telling me anything, even if she was trying to protect me? I know why she didn’t say anything and I understand but I… I still don’t completely trust our ability to be together, to function as a couple because of it. Is it bad that I forced her to tell me? That I gave her no other option?”

“I thought the whole point of you knowing was so that you could decide for yourself how you feel about everything that’s happened. You have the truth, Myka. How does it make you feel?”

The truth makes her feel nauseous. It makes her want to vomit. It makes her hate everything about Helena’s brother Charlie, including the two most influential men in his life. Helena’s father. Her own father. She’s starting to hate Helena’s absent mother, too. The truth is sickening and it repulses her to know what happened, to know that it _did_ happen, to think that if she’d only known about it as it were happening… maybe she could have stopped it.

She would have done everything in her power to stop it. She’s sure she would have found the right amount of threats to send to Helena’s father… to get him to let go of her and send her back home. She’s sure she could have found a way, if only she’d had the chance, to keep Helena from leaving her _true_ home. But now… _now_ they are so far beyond the point of Helena needing saving that it no longer matters.

Whatever Myka would have done to save Helena, a woman she’d always known as the love of her life, it doesn’t matter. _Myka_ doesn’t matter. She’d been non-essential throughout Helena’s history and she doesn’t know why, thinking back on it, she’s so surprised to learn all of this _now_.

Even if Helena _thinks_ she needs Myka, she doesn’t really need Myka.

She can be angry about it all she wants. Her anger isn’t going to change the fact that Charlie is gone now. That Kelly had been the one to save Helena. That Helena no longer needed saving or, more importantly – because Myka is making an attempt to not think so selfishly – that Helena is safe. That Charlie is no longer a threat. And all is right in the world.

“I want her to move home,” is the answer Myka gives Kelly. Kelly doesn’t seem surprised by this comment. She just smiles and nods and says softly, “ _Obviously_.”

“For what it’s worth, Myka,” Kelly goes on to say but she is still not looking at Myka, she is still not turning her attention away from the task before her, “I don't blame Helena for not telling you about Charlie. After the things I heard coming out of his mouth, thinking he was talking to you?” Kelly looks to Myka and only now does she allow their eyes to meet, “I wouldn’t have told you a damn thing about it. The line between protecting the mental health of the people you love and keeping them informed may be a little fuzzy to you… but Helena has always known exactly where she needed to draw it.”

Myka puffs out a soft sigh.

“Well… not _always_ ,” Kelly laughs softly to herself, turning back to the counter to chop vegetables again, "but in Charlie's case..."  
  
Kelly just nods to herself and that's all. That is the end of that conversation.

***

Just before Christmas, Myka has lunch with Giselle. It is an occasion that is long overdue but Giselle has been avoiding her for two weeks, claiming to be busy with work until Myka finally just told her, “I don't care that you’re dating Abigail.”

Giselle hadn’t said a thing about it in response. Only asked to meet up for lunch to talk about it and now here they are. At Leena’s Diner because it’s quick and easy and also because Myka’s _Helena_ car has been giving her trouble. This is a conveniently short walk.

“We’re not dating,” is the first thing Giselle says when Myka settles into a booth across from her, “and how the hell did I get here before you? You live like two blocks away.”

“Well, if you _were_ dating, you wouldn’t have to hide it from me,” Myka assures her, “also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it’s snowing outside. The sidewalk is a little icy. I wanted to put my old cleats on but clearly opted for comfort and style over my own safety.”

“ _Clearly_ ,” Giselle says skeptically, arching a brow as she gives Myka’s attire a once over.

“Shut up,” Myka scolds playfully, “so what have I done to earn the privilege of your company today?”

“Actually, _that_ is something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about…”

“My privilege or my style?” Myka asks, looking down at her own outfit.

She’d been second-guessing a lot of her winter fashion but she’d not seen Giselle nearly often enough to get any cold-weather wear tips from her. And she hadn’t previously thought twice about what mimicking Giselle’s fashion might mean for her privilege.

Suddenly she’s _thinking_ about it in a way that Giselle would force her to think about it…

But Giselle is rolling her eyes up and slowly down saying, “ _Abigail_. I’m talking about Abigail. And dating. And the probability of that maybe possibly happening in the future.”

Myka’s brow shoots up with intrigue.

“I like her,” Giselle admits, “a _lot_. But we aren’t dating. We just see each other, mostly in passing, and talk when we can. Sometimes we catch a bite at the end of our shifts. Informal things like that. It’s never been intentional or… purposeful.”

“And you _work_ together, apparently. Why didn’t you tell me _that_?” Myka asks.

“I didn’t know how to bring it up,” Giselle sighs, “I mean, at first there was nothing to bring up. Her mother and my mother are friends. Hannah, with Abigail’s help, really hooked me up when I was applying for residency but Abigail and I didn’t see much of each other until the hospital’s Halloween festival and after that… _what_?”

Myka doesn’t know why Giselle stops and questions her. She imagines it might have something to do with the giant smile on her face. Or maybe it’s because she can’t seem to turn away from the sight of Giselle, _of all people_ , fretting over talking to a woman.

A woman that she _knows_. A woman that even tolerated dating _Myka_.

But Giselle doesn’t say anything about that. She heaves out a sigh of what Myka believes is resignation and continues speaking on the origin of her situation.

“Seeing her working with the kids at the hospital, and not just any kids but _my_ kids, the kids I also work with? It kind of… does me in. She is phenomenal with them and I have realized, over these past couple of months, that it’s because she is just… a phenomenal woman.”

Giselle laughs softly at that statement and Myka isn't sure why but she’s still smiling at the sight of the person across from her, a smitten version of Giselle she’s never seen before.

“I have a lot of respect for Abigail. I always had when we were younger but back then she was just Michael's kid sister. It’s different now that we’re adults. Now that we’re moving almost at the same pace, although she is moving… very quickly and very far ahead of me.

“She’s extremely intelligent and she’s gorgeous and she’s…” Giselle is exasperated.

“A talker,” Myka supplies, resting her cheek into her palm, perplexed by her own admiration for how Giselle gushes over Myka’s ex-girlfriend, “And compassionate and thoughtful and I am acutely aware of all of her _attributes_.”

“And I have a lot of respect for you and your… _awareness_ , Bering. I wasn’t sure how to bring it up to you. How to ask if you would mind without… just assuming there was a chance it was even going to happen. Or knowing if I even wanted it to happen. It seemed best to… leave it alone.”

“I dated your ex-girlfriend,” Myka teases, “seems only fair that you should be allowed to date mine.”

Giselle rolls her eyes and shakes her head and says, “Helena is _all_ yours. You've earned it after all of these years.”

Myka laughs at that and asks, “Does Abigail have any idea?”

“About?”

“That you’re attracted to her?”

“No, I don’t… I don’t think so. I haven’t told her but it’s not just…” Giselle starts but pauses. Myka arches a brow in wait.

“It’s not just _what_?”

“Attraction,” Giselle admits. “You know me, Bering. I don’t have a problem talking to women but Abigail isn’t _women_.”

“So what is it then? And what is _she_ ,” Myka asks with a soft laugh, “because you’re starting to worry me. If you, of all people, cannot get the girl then there’s little hope for the rest of us.”

“What I’m saying is that I don’t _just_ find Abigail attractive,” Giselle corrects slowly, running her hands down and over her face, “I think I kind of… have much stronger feelings than that. I think there’s a possibility that I, you know…”

Myka waits.

“ _Love_ her,” Giselle finishes softly, through gritted teeth. As if saying it this way is like she isn’t saying it at all.

Myka’s brow arches again. Giselle peaks out at her from between her fingers.

“If you think that shit-eating grin is supposed to make me feel good or better about this happening, it’s not,” Giselle says, “it’s actually kind of creeping me the fuck out.”

“You just told me you love Abigail and I didn’t even know you were talking to Abigail until I ran into you two having secret breakfast together two weeks ago,” Myka laughs. “I’m sorry but it’s… this grin is genuine. I’m… _amused_.”

Myka doesn’t know why she finds this predicament of Giselle’s so amusing. This has always come so naturally to Giselle and the one time that it doesn’t… it’s Abigail. The one time Giselle questions her ability to sweep a woman off her feet, it is the very first woman that Myka had ever been involved with.

And Myka, for her part, doesn’t even care.

She cares a lot but she doesn't care in the way she’s used to caring… where her feelings get hurt and she takes everything personally. Where being rejected, even when she was the one doing the initial rejecting, is an affront to her natural goodness. Everything she strives for. Everything she believes herself to both be and be worthy of.

Myka is laughing again but this time it is at herself and mostly at her _past_ self. The her that has always sought out personal happiness by way of romantic relationships with others. The her that thought life _owed_ her that happiness, for everything she’d been through. The her that just expected all things romance would just fall simply and easily, right into her lap.

“Glad I could provide you with some entertainment,” Giselle sighs.

“Don’t take that the wrong way, Giselle. I’m sorry, maybe saying I’m _amused_ is the wrong word choice.”

“You think?” Giselle is incredulous.

“I am _happy_ for you and I am happy for Abigail because I have eyeballs in my head that work on occasion and from what I saw of you two that morning outside of the café? The feeling is probably mutual. Also, I love Abigail and I, ya know, kinda love you, too. So…”

“Look, don't try to get me all worked up right now woman,” Giselle warns.

Myka hides her smile behind her hand to spare Giselle whatever emotions she’s feeling, then lowers it to say, “You don’t need my permission to act on your feelings for Abigail, Gigi King, but if it makes you feel better to hear me say it? _You have my blessing_.”

Giselle, Myka can see, is trying very hard not to accept or believe or have faith in her words but eventually she puffs out a soft and incredulous laugh. She lets her hands and arms fall to the table and rests her forehead down over them.

“Why am I like this?” Giselle groans. “What is _wrong_ with me?”

“It’s not you,” Myka reassures, “it’s _her_. She is an easy person to love. Once you get past all of the talking.”

Myka winks. She thinks it is quite possibly the smoothest thing she has ever done in her life.

Giselle groans.

“You should try bathing with one of her mother’s homemade soaps. See how that works out for you.”

***

“I need to talk through something.”

“Okay…”

Helena’s voice sounds hesitant as she moves into view on Myka’s laptop screen and it is now, only now, that Myka realizes why the other woman had questioned  her rush to have this conversation.

But Myka needed to talk. Myka needs to talk. And Helena, in these past few months since the wedding, since they’d reunited and began working on their friendship from a distance, had become the confidant Myka had always known her to be. The opposite of her talker Abigail, the listener, the problem solver and, less occasionally, the problem creator.

Right now the problem is that Helena isn’t wearing clothes.

She is wrapped in a towel, still dripping wet and fresh from the shower. Her short dark hair almost begins to curl and that’s new, Myka thinks. She’s never seen that before. Had it done that at the hotel in December? She must not have been paying that close attention to Helena's hair at the time.

In fact, she's sure she wasn't.

Myka is wide-eyed when Helena calls her name. She blinks. She closes her mouth.

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

To that, Helena rolls her eyes and tugs that towel much tighter around herself.

“You needed to talk,” she presses.

Myka takes in a deep breath and moves her eyes to Helena’s eyes, away from Helena’s… everywhere and everything else.

“I care too much,” Myka says finally.

“Well, don’t pat yourself on the back too hard.”

“No,” Myka is serious, Helena raises a brow, “I mean about _Dad_. About _my_ dad.”

Confused, Helena asks, “Okay? Would you care to… elaborate?”

“Rebecca called…”

Rebecca had called Myka the morning before asking her to check in on her father because he hadn’t been answering the phone, not since early the day before. It’s unlike him, was the reason she’d given Myka, even if that was the only _him_ that Myka ever knew. But she trusted the tone in Rebecca’s voice. She trusted Rebecca. And if she was worried? Then there was probably a very good reason for her to be worried.

“I wouldn’t ask you,” Rebecca had told her, “if I didn’t think something was wrong. And Tracy isn’t answering her phone. I wouldn’t ask, Myka…”

Myka knew that was true. She knew Rebecca would have never asked unless she was absolutely _sure_. So she took Pete along with her, just in case. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d arrived to her father’s house to find him in a drunken stupor of anger and anguish, grief and denial. If she’d found him that way, it would not have been unexpected.

But what they’d found _was_ unexpected. Her father collapsed in the entryway of his home, clutching mail he’d retrieved, Myka can only guess, an entire evening before. The front door ajar. His skin a soft shade of blue and freezing cold to the touch.

Pete felt for his pulse while Myka dialed 911. He found it. Just barely. He was just barely alive. Hanging on somehow. That Bering stubbornness that ran through their family, thicker than blood.

Pete could only stomach his proximity to Myka's father just long enough to check his vitals. Even if he needed reviving, Myka's sure Peye wouldn't have done it. Not for her or Tracy, much less for Rebecca.

So they moved him from the tile flooring to the carpet, wrapped him in a thick blanket, and let the paramedics, when the ambulance arrived, do the rest.

And only after the ambulance had gone with her father inside, after they’d cleaned up the mess he’d left behind in the entry, after they’d called Rebecca (hundreds of miles away, visiting her daughter in Chicago) and followed the ambulance to the hospital just to make sure everything was _okay…_ only then did Myka stop to breathe.

To take collect her breath. To check her own pulse. To calm her heart.

What happened was _frightening_. Seeing her father like he was, like she’d found him, as he was collapsed on the floor? It was… something so familiar while being altogether strange and new. Because back then it had been liquor and she’d almost always known what to expect but now it could have been the absolute end of him.

Now she knows for sure that she’s afraid it very well could have been.

“Now,” Helena says watching Myka thoughtfully from thousands of miles away, “you don’t know what to expect.”

“I know what to expect from him,” Myka says softly, letting go of her breath, allowing her eyes to wander around the screen, over Helena’s skin, still exposed and shining where the water from her hair drips onto her shoulders, “I expect him to go away. I expect him to be gone. But me? I don't…”

Myka wants to kiss those shoulders. Even if the love is still not quite there. The memory of her lips against Helena’s skin, of Helena’s hands in her hair and Helena’s whisper in her ears is enough to want it all over again.

She is nostalgic. She wants to go back in time. Before Helena was in London. Before her father was dying. Before life was complicated, before adulthood and responsibilities and having to confront all of these things at once was ever truly a thing.

She wants to go back in time.

“I want to go back.”

“Back where?” Helena asks.

Myka hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

She closes her eyes and moves the palms of her hands against her face, warm and smothering her own breath, breathing out hot air against her hands before she moves them into her hair.

“Before _everything_.”

When her eyes meet the screen again, almost exactly to Helena’s eyes, the other woman is licking her lips, she is biting down on her bottom lip softly.

Myka lets go of another heavy breath.

“I’m sorry, Helena. You probably have to get to your class.”

“I’m fine.”

“How has teaching been going?”

“We’re talking you through an existential crisis,” one of Helena’s hands moves through her hair and then down against her bare shoulder, rubbing it softly, the other hand still holds tight to the edges of her towel, “my teaching can wait.”

She smiles a soft and teasing smile. It is gone before it ever fully forms.

“The thing that Tracy talks about,” Myka says, getting back on track, “the reason she moved back home? Because she’s afraid she doesn’t know how she’s going to feel or what’s going to happen?”

Helena nods, the image of her growing larger as she leans in closer to her own screen.

“I’m beginning to see… what she means. All this time, I was expecting to feel free. I was expecting the anger would just melt away, like his death was my escape from everything he's ever done to me and my life would be made instantly better. But now... I've had a glimpse of that feeling and it is anything but that. It isn't... freeing. It didn't make me feel happy or even better. It was suffocating. And scary and panicked.”

They are quiet for several long moments. Helena watches Myka. Her eyes are moving all over her screen. She is shaking her head ever so slightly, moving her hand to touch the laptop. Myka can only assume she is reaching out to _her_.

“However you feel,” Helena says softly and with a much broader shake of her head, “you’re allowed to feel that way. However your father dying… however his eventual death hits you…”

Myka has heard these words. Not just today. Not just from Helena.

“I don’t want it to hit me,” Myka shakes her head, “at all. After everything he’s done to me and Mom and Trace…” Myka lifts her eyes and Helena must know what she’s going to say next because she lifts her eyes, too, “After everything he’s done to _you_?”

“Myka, you don’t really have a say--”

“I don't want to feel bad about this, Helena. Not for him. I just want it all to go away. I just want all of us to be safe and set free from this... constant reminder.”

She can finally feel the warmth of tears burning in her eyes, hot and stinging, falling away as her eyes flutter shut. As she leans forward to rest her face in her hands. As she hears Helena’s voice, not quite Helena’s but Helena through the inadequate speakers of her laptop, calling out to her again.

“I love you, Myka,” she says softly and it makes Myka laugh. She doesn’t look up, she lets her arms fall to her desk and brings her head down to rest over them, “I love the way you have always loved me.”

“But it’s different now,” Myka says, voice muffled through sobs and tears runending down her own tear-stained arms, “right?” Myka lifts her head. “It’ll always be different now, thanks to him. He doesn’t deserve my tears.” She wipes them away and smiles at the sight of the woman before her, eyes red and glistening. Crying, five thousand miles away, as Myka cries. Crying _for_ Myka.

Helena tells her softly, smiling now, too. Shaking her head. “It has always been the same love, it’s just… _evolving_.”

“ _Devolving_ ,” Myka counters.

She could almost be sitting across from her. Myka could almost reach out to her and pull that woman into her arms and everything would be instantly better. Losing her father wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t be bad at all. It wouldn’t be for nothing and he could see, before he goes, that he didn’t actually destroy everything they ever had.

“Evolving,” Helena repeats, “growing stronger, in its own way.”

If only he could have _seen_ them together.

“I love you and when it happens,” Helena says softly, licking her lips again, moving Myka's thoughts back into that place of how things _used_ to be, how she wants things to be again, “I will be here for you, Myka. No matter how it makes you feel. And please don't… try to avoid grieving because of me. Not because you think you’ll be betraying me. Not because you find that you care. He’s your _father_ , Myka. Good or bad, he has had an impact on your life.”

Helena’s hand is on her laptop screen again, her fingers moving gently across it.

“You can feel any way you feel about it. I’m not actually going anywhere.”

But Helena existing solely on the screen before her and not going anywhere?

That is exactly Myka’s problem.

***

“This is Charles’ daughter’s car?” her father asks, reaching to tinker with something.

“ _Helena_ ,” Myka says and this gets his attention. He looks up at her with an arch of his brow, a curious smile, a familiar sway that makes Myka think he is about to fall right over. In the past she’d have called him a drunk but only in her mind.

Today, she gives his dying body the recognition it deserves.

He is weaker now since his last episode. The coloring in his skin is changing. Pale. Yellow. Most days, because Myka was seeing more of him these days, he can’t walk, let alone figure out what’s wrong with Myka’s car.

He’s never been the doing type anyway, from what Myka can remember. Unless the doing was drinking, insulting, grabbing and gripping, or blacking out. Hitting. Dragging. Dropping bottles over his child’s head.

“Her _name_ is Helena,” Myka clarifies, “she's your only friend’s only daughter. The girl you assaulted. We dated for three years.”

“Three years, huh? Is that all?” he turns his attention back to the internal organs of the now-deceased car before him. Myka imagines that for him it must feel a lot like looking into a mirror. Staring at yourself in the future. “Seemed more like ten.”

How would he even know? He was never there. Ever. Too busy writing his book. Securing his forgiveness, the only forgiveness that mattered. Not from Myka but the world. His readers. His audience.

As if reading her mind, he gives his source away now. “For as long as Tracy has been talking about you two. Seems almost a decade.”

She has loved Helena much longer than that but this isn’t a thought that her father gets the privilege of knowing.

Myka sighs audibly. It is her final warning shot.

He straightens himself, or at the very least he tries, and gesturing to the engine he says, “If you leave it here, I can take care of it.”

“ _You_?”

“Yes, _me_.”

“I’ll just call a tow."

Myka is already reaching for her phone.

“Put that thing away. Towing this back to town will cost you an arm and leg that neither you or your mother can afford to lose,” he argues though it isn’t an argument, it is a flash of the old him ordering people around, always having to be right, having the last word, “I know a guy who can take care of it. In the meantime, I can help you buy a new car.”

“Wait, what? I’m not buying a _new_ car. I just need to get this one fixed.”

“There’s no fixing this thing--”

“You just said you had a guy. You’re having it towed because I’m too poor, remember?”

“I don’t know what your girlfriend did to this car--”

“Her name is _Helena._ She is no longer my girlfriend--”

“ _Miss Wells_ ," Myka is slowly beginning to realize that he can't even say her name and this makes her angrier at him than she's been in quite a long time, "but it isn’t going to last another year of you commuting up here to school. And you need a car to get to school.”

“It’s worked just fine up to now, Warren. Somehow the second I give in to Rebecca's incessant whining on your behalf and come over for dinner, it decides to die in your driveway. Sounds like an omen to me.”

“Omen or not, it isn’t doing you any good now. And don't... take your anger at me out on Rebecca.”

The one thing she will agree with him on is that Rebecca does not deserve her anger. She tries dialing back her emotions by reasoning with the unreasonable.

“It probably just needs a new battery. I’m sure Sam can fix it.”

“New battery. New engine. New transmission. New alternator, maybe. New car sounds and looks a lot better.”

“I don’t need you to buy me a car. If you haven’t noticed by now, I don’t need anything from you. Except maybe some space.”

“Well, _Ophelia_. You’re gonna get it. You’re gonna get _plenty_ of it. So stop being so stubborn and just let me take care of you while I can… while I’m _here_."

“You already squandered that opportunity… _no_ , you know what? That’s just too fucking easy. I’m not even going to bother reminding you of how this whole parenting thing is supposed to work. How you’re supposed to do it, and do your best at it, _before_ you realize you’re about to die!”

“Let me do this one thing for you, huh? One thing! It doesn’t even have to be _this_ thing. Anything!”

“I don’t need your help or your handouts.”

“Myka Ophelia--”

“You don’t get to all of a sudden act like a parent to me, Warren!”

Silence.

Myka takes in a deep breath and closes her eyes, she lets that breath go in a heave of air from her nostrils. She quickly takes in another deep breath.

Up the walkway, the front door squeaks open and Rebecca's voice is cautiously calling out, “Everything okay out here?”

When Myka opens her eyes to the older woman in the doorway, she sees Rebecca is giving her father a look. And she loves how this woman is always on her side, even when she isn't on this woman's side, but she doesn’t know how this woman loves him.

“It’s okay,” Warren calls back, waving her off. An action that only further annoys Myka. “Just Berings being Berings, taking care of Bering business.”

Myka rolls her eyes, turning momentarily away, and Rebecca disappears back into the house.

“Bering business?” she questions looking back at her father.

“I’m buying you a car,” he states.

“I don’t need you to buy me a car--”

“I don’t _care_. Give it to your mother and Jane. Give it to your… _sisters_ ,” he puts a strange and unfamiliar emphasis on the plural of that last word, “you don’t have to sit any part of yourself into it but I’m getting you one and _someone_ in that family is going to have a reliable car before I leave this Earth.

“Give it to Pete or that jalapeño firecracker girlfriend of his.”

“Dad, that’s really fucking racist.”

“I’m just trying to lighten the mood,” he sighs and turns that defeated expression away, “Tracy hasn’t been around lately to keep me updated on what is and isn’t  _politically_ _correct_.”

He uses air quotes.

“Yeah well,” Myka says, softening her tone, thoughts turning to Tracy now, “she’s kind of scared to be around you right now.”

“Why?” his concern sounds almost genuine. As if it is more about Tracy than it is about him.

“Not because you're you,” Myka can’t believe she’s trying to reassure him that it isn’t him but in a way it’s better that he knows, that this isn’t entirely about him, “…Tracy just doesn’t know how to confront the fact that someone she loves is… _leaving_.”

“I’m dying,” Warren says flatly, “what more is there to confront? I’m the one doing all of the confronting. All she has to do is show up at my funeral, say a couple of words. Shed a few tears and watch them lower my body into the ground. Maybe make sure they don't pick my pockets on the way in.”

“Your assholery is _magnanimous_.”

“Coming from you, kiddo, I will take that as a compliment.”

“Trace doesn’t know loss,” Myka clarifies, ignoring her father’s attempts at both sincerity and humor, “she didn’t know the Donovans that well. She didn’t need to mourn for them because there was a safe divide. She never knew her father and that's probably the closest she's come to grief.”

“And there is no divide with me,” Warren concludes, his voice laced with actual sadness, “so she’s creating one.”

He is reaching and stumbling to close the hood of the car. Myka moves quickly to his side. There is no way that he can support the weight of that metal. The last thing Myka wants to see is her father falling over her engine and crushing himself to death. She's still trying to get the image of him, collapsed on his own floor as he'd been weeks ago, out of her head.

She’d been holding her breath, counting down the days. She isn’t ready for whatever's to come. Not nearly as ready as _he_ seems to be.

“There is no divide,” she echoes her father’s sentiments while closing the hood of the car. Safely. Securely.

Sam’s timing could not be more perfect when she spots him pulling around the corner in his mother’s car. He parks across the street.

“That your new girlfriend?” Warren asks with a gesture of his head in Sam’s direction.

“No,” Myka heaves out a sigh, “that’s Sam. Neither my girlfriend nor a girl.”

***

“Happy Valentine’s Day, my love.”

It doesn’t matter that it has already passed. That Helena is going to bed early in the morning on the sixteenth of February. That Myka is halfway through the fifteenth. They’d promised to talk on this day, or as close to it as their schedules would allow. Not getting it exactly right, exactly on that date, wasn’t a thing either of them cared about anymore. Not in the same way they would have cared about it before.

It’s been two years since the last time things had been normal. Two years since that last video chat they’d had, just before Myka had found out about Liam. Long before Myka had found out about Charlie.

He’d been around then. Hovering. Lingering in the background. When Myka had finally thought to ask, about all of those times they’d talked on the phone when Charlie was still home, Helena tells her she’d locked herself in her room or he’d actually benergy out of the house. The one time they’d chatted while she showered, he’d been home but asleep and never would have known the difference.

He’d always been around. Myka just never saw him. Never heard about him. And most certainly never thought to ask.

He’d been there in the shadows making Helena’s life miserable. Turning her world into a living hell.

It doesn’t matter now.

Helena is awake and alone in her flat, even if she is just barely awake. It is past midnight in London and lunch time for Myka but Helena will more than do. Having Helena’s voice like it used to be those couple of years ago, in her ear all breathy and exhausted, warm and sultry, needy and dotted with the tiny whimpers Myka has always found so delicious? This will do. Helena is drunk on a bottle of wine coursing through her veins, she is intoxicated by Myka’s whispers echoing things she hadn’t whispered into that ear in a very long time.

None of the old stuff matters now. She has her Helena. Even if she is far away. Even if she isn’t really hers. And that feeling they used to share? Infatuation? Or love? Whatever it used to be. It is almost here. She almost has it back. She can almost remember what it’s like. She can almost feel it moving back into place. Right where it belongs.

It is not quite taking her breath away but it is on the cusp of doing just that.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, Georgie.”

***

“Hey… Bunny.”

Something is wrong. Two things, actually.

The first thing that is wrong has two components to it. One, that he calls her _that_. Two, the way he says it. How he can barely get it out. That it is just a whisper on a breath that isn’t quite audible. It is nothing close to the teasing voice that he usually uses, to call her that godawful nickname he’d made up when they were kids, when they'd just met, all because he didn’t know how to read _Bering_ handwritten in cursive.

The second thing that is wrong is the way it makes her feel.

She tries to be annoyed but it is tangled up in worry and concern, in curiosity and empathy, in the too loud and present hint of things that feel a lot like love and desire. And when she turns to him, standing just behind where she’d been busying herself in the science fiction aisle of the bookstore, he has a look about him that hits her and in just the right way.

And suddenly it’s there. _That_ feeling. Of infatuation. Of need. Of loving someone so intensely, it makes you want to cry. It makes her want to fall absolutely anywhere at all, bringing him and that ridiculously pouty lip down with her. Brushing all of his hair away. Telling him to open those absurdly blue eyes. Kissing him, this boy she has always hated to love, right into an oblivion. 

All at once, it floods her emotions. It is too much for her to handle. Because it isn’t Helena, it’s _Sam_. And it isn’t right, it’s all wrong. That she wants him closer than this, that she wants to be touching him, that she wants to know what’s wrong with him and actually make it all better by putting her lips on his.

Or try. It was always _try_ with Helena. She’s not sure she could ever make anything better for Helena. Even now.

She doesn’t know she isn’t breathing until she’s suddenly breathing again. Taking in a deep breath, swallowing air. Trying to find her words. But he’s looking at her like he’s lost. Like he is as lost as she currently feels. His eyes are red and wet but if he was crying, he is no longer.

To save face, she says, “Don’t call me that,” but the way she says it, even to her own ears, makes it sound like that’s all she ever wants to be called. It isn’t all that she wants to be called. It isn’t even close to the thing she wants to be called but it’s Sam. Of all people. He could call her a rabbit turd for all that she cares. He could call her a piece of shit and she’s not so sure, at this moment in her life, she’d disagree or not still want to kiss that mouth.

But she knows he would never and that is a part of the problem.

Sam forces an already failing smile to grow and swallows and says, just as softly, “I’m sorry.”

She's never heard him speak this way. She's never heard his voice like this.

She shakes her head, the remorse hitting her suddenly. His voice projecting all of his hurt feelings into her soul. “I didn’t mean that,” and she blinks, clearing her throat, turning away, busying her hands on books she has no real reason to be touching. “You look like you’ve been crying,” to lighten the mood, she puffs out a soft laugh and jokes, “what’d you do, knock your girlfriend up?”

Silence.

The mood does not lighten.

He doesn’t say anything.

Not a laugh.

Not even an exasperated sigh.

And just as soon as that feeling had overcome her, it is falling into the very pit of her stomach.

This… it feels familiar, too.

Suddenly she feels sick. But she maintains her composure and turns to meet Sam’s eyes, his tears quietly falling now. She offers him a sympathetic smile and another more gentler tease.

“You know when I asked if you wanted to help plan a birthday? I kinda meant _mine_ , not a brand new one."

“Myka, I--”

The ring of the bookstore phone cuts him off and she sighs, holds up a hand and tells him to hold that thought as she heads to the front counter to answer it.

“Bering and Sons, how can I--”

“Myka.”

It is Rebecca’s voice. Not at all unlike Sam’s had sounded.

“It’s your dad.”

And that’s all she needs to say.

***

It feels impersonal in his hospital room, inhabited by so many bodies. It feels like a circus. Like they’re waiting for a performance. His final show. An act to end them all.

Myka’s still replaying the way that call made her feel. The rush of panic that moved through her. The way she'd said nothing more to Rebecca than, “We’re on our way,” before hanging up, dropping the phone on the counter, and brushing past Sam – putting aside all of his sadness to ask her what’s wrong – as she ran up the stairs to tell Tracy it was time to go.

Pete, out of everyone, was in the best shape to drive. He didn’t care, one way or another, and his inability to care was genuine and unwavering. It was helping Myka navigate what was happening by grounding herself to the possibility of it all. To the very reality of it actually, finally happening.

Myka wanted to feel _that_. She wanted Pete's divide.

Instead, she was and still is uncertain. All she could think to do was hold Tracy close as they sat, with Sam beside them, in the back seat of a brand new car that neither them, nor their mother, had yet to claim as their own.

Now on to the show. Her father, the ringleader.

His current performance? Weakened breath, failing organs, a heart refusing to go on. The jaundice-induced yellowing of dying skin cells. An inability to move or speak, except to say anything other than “I’m sorry" and "Myka, Tracy, Jeannie” over and over and over.

But he’d lost consciousness long before they'd arrived. Everything he says now is an echo of memories passing through his lips, like a record on repeat. His brain shorting out.

Rebecca is the closest to him, directly by his side. She is the only one who cares enough to be that close, to hold his hand as he slips away. Myka’s mother stands close enough at his other side and Myka is surprised, and not at all, that she is crying. Jand is just behind her, hands on her mother’s shoulders. She imagines Jand is where Pete gets a lot of his resilience. A lot of his unwillingness to give in to emotion.

“We all die, eventually,” Pete had said to Kelly on the way up, “he could have at least made his time alive worthwhile.” Myka doesn’t think he’d meant for her to hear him but she had and she somehow loved him for saying it. She somehow felt sickened by it, too.

Tracy had been there moments ago but Myka knows she must have caught a glimpse of that thing she wasn’t expecting to feel. She left to go find Pete and Kelly, lingering somewhere else inside of the hospital. Far enough away from this moment to give it to those who cared.

Myka is one of those who cares. For some reason, she cares to be here.

Sam is with Myka, standing beside her just at the foot of her father’s bed. And when her father’s breathing slows, when his mouth utters those final words of “Myka” and “I’m sorry”, when the machines connected to his heart and lungs and keeping him whole and just barely hanging on begin to sound…

It is Sam’s hand she reaches for. It is Sam’s hand that reaches for hers, too.

***

He’s gone.

He is _actually_ gone.

He’s been leaving for so long that it’s hard for Myka to believe that he’s left but to say that out loud sounds cliched. Sounds useless to any conversation she wants or needs to have about her father. Sounds like stating the obvious because everyone knows it is hard to believe and everyone also knows that it is true.

She keeps these thoughts and this shock to herself. She keeps these feelings to herself. She keeps all of the things she thinks about how it _should_ feel out of her mouth and in her own mind. Quiet and private. She’ll think about it later.

Maybe with Helena, if Helena has the time.

She wonders how Tracy is coping. She’d opted to stay with the mothers tonight. Myka wonders if maybe she should have made that decision, too. If it would have been smarter than where she is now. If she would have felt more free to say cliché things like, “I cannot believe he’s gone.” If saying those things would help the uncertainty she currently feels about it.

Instead she is home. She is in her room. She is lying on her bed.

Sam is lying beside her.

Together, they are a mess of new individual problems to confront while willfully ignoring the problem they share. The problem that Myka is hopeful they share.

She says, “So, you’re gonna be a dad?” And it’s a whisper because she’s turned toward him, where she lies beside him on the bed, and her lips are almost but not quite to his ear. He is lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling, one hand resting under his head, the other at his side, between them, still holding Myka’s.

He hadn’t let go since the hospital. When her father had passed, he’d only held on tighter. As the mothers stayed behind to comfort Rebecca, he’d stood by her side as she stared down at her father. It was the only way she knew how to say goodbye without ever having to say the word.

He’d led her to the elevators and thank her godless toaster for that because her vision had tunneled and she’s not even sure what time they'd left the hospital, who drove them home, how long it took to get there. She vaguely remembers leaning into Sam in the backseat of the car, eyes closed and holding on tight to the hand still in hers.

Sam was holding her hand when they’d made it back to the bookstore. He brought her inside, into her bedroom. He’d still been holding on when Myka asked him not to leave.

He’s still holding on.

“I don’t know… how this is happening.”

“You see, there’s this thing that happens when a pEnid ejaculates inside of a vagina…”

He turns to her with a blank expression on his face, hair falling in his eyes.

Myka sighs to avoid how that makes her feel and asks, “Too soon?”

“It only happened once,” Sam insists, “we were very careful.”

“Once? You’ve been dating for like a year?”

Sam narrows his brows on Myka.

“I’m not ashamed to move slowly. I do it with reason. _This_ reason. We were careful.” And, she supposes he just wants to remind her, “Your dad just died.”

“I know,” Myka whispers, “I was there.”

“We should be talking about you and your feelings. Not mine.”

“I think new life trumps my abusive, now-deceased father.”

Sam stares. He stares at her for a very long time in silence.

Myka sighs again and rolls over onto her back. Removes her hand from his hand. Moves both of her hands through her hair.

“You’re still trying to be more mad at him than you are sad he's gone,” Sam says softly, “for what he did to Helena.”

“There is no trying, I am mad at him. Still. And I _watched_ him die. I'm still mad at him.”

“You can be mad and sad all at once,” he tells her, “you don’t have to split yourself in two. You can be angry and grieving. You can mourn the loss of your father and still want to spit on his grave for being who he was.”

“Sam--”

“I know,” he insists. Myka turns her gaze back to his and he smiles softly, genuinely, before repeating, “I _know_.”

More silence as he watches her. As she watches him. As his eyes fall on her lips and her eyes on his and then back to his eyes and that hair… in his face… _again_.

Myka is taking in very slow, very steady breaths.

Sam smirks.

“Cut your hair,” she tells him softly, feigning annoyance.

Sam’s smile grows wide as Myka turns away.

“I like you, too.”

Myka turns back suddenly. She’s _glaring_. She is making sure Sam knows that she is. He knows. He must. She can tell by his soft laughter. The way he shakes his head and moves his other hand from behind his head and brings it to her just below her chin.

“I mean to say that I never stopped… liking you. Adoring you. Loving you. _Whatever_.”

“Shut up.”

His smile falls into a smirk and he lowers his hand. “I never know if you’re being serious or not because the way it sounds--”

She kisses him and she knows it catches him off guard because his lips are at first unmoving and stiff but then the warmth comes, he relaxes, and suddenly Sam is kissing her back.

She is kissing Sam. Sam is kissing her.

It’s softer than she’d expected and she’s not sure where she’d built up in her mind that kissing any other guy would be like kissing a nine-year-old Pete, all slobber and fish sticks and Kool-Aid stained lips. He lets go of her hand to move his to her cheeks. She moves her hands to his shirt and tugs him just a little bit closer. And when they part…

They are staring. Heavy breathing and trying to catch up, to keep up, with each other and this feeling… this interesting _thing_.

“Allison,” is all Myka can manage and she’s not sure why the first thing out of her mouth after kissing Sam Martino is another girl’s name but she trusts her brain has its reasons.

“I broke things off,” he whispers and before Myka can protest, “I already had when she told me and a part of me doesn’t want to believe her. Does that make me a bad person?”

“No,” Myka shakes her head and moves her forehead to rest against his, “it makes you the majority.”

“She showed me the test. I have never been more intimidated by the color pink in my entire life.”

This earns him a soft laugh. Myka tugs him closer, pulling at the cloth of his shirt. There’s nowhere for him to go, his lips are as close as they’re going to get without actually being on hers. But she’ll take that, too, and gladly.

“Did it stick?” she presses her lips to his and kisses him again.

“The baby? The baby definitely stuck,” he asks as they’re parting, moving his hands down to her waist to hold her closer, “is this okay? She has an appointment for an ultrasound on the fifteenth.”

“The break up,” Myka clarifies with a soft nod, “and it’s okay. Also, the fifteenth? Of March?”

But it’s not okay. Because Sam is going to be a dad. He’s going to be exactly the thing Myka had just overcome and she shouldn’t want to be anywhere near him. She hasn’t had any time at all to work out her feelings. Not for her father, not for Sam. And certainly not about Sam in this new way Myka has imagined him. Not the virginal long-haired love of her life but a person who not only engages in sex but is now going to be a father.

“It stuck. And yes, the fifteenth of March.”

She puffs out a soft laugh and moves her forehead against Sam’s cheek, closing her eyes tight.

“This can’t actually happen,” she tells him, sounding not at all unlike Helena, _years_ ago, “Allison _needs_ you. You need to be there for her. As much as I don’t like her, even if you aren’t with her…”

“I know.”

Sam wraps his arms entirely around Myka. One just under where her head rests against a pillow, the other around her waist, against her lower back.

Myka imagines all of the many times she has held Helena in this same way.

He closes his eyes.

“You know?”

He nods.

“I _know_. Responsibility. Fatherhood. _Sleep_ while I can.”

Myka watches him, eyes still closed, as he slowly loses his mind to exhaustion. Breath softening. Grip loosening. Falling away to the sleep he calls out to.

"Did you also know that's my birthday?"

His eyes open wide.

"The fifteenth," he repeats softly, remembering, allowing his eyes to close again, "I'll make it up to you. Even though this isn't actually happening."

“Then what do you call this,” she asks finally, smiling wide, "if not _happening_?"

He opens one sleepy eye and smiles, only for a second. He pulls her closer, wrapping her up further in his embrace.

“Grief counseling,” he supplies, a hushed whisper in her ear just before he kisses it.

Myka brings her hand up to Sam’s hair and moves her fingers through it, moves that hair out of his face. Away from his eyes, finally resting.

His breath comes measured and rhythmic. She smiles as he drifts. Pressing her lips to his lips and whispering against them, “You are useless.”

He smiles, softly. It falls away as soon as it had appeared, giving way to sleep.

She closes her eyes, moving her cheek against his cheek.

“Absolutely useless.”

Myka is just on the edge of falling away from her past. She is teetering precariously over the depth of an uncertain future.


End file.
